Attending a fashion show, or rather India Fashion Week in early August? As in August 2002! Just at the time when a million Pakistani and Indian army soldiers face each other on the border? Well the circumstances were such that this was an opportunity too good to miss.

In New Delhi to actually attend a conference that was not related at all to fashion, I couldn’t help but notice during the break in the conference every day the dozens of articles and pictures published in the morning papers. Indian Fashion Week was on – from August 2 to 8 – and was actually being held at the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi. Apparently, the shows – thirty five in all, and then a daily seminar and several other related events – were going to be open only to selected invitees like buyers from major stores or from overseas, guests of sponsors and of course the media.

Since I was a journalist – who didn’t really write on fashion all that much but did follow the fashion scene in Pakistan as an interested reader and consumer – I thought this would be a great chance to go see and judge where our fashion industry stood compared to India’s (especially since we so often love to compare ourselves with them). I began first with the Times of India since the hotel I was staying at had that paper. I called them up to ask for the correspondent who had done that days story. He was out but I was given the number of Meenakshi who was working at the media centre. Now, and sorry to say this, but if this were Pakistan I would have probably had to face a lot of attitude. Please note that this call was made on Aug 2, the day Indian Fashion Week had already begun and I was calling to ask if I could still come, and without having submitted any of the documents needed for press accreditation. Surprisingly, Meenakshi was very cooperative, especially after I told her that I was a journalist from Pakistan. All I had to do was to show up at the Taj Palace the next day and everything would be taken care off.

Several events were scheduled for Aug 3, including one that particularly sounded quite interesting. The Sunsilk Styles of the Silver Screen hair show turned out to be an extremely well-packaged and managed fashion presentation. But before I get to that, a bit on the way India Fashion Week was being organized and some details about those who took part in it.

Their fashion industry has had the good sense and professionalism, and not to mention the commercial and trade support, to come together and form what is called the Fashion Design Council of India. It’s current director, Vinod Kaul, has almost thirty years of experience in the textiles and apparel retailing and merchandising industry, and this just goes to show the extent of cooperation between fashion designers and industry in India, something that is sorely missing in Pakistan.

In its third year, India Fashion Week ran in New Delhi from August 2 to 8. It had 53 designers highlighting their talent and they used 48 models, including reigning Miss India Neha Dhupia. The other thing that set it apart from any fashion event that one is likely to have seen so far in Pakistan is the immense amount of support it received from the media, print and electronic. For all the days that I was in Delhi, all the local English papers carried front-page stories about the event on their metro sections. Some papers took the more conventional basic reporting of a show, while others tried to be more innovative, like for example The Hindustan Times which deputed one of its reporters to spend a whole day with one of the young promising designers and then do a story on that. These stories, unlike the print media here, were carried in the main news pages, something that being a reader from Pakistan I had to get used to. Interestingly enough, some Indian journalists – not those who cover fashion though – themselves were quite critical of this saying that their editors often preferred glamour and entertainment stories in preference to those that had hard news, apparently because these increased circulation.

Other than the print media, dozens of correspondents of various Indian and foreign TV channels were on hand. In fact, the Fashion TV correspondent was milling about the media room before one of the shows I attended, trying to get an interview of the new – and stunningly beautiful – Lakme girl, the 17-year-old Vinnie Kapur. Several dozen computers were on hand for correspondents who wanted to file their stories directly from the hotel and some were being used to do just that, while a few others were being used by the waiting journalists to spend some time on MSN chat. Some of the journalists managed to find out that I was from Pakistan and several were surprised that I was actually in India given the existing situation, and most of the time I did feel like an oddity, as if being constantly looked at by interested spectators. Most, however, were friendly and curious to know how things were in Pakistan, both fashionwise and politically, especially with reference to Gen Musharraf and that planned election.

Though it was obviously impossible, and not even my intention, to attend all the thirty five shows (five every day, seven days running) that happened at India Fashion Week, the handful that I did manage to go made for an excellent experience. And, it was hard not to make comparisons with the way things are done – at least in the fashion and modelling, and styling, world – back home. In fact, even the comparisons to the way the media covers fashion in India, compared to the way it covers it (or some would say, doesn’t at all) were quite instructive. For example, many designers here, notably Rizwan Beyg in an interview last Sunday to a Lahore-based English daily, complain all the time that Pakistan has no fashion journalists worth the name. However, most of the journalists – both newspaper and television – that one came across covering India Fashion Week were not specialists either in the strict sense of the word. Most, like their counterparts here, had to cover several beats, one of which was fashion. Normally, fashion is part of the ‘arts and culture’ beat. In fact, only the correspondent of The Times of India said that he exclusively covered fashion, and that he had been doing it for ten years. Clearly, some of them had been covering it for so long that they had become specialists but that didn’t mean that they had any formal training. Unfortunately, such accusations are bandied about much too often by Pakistani designers, often on the grounds – sometimes though with good reason – that those who write on fashion know nothing about it. Well, for the sake of argument even if that were accepted to be true (which it mostly is) what do these fashion designers propose to do next. I mean it’s not as if the media in Pakistan is going to get extremely qualified ‘fashion critics’ suddenly from abroad or somewhere, so they (as in the fashion industry here) really have to make do with what’s on offer. And in any case, blaming the lack of qualified ‘fashion journalists’ does not take away from the fact that the fashion scene in Pakistan – at least to people from outside – is perceived to be incestuous and ridden with personal politics and rivalries (take for example the recent interview of Tariq Amin to an English daily).

What is different in India, and is certainly a handicap in Pakistan, is that TV there covers such shows most willingly and there are none of the absurd censor policies or other hypocrisies that one has to bear with in Pakistan. This by the way usually means that outlandish shows by our movie actresses are shown while perfectly tasteful fashion shows highlighting the creative energies of our local fashion talent are ignored.

The Indian fashion industry, as their fashion week showed, is much too large and organized for these things to get in its way. The shows that I managed to attend included a fabulous one by well-known designer Rohit Bal and another by Sunsilk which showcased how Bollywood had influenced hairstyles over the decades. Both were very well choreographed and managed. The lighting was spot on and the music well chosen and with excellent sound. These two particularly stood out because they combined the fashionable and the classical with the theatrical. The organizers also had a dedicated website to the event at www.lakmeindiafashionweek.com and several designers using the services of PR companies to showcase their participation. The Sunsilk hair show did have well-known Indian comedian actor Sajid Khan as sort of an MC but his jokes – unlike those of MCs here – were actually quite funny and not at all in bad taste. The way most of the Indian models walked, and looked, was quite different from what would likely to see any Pakistani model doing, except perhaps Iraj. As far as physical proportions go, most of their models have the height and built to work abroad, something that can’t really be said of much of the talent here. And, the shows were structured in a way – showing pret-a-porter or ready-to-wear collections – that it made economic sense with invitations extended to representatives of retail chains and major department stores. Here, most of the times the buyers are rich aunties or others kinds of individual buyers, and if that’s okay with the designers then what other people say shouldn’t matter.

Pakistan plans to have it’s own fashion week next month in Lahore. This is probably a good time as any for our industry to show off its talent and creative energy to other interested Pakistanis and to the rest of the world. Let’s hope it comes off at least with the same level.