NO FLUFF, JUST BUSINESS
Sourish Bhattacharya (HT City)

Last year, a team from Selfridges, the upscale London store that’s also outwardly mobile India’s favourite holiday destination, had come to the Lakmé India Fashion Week with the intent to spot designers who could breathe life into its Bollywood showcase. That wasn’t serious. This year, Selfridges, whose display cubicles already stock garments by David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore, as well as shirts made by Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna for Joshua Joseph, will be in the city for some serious business.

“That’s a big step up for us,” declares Vinod Kaul, Executive Director, Fashion Design Council of India. “For long, our designers have been catering to the Indian diaspora. Now, at last, we can hope to real the international market.” Adverse travel advisories have also taken their toll on the turnout of foreign buyers at the Lakmé India Fashion Week, but still, teams from Dubai’s Aesthetics, which already has eight designers on board, and British India, a 40-store chain operating in Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, will be dropping in for a dekko.

For Kaul, a 25-year veteran of the apparel industry who has seen action at Tata Exports, Bata, DCM-Benetton and Raymonds, the presence of over 200 buyers representing 100 companies from seven countries is the first visible sign that the Lakmé India Fashion Week may not be just another endless party. Our designers, at least some of them, are getting serious about getting out of the trousseau trap (haute couture is sexy, but the market is minuscule and the players are many), and Kaul has every intention to make business the focus of fashion.

“Our designers have already taken the mental leap forward from haute couture to prêt,” says Kaul (although prêt, if we follow the internationally accepted terminology, is by no means for the mass market, which is what bridge lines serve). “But prêt means serial production, which is why quality is an issue, because the designer can no longer control everything himself. That’s why we organised a quality workshop for designers on July 12 and 13. And immediately after the Fashion Week, we’ll start identifying production units that can work with designers.”

If prêt is the direction in which the industry is moving, designers have got to learn to be geniuses in the real world. “For starters, our designers will have to reconcile to their margins being dictated not by their personal fancies, but by the marketplace. Our stores, after all, operate on half the margins of their counterparts in the West,” says Kaul. Well, that’ll be the equivalent of a tectonic shift, but will our designers bite the bullet?