My First Indian Summer: Lakmé Fashion Week

For a few seasons now I wanted to experience Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, India. I just browsed all the albums and designer profiles and here is the verdict. I pretty much don’t know sh*t about non-western fashion histories & practices. My imagination is usurped by the godawful tradition of colonial imagery that envisions India as a colorful playground for white Western eat-pray-love escapades (and prior murder-rape-pillage endeavors). One does not have to go far, at all. Literally this morning, I thumbed through the April issue of the Corriere della Sera STYLE magazine in my Bologna neighborhood café… Anatomy of almost any India-themed editorial: a Ganesha/deity pic, a palace and-or temple backdrop, dis/comfort of Louis Vuitton & such style powers, no Indian people. Check your local fashion media. Each year Bollywood outproduces Hollywood. Guess how many Indian films were nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in Academy’s 87-year history? THREE. Jodie Foster has more nominations than Indian cinema. (Not intended as a Jodie Foster jab!) Let me put it another way: 30+ nominees represented France while Americans have a long lampooned mutual animosity with the French culture! Tell-tale Oscar trivia aside, I doubt I can write about this without sourcing my references in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited, and Slumdog Millionaire. So I leave you in the marvelous company of several designers whose summer-resort 2015 collections made me catch my breath, check my pulse, click save-as and commit to expand the post-paris discourse beyond my own excruciatingly limited visual languages, cultural frameworks and psycho-emotional sentiments: mosaics by Aartivijay Gupta and bright birds of Ikai by Ragini Ahuja, patchwork and layering by Mayank Anand Shraddha Nigam and Vrisa by Rahul & Shikha, the painstaking exquisiteness of Suneet Varma and Arpita Mehta, and The Blue Runway collection by the maître Manish Malotra who turned his signature wedding couture into a political statement on gender equality.