Does-indian-fashion-really-need-celebrity-showstoppers

When designers Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna were asked why they didn’t use any celebrity on the catwalk at the India Fashion Week, a nonchalant Khanna replied: “Our clothes are our showstoppers. It’s a business event, let’s keep it that!”

But in a world of glamour where media visibility is almost a prerequisite and most of ‘what’s hot’ and ‘what’s not’ is measured by the number of shutterbugs and roving video cameras present, does having a movie star or two sashay in front of a celebrity-hungry media really make bad business sense?

While a few other designers publicly seconded Khanna’s lines, many others at the fashion week were happily posing for the cameras, hand in hand with their celebrity showstoppers.

And the media is often just a means to a (business) end.

“Yes, he (buyer) does get helped by the publicity surrounding the designers. If there is a star wearing the clothes, it helps him sell the product (to customers). So in that term, yes, indirectly, they do help,” says Rina Dhaka, one of India’s most popular designers, at home and abroad.

And publicity is one thing that always tags along with celebrities, who are as talked about, if not more, than the actual designs on the runway.

Off the stage, if you happen to see a crowd in the corner, you can be sure that a Bollywood star or a beauty queen is at the centre of the melee, posing away in front of the flashbulbs.

The Indian fashion design industry’s overall production was just around 2.7 billion rupees in 2007, with the majority of customers being Indian.

And even though international buyers have increasingly been drawn to the industry by the handicraft and detailed embroidery, most of the foreign buyers I’ve spoken to say Indian designers need to be more market-savvy about promoting their products
And the use of celebrities seems to be one such tried-and-tested method.

“If celebrities are walking, people identify the success of the designer with that,” says Sunil Sethi, president of the Fashion Design Council of India.

So is it any surprise that the ongoing Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, which is usually chock-a-block with celebrities, receives more media coverage than the India Fashion Week and the Delhi Fashion Week in the Indian capital?

As Rina Dhaka points out: “They (celebrities) do make a difference, unfortunately!”

What do you think — are you interested in buying an outfit only if a Shilpa Shetty or John Abraham look good in it?

Fashion-cliched-but-watch-it-for-priyanka

That is why Madhur Bhandarkar’s “Fashion”, which makes an attempt to take a long hard look at the world of fashion, with its pressures and pitfalls, is a topical film.

Priyanka Chopra plays the part many girls must be living out at this very moment — a small-town girl who wants to make it big as a model. She rebels against her parents and comes to Mumbai.

She makes the rounds of auditions, parties and photographers, gradually realising the fashion world was not as glamorous as she imagined.

But her ambition is far too strong to let her take notice of these minor glitches. She is determined to make it big. Along the way, she makes friends with Rohit, a designer’s assistant and Janet (Mughda Godse), a small-time model.

She also falls in love with Manav (Arjan Bawa), a fellow struggling model, but the relationship can’t stand the pressures of their careers. Her big moment comes when she catches the eye of Abhijeet Sarin, the owner of a big fashion brand. She moves to the top league but loses out on friends along the way.

Director Bhandarkar has his intentions in the right place and from the first few frames, I thought I’d get to see a hard hitting, no holds barred look at the world of fashion. What I did get though was a whole lot of clichés and a predictable storyline. Bhandarkar includes a whole lot of subplots, introduces a whole lot of characters, but unfortunately, tells us nothing new.

There is the mandatory gay designer (Sameer Soni), the model taking drugs (Kangna Ranaut), the socialites, the businessmen, the front row elite, the photographers — but the film just seems to skim the surface. There is none of the impact that Bhandarkar’s films “Chandni Bar” and “Page 3” had.

How I wish Bhandarkar had given us a glimpse of the mind of a model — the pressure to look good, the crazy working hours, and the politics, rather than just telling us it exists. I wish he had made a much more honest film, merely because Priyanka Chopra deserved one.

As Meghna Mathur, the protagonist, she is at once innocent, ambitious, in love, angry, jealous, arrogant, and defeated — delivering each emotion with such intensity you feel for her at all times.

This performance has awards written all over it. I wish it had been backed by a more rounded script — that would have been the icing on the cake.

As for Kangna Ranaut — she plays the violent, schizophrenic Shonali Gujral to the hilt — but what is it with her and crazy, suicidal roles? I’d like to see her in a “nice” film for a change, in which no knives or drugs are involved.

The rest of the cast is competent enough, except for Arbaaz Khan as Abhijeet Sarin, who has one single expression throughout. Watch “Fashion” for Priyanka Chopra, otherwise, this one has nothing new to offer.

The Red Queen Color Theory

Matt Ridley's erudite, engaging book describes a dynamic he calls the Red Queen. It means striving just to keep from losing ground. He points out that in some endeavors, success cannot accumulate. Ridley develops this concept to explain many interesting phenomena, including sex and intelligence. Excellent book, by the way.

Here I'd like to use the Red Queen concept to describe what goes on in your psyche when you color your website, and its relationship with what goes on in the psyches of your users when color makes an impression on them. For one thing, I think the same things go on when you get choosy about what to wear, and when someone looks you over from head to toe. We're designed to check each other out, as well as to give each other something to check out.

The diversity of cultures and personal values is merely part of the backdrop. At the fore is an individual struggle to stand out, to decorate and adorn so as to maximize appeal. Appeal to whom and for what are different subjects. But undeniably, fashion is about showing off.

Seeking great color for a website is also a Red-Queen race. It's about standing out among numerous others vying for user attention. Color that's effective on one popular site is usually avoided on others.

Color theory is merely the backdrop. At the fore is individual ability to come up with colors that appear to be associated with skill and value.

Undeniably, color choice for a website (beyond the rare application of color-as-information) is about showing off.

People show off in many ways besides clothing of course; wit, altruism, aggressiveness, conspicuous consumption, righteousness, savvy, nonconformism, unconventional ideas, and e-zine articles to name a few. A website shows off in a lot of ways other than its choice of colors, usually by using the following techniques: difficult graphics effects, tricky animations, catchy background midi's, sarcasm, outrage, righteous indignation, unconventional layout, trash compaction, smiling nubility, smarmy platitudes, obsequiousness toward customers.

If you decide it's important for your site to make a great impression, and you choose to show off with color, I have a few suggestions.

The color game, like the fashion game, has two facets: the judgment and the struggle. The judgment is a quick opinion, an impression. The struggle is to make a good impression, or--and this is key--to make a better impression than others are making.

Ever since people began fabricating color (working with dyes and pigments as opposed to merely perceiving color in flora, fauna, faces) it has played a part in numerous Red Queen effects. From house paint to hair color to printed money, wherever color is a challenge to produce, the Red Queen makes a competitive arena out of it, a forum for showing off. You inherit the desire to impress using color right along with a tremendously refined and intricate capacity to be impressed by color. Judgment and struggle are packaged together. Use one to crack the other, that's my central message here. Harness your innate ability to perceive great color in order to find impressive colors for your website.

THE FASHION RESEARCH GROUP

Founded in 2003 and drawn from the departments of Classical Studies, English, French, and Modern Languages and Literatures at The University of Western Ontario, the Fashion Research Group is dedicated to exploring scholarly aspects of Fashion. The members of the research group work on Fashion from a variety of interdisplinary perspectives and cover such diverse topics as representations of fashion, fashion theory, image-text relations, self-fashioning, discourse theory, the history of fashion, and fashion and fiction. Fashion embodies a limitless potential for communication. This potential of fashion has been examined in the fields of cultural studies, art history, literary criticism, anthropology, fashion history, media studies, gender studies, folklore studies and sociology.
Regular meetings once a month discuss current scholarship on Fashion. A yearly workshop gives members the opportunity to present current research and interact with an invited guest speaker.