The world today
HEMANT SAGAR
NEVER before has human society lived in a world changing as radically as it is now and never has fashion been such an integral part of daily life. In fact, everything that surrounds us has something to do with fashion. From the food we eat to the music we listen to, everything has a timely, thus fashionable, marketable aspect.
Technology as it moves ahead creates aspirations that are reflected in how we live and as a consequence, how we want to dress. Fashion is thus a product that reflects our surroundings while the surroundings influence or even create the platform on which fashion thrives. It inserts the wearer into the present tense and makes him/her move ‘with the times’.
Fashion, in itself, has numerous aspects and all are called fashion: From the eccentric fashionista in Harajuku in Tokyo, the street wear mecca of the world to the elegant socialite in Milan all bedecked and bejewelled in brands, each has their way of being, or rather, being their fashion. The personal ways of both in this case are called style, or attitude, and it can happen that both wear perfectly identical elements and that is the key – identical elements!
It is these identical elements that give Zara, H&M and all the other garment producing companies their business. Designers theoretically function at a more subjective level. The big companies search for these identical elements on the catwalks of the world and usually produce their versions of them before the designer can produce the original. To do this as quickly would be every designer’s dream.
In a nutshell, the concept of organized fashion, i.e. spring/summer and autumn/winter collections, has existed since the mid-1850s and originated in Paris. Today, the sun does not set on Planet Fashion, which still functions by the same ideas, but the Internet has started to change this. The global reach of distribution combined with the jet-setting client have initiated the classic two-season formula’s being cut into many smaller ‘drops’ with the result that today a returning client may discover a totally new assortment in the online as well as the bricks and mortar shop visited a few weeks earlier.
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n the first years of organized fashion in Paris, all designers, or rather ‘houses’ as they were referred to at that time, reinterpreted what was then called the feeling of time, an interpretation of what a respective designer thought was the coming look, and all functioned that way. It was only much later in the 1940s that houses like Chanel and Lanvin started investing in signature designs making the brand recognizable, while at the same time being season specific. Dior was in fact one of the first houses to do this. The New Look that was launched in 1947 remains an important reference point in fashion history.This signature design activity is what leads to strong and solid corporate identities, a phenomenon that permits one to recognize, even unconsciously, the name of the brand while flicking through any given fashion magazine. It is also the driving force that makes people buy accessories that enable even wearing logos in the middle of their faces, as on their sunglasses. And fashion by doing this has gone a step further because these corporate identities have evolved into status symbols. It’s the possibility to adorn yourself with a fashion accessory emblazoned with a logo, to look as striking as you would with real jewellery.
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n India we are also starting to see the first ripples of this. Our fashion industry being extremely young, we are still discovering not only the clothes, but above all the attitudes that go with them – and the opinions, characters and tastes that create these fashion images, all man-made, that surround us. And to a certain extent we are growing into that culture ourselves.
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1994 Lecoanet Hemant Couture – Golden Thimble Award for Fiber Collection. |
Genes-Lecoanet Hemant Men’s Wear. |
Genes-Lecoanet Hemant Women’s Wear. |
Behind all the expression of fashion, however, lies a vast world of technicality: a worldwide industry of making the right clothes at the right time, and it is a tricky business. In India we have an existing expertise of clothes production that goes back much further than the establishment of our fashion catwalks: just think of the ‘quota’ decades during which all an industrialist in India needed to have was a factory, acceptable machines and workers. All the rest, from conception to establishment of patterns and designs, choice of fabric, merchandising and quality control came from overseas along with the client. The industrialist did not even need to know the profession: all parameters of manufacturing were brought in with the assured orders. It is only on entering the WTO and thus not having access to the quotas, that professionalism and know-how started to count. In fact, many a factory has closed down since.
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t was in the mid-90s, parallel to the industrial and quota movement, that an Indian fashion movement started, one going back to our artisanal roots that had been neglected in the early years of our nation. A bunch of young designers, all very successful over the years, established the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), an association that created the first fashion week in India; an amazing accomplishment. And many more followed. Today we can boast over fifteen fashion weeks in India, from Beach to you-name-it – they are, in fact, so omnipresent that one wonders whether establishing fashion weeks is not the actual business versus what we think the fashion business is.
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s mentioned, it is the famous few that came out as the first fashion batch that established the codes of fashion in our country. And the establishment of the first fashion week needed to take into account the fashion resource scarcity that existed at that time. There was not a single modelling agency as yet and all models were freelance, negotiating tariffs with clients themselves. The same applied to hairdressers and make-up artists as well as choreographers and all the other professions needed to contribute to a fashion week.The perfect solution was the turnkey fashion week in which a committee pre-designated the two groups of models that would alternate on the ramp to stage these shows, permitting a given designer to show while the next one prepared with the other group of models. It’s a great system to allow many designers to have shows and democratically allow all those participating to be treated equally.
These heavily sponsored shows allow designers to participate at relatively low cost, to which there is a flip side also: the shows happen with backdrops, i.e. visual identification featuring, above all, the sponsors – normal in these circumstances. It is true that when Lecoanet Hemant had its very first show in Mumbai in 2007, I sent back some pictures to friends in Paris: everyone thought it was a great and witty idea to rename Lecoanet Hemant to Lakmé, the name predominantly figuring on the ramp apart from the fifteen other logos. This misunderstanding also underlines the malaise of corporate identity, vital to individuality, the base of the fashion business.
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t is true that magazines and newspapers in India are often not only committed, but also obliged, to generally never cover a story on a single designer; it’s always about a group. The roots maybe lie in the fact that a group freshly out of school formalized the fashion industry in India.And for me, after seeing one collection after the other for a full day, by the evening, everything reviewed seemed to be somehow alike: with nearly all designers doing traditional attire, presenting their shows on the same ramp with the same models, it started to make me think about individuality.
Sitting in a dark front row of a show at fashion week for the first time in India, I discovered elements of our beautiful clothing heritage walking down the runway again and again and it did not take me a long time to understand that fashion will have a fierce battle, one difficult to win, when trying to give itself a place in our society. Traditions are so deeply anchored in India where social status is much more important than novelty of any kind. And instead of keeping our traditions alive by reinterpreting them again and again, we reproduce them historically, which disconnects them from daily life rather than keeping the kids enthusiastic.
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Lecoanet Hemant Couture Leather Origami Dress. Photographed by John Akehurst, London. |
Here, any event you may think of will never be as important as a wedding in the family. It is the one and only event many people live and save all their money for a whole lifetime because of the immense impact it has on status. And it is a fact that no event in society will ever be able to bypass something as important as the Obese Indian Wedding (please excuse my French), the only correct appellation if a Greek wedding is considered big and fat.
By far, the biggest fashion business in India is the wedding business, comparable to nothing else in the world. Calling it a fashion business is legitimate, considering it comes from the catwalks, even if it is entirely traditional and artisanal.
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he malaise from an international point of view is that these ramps concern only wedding wear, which is a niche that exists in all countries. The big difference is cultural: in India it is the family and not the couple that organizes the wedding, or at least used to until the big change our country and culture is going through. An absence of blank money could deeply modify spending patterns even in the near future.
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he other malaise is for the adventurous designer who actually creates fashion, which means garments for daily and event wear in sync with their time: in India we do not have the textile industry working hand in hand with designers, which would mean creating proactive, researched textile collections for a coming season. Novelty launching, the mechanism of the fashion system, is based on the constant novelty that is shown on the ramp first by designers in fashion weeks or elsewhere. Having new textiles at your disposal helps create new fashions and has been proven in all textile havens of the world, from France and Italy all the way to Japan, including the US and many more countries. Look at the vast amounts of new materials presented at the various textile trade fairs internationally every season.I also think that another reason Indian designers go for wedding wear is that they get seduced by the unit prices they can obtain. Selling small amounts in those categories also permits functioning from small workshops that need next to no know-how and technology, only artisans and a client.
Looking at the same time at our retail world for fashion, it has to be stated that a designer in many ways needs to be a banker who pre-finances everything he does including what gets to retail. All fashion shops in India function more or less only on consignment (they don’t buy, but only pay for goods once they are sold from their stores), which makes the designer the only one financing the risk and not a whole market like elsewhere. It is thus understood that being a designer in India means being above all artisanal – unlike elsewhere.
With our unique position as far as artisans are concerned, making a new design seems to be the most logical thing. The fact is that we all live in a world of consumerism and everyone is looking for something new, which can hardly happen if the ingredients don’t change. Which they don’t really: research and development of new materials is far from being the forte of our industry. Going into the market, all textile companies will tell you that they would be willing to develop whatever the designer orders, usually a couple of thousand meters, which is the tough, unreachable reality when you need to produce yourself what an industry could be developing for general progress: something really new. So we are once again back to innovating with embroidery or otherwise, and when lucky, finding leftovers from exports.
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t was in fact while creating our new prêt line named Genes-Lecoanet Hemant that we went through this analysis as a group during which another thought came up: about respect and confrontation, about questioning and opinions. It is considered rude to confront and being different is a confrontation not many wish to live up to, even if every generation in history has had the same problem, like in the US when blue jeans became the clothes of an entire generation. From initially being the clothes of the worker, denim became a symbol of rebellion culminating in the expression of the love generation of the ’60s and ’70s, eventually becoming the fabric the planet wears. Again, fashion.Times, however, are changing and have already changed again. In this digital age all styles coexist. And everybody is an equal star, digitally speaking. In fact, digital is the ultimate star technology, a site where for the first time the young know more than the elders and where, for the first time, the helping hand comes from the other side.
