If I hear one more person say that fashion week is a trade event, I’m going to walk right up to them and paint their lips with my red lipstick. If Gandhigiri — offering roses to your enemy — is de rigeur these days, I’m pioneering YSL-giri. Let them have a taste of pure, unabashed glamour to know how addictive it is. Or lend them my five-inch Manolo Blahniks and show them the world just above them is far better.

Having just returned from Delhi’s Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week, and readying myself for next month’s Lakme Fashion Week, I have to say we’ve got it all wrong. The fashion council’s current executive director waxes profane about not catering to the “stiletto set” all along as she offers a better profile to the television cameras. At another end, a Mumbai-based designer for some beautiful women of Bollywood is giving an interview to an Anokhi-dressed hack, saying he’s happier without the film stars whose fame he has piggybacked to Delhi on.

Each designer, organiser or journalist I’ve met is consumed with the idea of “the business of fashion”. Sadly, everyone’s missed the point. The business of fashion is the business of glamour. If no one cared about their own physical appearance, who would want to wear expensive designer clobber?

Eight years of fashion weeks, and we still paint such a serious image of the industry, it’s almost a joke in itself. No one wants to know how much money a designer has made, which stores have ordered how much; it’s important but it isn’t interesting.

... contd.