 "J J Valaya")
Just before the India Couture Week kicked off in New Delhi last month, J J Valaya, one of India's well-regarded fashion designers, took to his Facebook page to write a long post about the sorry state of affairs in the industry today. Titled "Midnight Musings", it was a caustically witty account of what a press release of a "wannabe" designer would read like: "hand embroideries" translate into embroideries done by machines operated by hand, on fabric sourced from Nehru Place (Delhi's export market for textiles), to create lehengas that are over 30 kg in weight.
Valaya tagged 46 people in this post: top designers, fashion journalists and stylists. Almost all the 50-plus comments were in complete agreement, congratulating Valaya for his boldness and honesty.
Emboldened by Valaya's post, leading designer Rohit Bal also poured his anger out on his Facebook page, against the "egocentric self-indulgent wretchedness of mediocrity" that he says he sees "everywhere".
This seemingly poetic post, though, pointed to a deeper problem with Indian fashion: stagnation of ideas, which is failing to inspire fashion trends in the country.
Others agree. According to Ankur Bisen, senior vice-president at Technopak, the function of couture in any fashion community is to establish the season's trends in the country, which then percolate down to the retail and mass fashion segments. In India, the trends for western wear are dictated by fashion weeks abroad.
For example, skinny jeans made a comeback at an international fashion week, which was then replicated by high-street labels such as Zara and Mango and eventually produced on a large scale at Indian branded and unbranded retail stores.
Indian designers have little to offer to an aspirational generation of young buyers who are increasingly becoming more fashion conscious.
"For a country as large as ours, with such vast heritage and a great pool of talent, the word designer has become common. Barring a handful of young and old designers - sadly only a handful - there is not enough exploration of the treasure trove of Indian history and culture that we have been blessed with," he says.
Unlike Japanese or even French fashion, which is distinctive and can be instantly recognised, Indian fashion lacks a unity in design sensibility. An editor of a leading fashion magazine, who requests she not be named, says that designers, in a scramble to bring out collection after collection, are merely creating a line.
"But no one thinks about who will want to wear this. Barring a few stalwarts, design experiments are just leading to confused colours, cuts and embroideries that are just old wine in an older bottle."
Valaya believes that there is a "glut of clothes that all look the same", primarily because of the mushrooming of fashion institutes and the unsustainably large number of fashion weeks in the country.
"Any fashion forward country has only one or two key fashion weeks. There are nearly two fashion weeks almost every month in India. It naturally creates a space for mediocrity," he says.
Young students today, he adds, want to "kind of" design clothes, go to a fashion institute and then feel the pressure to create something meaningful. "A majority of them get into a cloning process of brand building through bloggers and the social media."
Shasha Gaba, a 29-year-old designer, cautiously agrees with Valaya. "One can't say that there is no creativity or originality among designers today. But there certainly seems to be overcrowding in the industry, which leads to a mix of design trends."
Fashion institutes, too, she says, need to involve members of the fashion fraternity to give students a realistic sense of the market and how design sensibilities have evolved.
A National Institute of Fashion Technology graduate, Gaba says that young and upcoming designers do not get enough investment or infrastructure to exploit their full potential. "If you look at IT start-ups, the investment cycle is quick and abundant. For fashion, this is abysmally low."
Gaba adds that almost everyone from her class wanted to become a designer, of which only 50 per cent tried and less than 25 per cent ended up creating their own labels. How long the labels last is the real question. "Many young designers make a splash at fashion weeks and fall off the wagon three years later. Not everyone who is the flavour of the season lasts beyond one season," says the fashion magazine editor.
While designers struggle with funds at home, globally, too, Indian designers have virtually no market. "There are very few takers for Indian couture abroad. The designers who do showcase their collections at stores in, say, New York or Paris are creating clothes specifically for that audience and those clothes do not sell in India," says a professional who works with one of the world's leading fashion houses.
For this reason, institutional buying is restricted to multi-designer retail chains such as Fuel, Ensemble and Ogaan. While the stores claim they give equal space to young and established designers, Gaba believes that the retail ecosystem only makes already popular designers more popular. "Eventually, what choice do upcoming designers have other than hotel exhibitions and bridal shows?" asks Gaba.
The fashion professional too, too, believes that the numerous fashion shows do not represent the season's trends or a business opportunity as much as they are a consequence of simple cost-effectiveness.
"A fashion show is sponsored and all costs for unveiling a collection are covered, which a designer would have to incur should she choose to host her own launch event. The business of fashion is not dependent on these shows," he says.
For the simple commerce of it all, fashion weeks and independent shows have lost the shock value that was characteristic of them in the 1990s and early 2000s, says Meher Castelino, one of India's oldest models and the first ever Miss India crown winner.
"There are no new motifs. The Mughals, Russians, Rajputanas continue to rule the roost. Are we to say that even in 2050 we will look back at this heritage?"
Nisha Kundnani, celebrity stylist who has worked with Anushka Sharma, Aamir Khan and Shraddha Kapoor, believes that the motifs remain the same because Indian brides continue to pick safer designs. "The big names have a prêt line but the business comes from bridal couture, and when a bride is buying a lehenga, then it is usually traditional and timeless rather than trendy. There is a lack of creativity because designers play to the gallery there."
But, she adds, this repetition also occurs because leading designers like Rohit Bal and Tarun Tahiliani have established a signature. "The look tends to repeat but that is a conscious decision."
In some senses, Castelino's is a lone voice in the industry today. Of the over 50 influential people who decisively agreed with Valaya on his Facebook post, few wanted to come forward and critique other designers or point out where the mediocrity lies. Others still were honest and cutting in their analysis of designerwear and bizarre trends, but did not want to alienate themselves from a tightly-knit community.
Castelino believes that this is because of a new generation of fashion bloggers and writers, whose opinions are driven by public relations and marketing campaigns. "I still write honest stories from the fashion world on my blog but there isn't enough nuanced writing," she rues.
A blogger with over 25,000 followers says that anything negative she may write about a designer's collection would cut off her access to a whole host of lifestyle and beauty opportunities. "They blame us for being PR-driven, but do they really want to hear the truth? I try to balance my writing with some critique, but at the end of the day, the mandate is clear: if I am to make a name for myself, I must follow the rules of the game."
To an extent, this is a scenario where the old is competing with the new - both designers and technology.
The missing link, she says, lies in the people who can curate good fashion from bad. "Plagiarism in fashion is a very thin line because everyone is inspired from someone. But if someone uses another designer's work and calls it his own, then there's a problem."
Qureshi says that when she gets a complaint from a designer about plagiarism, she needs to carefully assess both works before she pulls a product down from the website. "After all, they all use ambis [a motif in the shape of a mango], we have the same colour palette."
But the copy market works in subtler ways in India, even though the very act of copying is more blatant than "inspiration". Countless Facebook and Instagram accounts of "designer boutique" share images from a designer's latest collection and boast of their ability to copy these. And just to safeguard themselves from any legal hassles, these put out a disclaimer: Images are for representation purposes only.
"Entire shops run on Sabyasachi's designs. But then he's a true trendsetter in that sense. While I sympathise with the designers and understand their angst, I really don't know how this can be prevented," says Qureshi.
In a tiny, air-conditioned shop in Delhi's bustling Chandni Chowk, a young woman - evidently one who is getting married soon - frantically goes through the photo gallery of her smartphone. Shop assistants crowd around her, offering to show her the latest gota patti sarees and suits but her resolve is steely.
When she finds what she is looking for, she shows it to the shopkeeper with a glint in her eyes. The shopkeeper grins smugly and dishes out a heavily embroidered lehenga with a flourish. "This is the latest design from the fashion week you were looking for," he says. She shows him a few other photographs of apparel by the country's top designers. While the original designer lehenga costs upwards of Rs 4 lakh, she hesitantly tells the man on the other side that her budget is Rs 1 lakh. Sitting cross-legged on a mattress with white sheets, he replies unfazed, "I can make it for Rs 80,000."
What is perhaps most striking is the fact that this conversation can be heard at every other bridalwear store in Chandni Chowk and other hubs. The copy market is robust and thriving.
And till the fashion world finds a solution to its creativity crisis, spectators are taking their seats at the front row of the next fashion week, for more of the same.
Ranjita Ganesan contributed to this report
