The Fashion Design Council of India has a new, sterner face. Its affable, mild-mannered ex-chief, Vinod Kaul, has handed over the baton of running the country?s apex fashion body to a lady who looks very much in control.

It is slightly over a month since she took over as the FDCI?s director general, but Rathi Vinay Jha displays complete sure-footedness as she talks about her new job. Perhaps that isn?t surprising. This is just one more job for the 1967 batch IAS officer who retired as the tourism secretary in July 2004. What?s more, she has had a long association with the fashion industry.

In fact, she can claim to have been there at its birth since she was part of the team that set up the National Institute of Fashion Technology in 1987. She was the institute?s first executive director at the time of its establishment and continued to head it till 1993. ?Out of all the designers I?ll be working with for the FDCI, half were my students and the other half are my friends,? says Jha expansively, ?so I don?t feel as if I?m on new turf at all.?

During a long bureaucratic career, Jha was also the managing director of the Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Division and been involved actively with the Co-optex in Chennai. She has always been an extremely vocal supporter of Indian arts and crafts and it?s this ethos that she wants to bring into the Indian fashion industry today.

?When you talk about fashion,? she says, ?there is an immediate association with Westernwear. Why should that be so? Aren?t Indian clothes fashionable?? she asks. ?I am extremely proud of Indian traditions and crafts and I will do everything in my power to give credit to those craftsmen who are what you call ?untrained? and who still conceive the most beautiful designs out of their heads.?

She doesn?t seem bothered about how Indian fashion designers, many of whom show a distinct bias towards ?Western? fashion, will react to the FDCI?s new emphasis on all things Indian. ?Most of our fashion designers, however Western they might be in their outlook, incorporate Indian sensibilities in their designs,? she says. According to her, they stand to gain the most by exploiting their strength, which lies in textures, textiles, ornamentation ? the whole gamut of a very Indian aesthetic sensibility. ?They will have to find a meeting point, and they have to make fashion happen for the average Indian who wears Indian clothes.?

Jha says she dreads the thought that India might turn into another China, Japan or Thailand, where ethnic clothes have been reduced to costumes and are not worn by the average person on the street any more. ?Thankfully, in India, we still continue to wear and be extremely comfortable in our national dresses ? the sari, the salwar-kameez, the churidar kurta. And we, along with the fashion industry, must encourage this as much as possible,? says Jha.

This, she insists, must also apply to their marketing efforts. She won?t directly criticise the top designers who are wooing foreign buyers and trying to go global. But she emphasises that they must look at the Indian market. ?Of course it is desirable that they go global,? she says, ?but with an expanding middle-class that has greater purchasing power and higher disposable incomes, there is a huge market within the country for Indian fashion.?

Moreover, she emphasises, only Indian designers can deliver the smart-yet-ethnic look the young seem to love and that is where they can beat the numerous foreign brands inundating the pr?t market. Is the Indian fashion design fraternity feeling the threat of multinational apparel brands with deep, deep pockets? Yes, concedes Jha, but if they continue to play up their strengths they have nothing to worry about. As for the changes she has planned for the fashion industry to successfully sidestep the challenges facing it today, Jha tactfully says, ?I wouldn?t call them changes but growth ? in terms of numbers, capacity building and better market penetration.?

At the same time, Jha hopes to make sure that it?s not all work and no play in the fashion industry, known as much for its attendant glamour as the clothes it churns out. If she has her way, the annual India Fashion Week will be supplemented by other events throughout the year.

And the announcement that is sure to have die-hard fashionistas rushing for their make-up kits is there may be two of the mega fashion events in a year soon. Not as soon as 2005, when the fashion week is scheduled between April 20 and 26, but the year after that may well see a second fashion week.

?There are several levels of designers who should be accommodated within the fashion week but not necessarily in the same one,? explains Jha. The FDCI also plans to hold product-specific shows and shows in smaller cities like Pune, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. Also on the cards are capacity building workshops for designers and even more fashion awards.

How that goes down with a famously squabbling industry remains to be seen, though that is just the sort of stereotype about the fashion world that Rathi Vinay Jha seems intent on removing. For the new FDCI chief, fashion means business as usual.

Photograph by Rupinder Singh