LUNCH WITH BS: Manish Arora

Prawns for Mr Fish Fry

Manish Arora

With 80 international stores in his pocket, here's one designer who says Indian fashion is far from making the cut globally.

Lunch With BS is usually a staid affair, and often the food is more engaging than our guests. Manish Arora breaks that stereotype on several counts. He's a fashion designer, only the third ever to be invited to break bread with the paper; he's maverick where others are merely clever; and he has eyebrows that are double-pierced, guaranteed to have you warn your kids off his periphery, says Business Standard.

But 33-year-old Arora is also pleasantly refreshing. He hates cellphones and will almost never post you an SMS (the reason why our first attempt at lunch was aborted), is a festive foodie, likes his drink especially in the afternoon (white wine, beer), speaks with a candour lacking in other designers ("What other designers?" he spoofs), and is happy to spend time over a leisurely lunch instead of wanting to rush back to his factory in Noida.

He's self-employed, not answerable to anybody so he orders a bottle of Castle lager; as a working journalist, I'm sticking to fresh lime soda; between us we split a mozarella and tomato salad at Olive, every fashionista's foodie address. It's unusually quiet, which might be the reason we're being lavished with attention, and not just because Arora's a permanent fixture there. I mention this only because it irks that I'm paying the bill while Arora's hogging all the limelight, though that's to be expected.

Arora is the new darling of the chattering classes, the fashion designer who literally came in from the cold and swept the market from under the leaden feet of India's wedding couturists. His pret label Fish Fry has gone from being the oddball studio where people went for a laugh, to where serious fashion followers now worship at the racks. This September will mark his third appearance at London Fashion Week, and that's serious stuff. "I'm the only designer in 80 stores internationally," he says, "I have agents who sell for me in France, the UK and Spain. I have PR agents in the UK. I have people interested in me, looking at me." And boasts: "Are there any others worth looking at?"

Will he have more beer? "Why are you asking?" the Mumbai boy who's adopted Delhi as his own, tells the stewardess, and a fresh glass is instantly by his side. We place our orders. He'll have a prawn risotto that isn't on the menu, I settle for what turns out to be an excellent reef cod. The impossibly wiry Arora, meanwhile, helps himself to rather a lot of bread "" hopefully, he'll dance away those extra calories at Elevate, or Climax "" places he frequents for the music.

Arora, just for the record, loathes what passes for Indian couture "" swathes of beads and baubles that weigh down a dress, more craft than design. "I could make lakhs from lehngas," he chortles, "but I make clothes that I enjoy." Not that he's above bling himself, but European stores that gasp at any colour that isn't black are reaching for his heady hues as if they're seeing colour for the first time.

Arora hasn't developed his identity for the ethnic Indian market. "I've never done salwar-kameezes," he says; "if I had, I'd have built my own home, been rich." But money, he says, was never his goal. "It isn't important in itself." A graduate from the National Institute of Fashion Technology who doggedly stuck it out in a market that seemed to consist entirely of fashion designers packing suitcases to go sell to millionaire NRIs in Dubai and Southall, Arora stuck it out till "the international market started noticing me. Then, suddenly, everyone was talking of my clothes."

His London debut was supported by the non-profit Centre for Fashion Enterprise, and soon he was designing collections that went from London to Paris to Spain, before being shown back in India. "Now, when I go to a party" "" and that's often "" "I will see somebody wearing my skirt, or my shoes..."

Shoes "" ah yes, shoes. For our lunch, he's wearing a considerably sober pair, but Arora has tied up with Reebok to design a line as iridescent as beetles, and is often seen sporting them around the capital, even though they're meant for women. "I knew the potential of Reebok, I went to speak to them. I'm quite a good businessman actually. I may not know about taxes and things, but I can take decisions." And following up his designs for shoes, he's now designing sportswear for the company. Many other ideas are simmering in his creative pot, including (finally) a line for men provocatively labelled Getting Laid by Manish Arora, but he isn't spilling the beans yet "" inspite of a third beer.

We're both humungously late for our following appointments, but Arora wants a smoke and a double shot of espresso, and says he won't design for Bollywood "because clothing isn't all that important to films, and I have a very strong opinion on fashion". Nor is he high strung about his appearance at India Fashion Week (Wednesday, April 5, should you be interested) because he's merely showing what's already been shown in London.

And sorry to be a party-pooper, but Arora says "Indian fashion isn't anywhere on the international scene, it's really, really behind," and no, in spite of India being in everyone's eye, "it isn't going anywhere in a hurry".

He summons his black Ambassador, and because I want to know why you'd label a fashion house Fish Fry, he laughs and says, "I haven't told anyone this but when I had to register a name, I couldn't think of any, and the registrar wanted three options." The mind boggles at what those options might have been, and though Arora's clearly dying to tell, I decide not to ask "" he might want a fourth bottle of beer to go with the tale, and we do have appointments to keep.