...And So, Apparently, Is Vogue.

..to India, that is. This October (I'd like to know how this piece of news escaped me for so long- actually I do know: I dismissed it as a rumour). I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, to be honest. My views on Indian 'designers' (note the quotes) is that they're a bunch of pretentious Page 3* ass-kissers who put utter rubbish on the runway when they remember that they have a day job, because most of them have no conception of how to cut or fit clothes, and just hide that fact behind piles of embroidery in order to emphasise their 'Indianness' (which apparently consists of Bollywood and lots of ethnicky-looking textiles). And they're overpriced and unwearable to boot (about the only designer whose stuff I've approved of in recent years is Manish Arora, and I'm almost entirely convinced it's because he realised he couldn't get away with the usual crap job in London). And don't even get me started on the astounding lack of originality, and the two-year backlog of trends.. And given that Vogue seems to make a bit of a policy of promoting the local design industry in the countries where it sets up, I'm wondering what they'll find to push at us here. The luxury clothing/accessories market in India is, by and large, a new thing (the country had pretty much no fashion design history pre-1970), and I'm a bit ambivalent on the question of how good or bad this is. I wouldn't complain if it meant clothes and trends got here faster, and maybe gave the Indian design lot something to chew on (as in: MAKE DECENT CLOTHES. OR ELSE...), and this needs a bit of thinking about, but maybe it'll be good. Even if we haven't got anything like Preen or Giles Deacon for ourselves, maybe the next generation could use a bit of incentive to actually create, instead of just ripping things off..

*non-Indian readers: that's the social page. No glamour models on it, though it might've been more interesting if they were.