Cooperating with the fashion police

With Indian Fashion Week in full swing, Delhi Police have been reportedly keeping a keen eye on designers, models and customers.

All you Page 3 beaters-pumpkin eaters, maybe there’s something to learn after all from the Beautiful People with snow on their noses. With the Indian Fashion Week in the Capital in full swing, the Delhi Police have been reportedly keeping a keen eye on designers, models, customers and the lot involved in the fashion business. The intelligence network — including its special Common Sense branch — is basically following certain leads from past cases and believes that the fashionistas as a community are prone to indulge and engage in the buying and selling of drugs, especially those three after-show party favourites — cocaine, ecstasy and television cameras. This, to our mind, is police profiling, the classic sort that if conducted on any other community would have had the liberal universe up in arms and candlelight-vigils shouting, ‘Prejudice!’

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But the fashion set is too mature and level-headed (despite what crystalline substances that are not branded by Swarovski may have done to their heads) to protest what others might think as targeting according to stereotypes. Unlike the beleaguered hoi polloi, who may share characteristics with viceful characters, and this similarity getting them branded as being potentially viceful, the fashion set understand that law enforcers are just doing their jobs. All users of high-end drugs may be members of the swish set; but all members of the swish set aren’t high-end drug users. But the ‘fashion victims’ know that it doesn’t hurt to be kept under a watchful eye. After all, when one rotten apple among them rolls a banknote in the bathroom and is heard making mini-vacuum cleaner sounds, the whole fraternity’s reputation is at stake.

So as honourable citizens of this country, those participating in whatever capacity in the ongoing Delhi Fashion Week have been fully cooperating with the police. It’s another matter that even if you’re not a cop on the fashion beat — positioned between the ramp and the seats in front — you tend to associate any anorexic model or glazed-eyed hunk as part of a ‘non-legalised’ supply-demand chain. But our liberal instincts make us clearly keep our thoughts to ourselves. The police have no such dampener. And the fashionable people don’t have no guilt. So...