Democratic Style

if you read the papers, you'd think india was fashion crazy. lakme week this, lakme week that. nothing more important, it would seem, was happening in the country than india fashion week. in fact, fashion is marginal to most indians. i am not going into "what is fashion when most indians do not have enough cloth to cover their bodies" rhetoric. even the large body of indians who can afford clothes, aren't particularly interested in fashion.perhaps that has something to do with having large bodies. (most well-off indians are overweight). it certainly has to do with the fact that there has been no fashion industry nor any tradition of public designers. royalty and the super-rich had their own private couturiers, who made one-off creations for their clients. they weren't called couturiers, or designers, and what they did wasn't fashion either because "fashion" implies a trend followed by many. yet, in the absence of a formal fashion structure, they were the trend setters; what they wore trickled down eventually to those who went to their local darzi. these trends were obviously localised. it was only with cinema and its mass appeal that we finally got national trend-setters. but we still didn't get fashion, because that needs mass production of new lines and their large-scale retailing, while we only had our local tailors to copy the latest dev anand/rajesh khanna/madhubala/sharmila tagore look and cut. the entry of the designer about a decade ago didn't change that much, because designers concentrated on the high-profit, high-profile couture end of fashion and completely ignored the mass-production, low-margin pret-a-porter end. which really meant that we hadn't moved much: yesterday's maharanis were replaced by maha society ladies, with wallets as large as their egos. this is what, i presume, the recently formed fashion design council of india, with the help of sponsors like lakme and sunsilk (which are also in the beauty business), is trying to change. hence, the mumbai week's emphasis on pret-a-porter, clothes which are trend-setting, but are wearable by the many and affordable to the many. in short, clothes which are fashionable. in spite of the buzz around the event and the column inches it produced, the lakme india fashion week wasn't an unqualified success. that wasn't the fault of the organisers as much as the designers: used to designing that individual dress or that individual trousseau, they were neither mentally tuned nor physically equipped to deal with marketing to buyers or to produce in bulk for retail chains. but changes don't happen overnight: what the fashion week represented was a first step. but, you might ask, why bother about the first step? we have managed without fashion all this time, why have it at all? for an answer look to the paintings of peter paul reuben's or early 20th century nude photographic studies. ruben's nude women are large, buxom things heavy at the breasts, heavy at the hips, heavy at the thighs (khajuraho has the same idea of voluptuousness). even the photographs of less than a hundred years ago showed women who might now be advised to take up a career in shot-putting rather than modelling. or, to use the old joke, if our models now look like they have come from a famine, the older models looked as if they had caused it. what brought about this transformation was that the fashion in clothes changed from the voluminousness of the victorian era to today's bare-allness. which essentially meant that you now have nowhere to hide. today's health consciousness is a recent phenomenon; the exercise and diet dictated by fashion pre-date it. in the indian context, in just a few years of fashion-consciousness, there is suddenly a plethora of very tall and very thin women and very tall and very muscular men, a clear indication that nothing speeds up physical evolution as fashion does. fashion is also a great equaliser. in the england of the 17th century, the "lower classes" had to wear woollen caps made in england while the nobility wore velvet caps imported from france and italy. (an indian equivalent: only upper caste men were allowed to turn up their moustache not so long ago). mass produced in-fashion clothes have changed all that: the cut and the style will be the same for the boss or the secretary, only the fabric will be different. fashion, you could say, is democratic. which reminds me of the tee-shirt i saw in my neighbourhood the other day. any young man in the smartest pub in town would have worn it quite happily. here it was worn by the car cleaner. its label was not on the label, but splashed right across the back. boss, it said.