The Spectator
Correct me if I am wrong, but Shweta Bachchan Nanda modelling a pleated gray dress by Fendi on the cover of my friend Superna Motwane’s September issue of L’Officiel, and looking every inch as if she were born to do it, has officially announced India’s entry in to the international fashion ball.
Think about it: So far we’ve had exquisite doe-eyed beauties carrying off their Abu-Sandeeps and Tahilianis with panache. Our beauty queens capture world titles like they were going out of style. Even Bollywood is au courant at the hippest spots in the world.
But carrying off a blue chip international designer label, in clothes that have not a shred of ‘exotic India’ — in fact that make no concessions to the subcontinent and have been designed for global consumption for the world’s most sophisticated women — heralds a new age for Fashion. Now, it is open season on India. Nothing is ever going to be the same again.
For some one who has been keenly watching fashion as it has evolved over the past two decades, who has been present when fashion’s first milestone was achieved when Tarun Tahiliani’s launched Ensemble in Mumbai (A Wharton graduate opening a kapde ka dukan?!), I can feel it in my bones that with L’Officiel newest issue a new and important frontier has been breached.
Fashion’s first rule is that it percolates downward: Haute couture becomes pret, becomes high street before you can say Gaultier. And the fact that Shweta, whose pedigree is as peerless as her cheekbones ,has decided to wear Fendi with style guarantees that a generation of women — hitherto tentative — will decide to step in to those well-heeled shoes themselves.
How long then before the Chanels, the Valentinos, the Versaces, and the Moschinos find eager buyers on Indian shores? Five years ago canny international brands were already sniffing out the Indian market. Brand managers trained at the best B schools had sensed that there was a audience waiting to be captured. Slowly they began opening shop here.
About a year ago the movement gathered momentum. You couldn’t throw a bauble without hitting some bright young thing about to bring in yet another fashion label. But in our hearts and minds we wondered if they would really be able to pull it off. Yes, we had some of the most beautiful women in the world, and we had globalisation and reform and (with some luck) rupee convertibility, but Indian women getting away with pencil thin skirts, boots, capes and suits? With our hips, our heights, and our climate?
It took one fabulous photo shoot in Rome, featuring a lissome model, a world renowned photographer and an international label to answer that question.
Move over global Fashionistas — India has arrived!
s_malavika@dnaindia.net
