Fashion designers are supposed to make clothes. Beautiful, eye-catching clothes that make you feel like a million bucks. And often that’s how much these clothes cost. It is then easy to argue that clothes that cost so much would require time and effort. But Indian fashion designers, barely beginning to make a mark in their chosen field, are busy doing everything other than concentrate on their core business. From designing dishes (Manish Arora for the home store Good Earth) to hosting talk shows (Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla) to directing a film (Sabyasachi Mukherjee), Indian fashion designers seem to have already tired of fashion.
Seen from a limited perspective, the business of designing and tailoring can be dull, even banal over a period of time. But seen from another, more uninhibited perspective, fashion could be as challenging, as exciting as any other creative pursuit. Could a painter like Picasso have ever said that he couldn’t bear to continue dabbing paint on a blank canvas for some silly, rich patron? The act in itself isn’t the limitation but an inability to dream, to see things differently could make any pursuit boring and dull. Could substituting a dinner plate for a pinafore be enough to get the creative juices flowing, and is this why fashion designers are rushing to explore other avenues?
The answer is evident if one were to just look at the bottomlines of the companies that these designers run. There isn’t even one which has crossed the Rs 100 crore-turnover mark. If the big daddies in this business haven’t reached there, the second and third rung designers run small enterprises. To expand these is tough without major cash infusion. And therein lies the conundrum that most fashion designers live with: whether to get private equity into the company and lose control, or stay small and continue to struggle to grow.
In the meantime, for designers like Arora and Sabyasachi who have no family money or infrastructure backing them, the way to make quick money to run the fashion side of the business is by lending their name and talent to assorted products and schemes. All this sounds good on paper: design something here and there, and get money and recognition.
There is, however, one lacuna in this almost perfect plan: contrary to what the designers think, they are not yet household names. Somebody stumbling upon Manish Arora plates in Good Earth may never have heard of Manish Arora, the fashion designer. In the mind of such a person, Arora may forever be linked to plates. Not an ideal state of affairs as Arora isn’t, as some of us know, a crockery designer. Diluting your brand identity so recklessly even before it has been firmly established doesn’t make sense.
Building a brand which can stand the test of time and adverse conditions is hard work. It’s time all the fashion designers pulled up their socks (literally) and concentrated on the job at hand rather than fritter away their names for a little bit of dross.
