A lot of haute air

A lot of haute air

The big question of the week. What do 33 designers, 42 models and 24 fashion shows spread out over seven days add up to? Going by the fare on offer at the just-concluded Lakme India Fashion Week (LIFW), not much. Of course, the event generated a whole lot of images and words, with fashion `commentators' and page three celebs unilaterally proclaiming the event as the coming of age of Indian fashion. Alas, hyperbole is no substitute for the truth, although it may provide great newspaper copy and greater soundbites.

This is not, of course, to rubbish the LIFW out of hand. There were gains, some of them considerable. As veteran fashion designer Ritu Kumar observed, it did make available an important platform for the young fashion professionals of today to showcase their work, a facility that an earlier generation of designers did not have access to. Also, the event almost certainly helped give a much needed fillip to the fashion trade. But having said this, the seven-day wonder that was on display suffered from serious flaws. For a group of Delhi-centric designers to claim that their work represents `Indian fashion' is quite obviously an overstatement in a country as culturally complex and varied as this one. In any case, Mumbai laid claim to being the country's fashion capital long before Delhi emerged on the scene, helped in part by institutions like the Indian Institute of Fashion Technology and the support of Indian babudom. Therefore, Mumbai's virtual non-participation in the event indicated a serious schism thatportends ill for the long-term growth and development of the country's fashion industry. The more generic question, however, is whether Indian fashion is anything more than some clever adaptation and smart tailoring. Fashion, at its best, captures a culture and a civilisation in a moment. Do the 33 designers who participated in the LIFW honestly believe that their work did this? Does India even have a culture where the language of clothes has acquired a lexicon of its own, apart from the borrowed mumbo-jumbo that is bandied around so widely? How much creativity goes into the clothes that emerge from the designer's table and is there a credible critique of it?

Thus far, fashion in this country has largely been nothing but an elaborate system of patronage, with those at the top so firmly entrenched that nothing can breathe beneath them. Consequently, it is the same 20 names or so that get bandied around, year after year, a small incestuous group that is kept alive on the oxygen of celebritydom. Most of the designs that emerge, when they are not clever copies of Western trends, cater to the wedding market. Contrast this with the West, where a myriad reputations are made and destroyed in the course of a single season and the difference between fashion as an industry and fashion as a social event becomes manifest. Indian fashion has not come of age. In fact, it has barely been born.