WESTSIDE STORY: THE CONSUMER IS QUEEN
Sourish Bhattacharyya (HT City)

Fashion may have started with haute couture which designers would make for their well-heeled clients, costing anywhere between $20,000 to $150,000, but the future of fashion as most designers agreed is pret-a-porter popularised by Yves St. Laurent with his Rive Gauche boutiques. But a stroll around the LIFW stalls proved that pret was still being confused with bridge lines like the one Emanuel Ungaro started in a boutique collection called Parallele in ’67.

As designer Payal Jain explained: “Even when I do pret, I never use inferior fabrics. Rather, I do a little flower than a fully embroidered dress. That’s the way I will lower the price of the outfit to fit it into the ready-to-wear bracket.”

Sadly, most of our spoilt designers still cannot handle mass production. Says Chennai-based designer Rehane Yavar Dhala: “I can’t deliver the next week. You have to give me at least 50 days’ notice.”

As for Shantanu and Nikhil Mehra, pret exists only in their dreams. “We do a bridge line. How can we ignore our heritage and just do a simple shirt? It won’t be accepted.” They are sadly wrong, as a simple, well-tailored shirt would have more takers than a marginally hand-worked sherwani.

Luckily, Mumbai-based designer Priyadarshini Rao is much more sensible as she does ‘real’ pret. “I do stuff which you can take off from the racks and wear. I stay away from embellishments, brocades or jacquards. My shirts begin from Rs 750 and have a cut off upper limit of Rs 3,000.”

However, what one saw at LIFW was not real pret. what one saw instead was more drama than creativity. Aparna Jagdhari, too, stays clear of couture. “It’s a grossly misused word here, so I don’t want to get into the dynamics of it. But pret for me is all about great cuts. I’d rather do patchwork than put 20 tons of embroidery on outfits. My clothes are priced from Rs 800 and it’s a line that is customer intensive. It’s all about what kind of attitude the customer likes to project through their clothes.”

The LIFW proved that it were only a few designers who concentrated on the fit and drape of the fabric and the rest were more focussed on the visual appeal. They were interested in designing for the groom! As Nikhil Mehra annoyingly says: “There is no acceptance of pret as people still can’t accept plain silhouettes.”

Well, changing mindsets is not all that easy, as it was proved at the LIFW.