When Madhur Bhandarkar announced a film on the fashion industry, he made my toes curl with dismay. On these very pages I had had the good fortune of thrashing him on two counts: one, for Page Three, one of the worst films I’d ever watched, and two, for asking me over the phone: “Tu bhi page-three journalist hai kya? How do you go home after parties?” — destroying the hoity-toity image I held of my job.

I went to watch Fashion, despite the Rs 300-odd ticket, with determined zeal and every intention of hating it. But Bhandarkar changed my mind and heart.

Each day I wake up to self-styled fashionistas, reviewers and ombudsmen of popular culture whining about the fallacies of Fashion. But I find myself eating my own hat; mentally congratulating Bhandarkar on telling a difficult story with great sensitivity, style and especially without the pseudo-moral rectitude that was his stock-in-trade.

A tale of a small-town girl coming to big, bad Mumbai and losing herself to ambition, avarice and abuse, is as old as the hills. But to tell it without prejudice — without the middle-class baggage and reverse snobbery that all of Bhandarkar’s films have flaunted (including the terribly one-sided Chandni Bar) — is not easy.

Fashion does not take sides; it just tells us a simple story that has great highs and plummeting lows, slickness and pathos, in equal measures.

On the other hand, that other great film about the fashion industry, The Devil Wears Prada, was the ultimate bundle of clichés — a toothy intern prefers her sloppy boyfriend and a sloppier jacket to a high-paying, glamorous job with expensive minks and trips to Paris as perks. This film’s stylist is gay too, played campily by Stanley Tucci. The dominatrix boss from hell, flawlessly essayed by Meryl Streep, won her a Golden Globe and her 14th Oscar nod and Prada shrugged off its flagging sales to finally show profits.

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