It’s strange. Some believe that films influence fashion. Yet what films do not want is most wanted in fashion.
Yesterday actor Shah Rukh Khan went to meet Raj Thakrey to request him not to stop his show of his film Raees. A couple of months ago Karan Johar did the same for his film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. Both did not want ‘Show Stoppers.’ Continue reading…
PROLOGUE: It was during early years of my university days that my father, who was a voracious reader, came home from work one evening and flipped a book towards me and said, “Read it. I have a feeling, it will take you very far!”
I looked at the book as it lay next to me. The cover read, Don’t Say Yes When You Want To Say No, written by Dr Herbert Fensterheim, a clinical professor in psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical College. I picked up the book and never put it down until I finished the last page. Continue reading…
A woke up with a start… it was the announcement of another fashion week. As I sat in my bed thinking whether to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger or have a bowl full of Phenobarbitone instead of cinnamon rings for breakfast, came another announcement… “India’s most… whatever”.
Phenobarbitone first and then pull the trigger. I decided. Continue reading…
And Lakme Fashion Week (LFW) finally breaks out of the four walls of concrete. For the first time since its inception, the event this season was held at the Gio Garden at the Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, India. And the way it looked, I feel this may well be the beginning of a grand scale seasons coming in the future.
When one walks into LFW, nothing is stressful. Well, in fact, even before that actually. Event dates are announced well in advance so one is able to plan nicely, communications are done promptly, all laid out perfectly when one reaches the venue and the shows start like clockwork. Continue reading…
It’s strange. Some believe that films influence fashion. Yet what films do not want is most wanted in fashion.
Yesterday actor Shah Rukh Khan went to meet Raj Thakrey to request him not to stop his show of his film Raees. A couple of months ago Karan Johar did the same for his film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. Both did not want ‘Show Stoppers.’ Continue reading…
Che Kurrien, the Editor of GQ India, has a clear vision. When he launched the magazine, he made sure it looked and read nice and different. GQ Men of The Year Awards, where every Bolywood star worth his salt scurry to attend — award or no award, society ladies pose at the Red Carpet and men make sure they looked their nattiest best and post the same on Facebook and Instagram, not so much for how they looked, but to make sure the world knew they were at the GQ event. And GQ Fashion Nights, another success story that was launched last year just as hopes for having a well organized men’s fashion event was beginning to whither way. The curtains of its successful second edition were drawn on December 4, 2016. Continue reading…
A few days ago, in fact the day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped the demonetisation bombshell, I made a round at the luxury mall DLF Emporio and some of the Indian fashion designer stores in New Delhi. Let me tell you, the idea wasn’t to see or investigate any thing. It so happened that a friend from Kerala was visiting and he wanted to see some of the fashion and luxury establishments in the city and I was merely taking him around.
What’s the famous saying? “As empty as a church on a Monday morning”? Continue reading…
I was at the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai last week and for each show I sat next to one of the leading fashion writers in the world Colin McDowell, who among many things also writes for the Sunday Times London.
As we sat and watched show after show, I realized that the interest of the West, especially in such stalwarts in fashion writing as Colin, lay in the portrayal of India in a format which is acceptable to the West. Continue reading…
There was a time when our fashion designers used to do theatrics on the fashion runway. You know, the kind of outlandish stuff that made people say that what designers show on the fashion runway is totally unwearable.
Talking about outlandish creations, western runways, especially Paris, are no strangers to such kind of creations that send shockwaves through the audience. How it works there is that designers shock the audience and the media and that way brand recall is created. What John Galliano shows at the Dior presentation is a classic example to this. Continue reading…
I don’t watch the music channels on TV. If the way the presenters yap is not enough, their ways of dressing is something that makes me switch channels (or pop in a piece of cinnamon in my mouth to control nausea!).
No matter what channel I watch, when it comes to music I found that DJs have peculiar ways dressing. To show how ‘kewl’ they are they go for the funkiest (read funniest) clothing that makes all of them look as if they belong to one dwelling cluster. Continue reading…