Manish’s muse

Buyer’s boy

While the general buzz was about business being rather low at the Fashion Week, here’s one designer who has seldom had it so good. Sabyasachi Mukherjee truly was the buyer’s darling at the five-day fashion trade event, as The Snail overtook every collection in sight.

To begin with, the Calcutta boy bagged a sizeable order from Tracey Ross, whose store at the Sunset Plaza in Hollywood boasts of star clients like Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson and Johnny Depp. Then there was London fashion store Browns, whose representative Albert Morris went ga-ga about The Snail, and the “detailing and finish of garments”.

Sabyasachi also bagged orders from Zenia Fashion and Moda Inn from Kuwait and Les Nomades, Geneva. The flood of orders added up to Rs 70 lakh by the end of the fourth day of the event. And the icing on the cake came in the form of “a very big enquiry” from Saks Fifth Avenue in New York.

Ritu’s razzmatazz

Bollywood badshah

Manish Malhotra’s show on the inaugural evening flaunted a guest list that read like the yellow pages of tinsel town. Karisma Kapoor, Tusshar Kapoor, Rahul Bose, Bobby Deol, Arjun Rampal, Mehr Jessia, Tanissha, Gauri Khan, Tara Sharma, Malaika Arora Khan, Amrita Arora, Dia Mirza, Sangeeta Bijlani, Jaya Bachchan, Kirron Kher, Jugal Hansraj, Karan Johar, Neetu Singh, Ritu Nanda...

They were all spotted among the audience, cheering Bollywood’s favourite designer throughout. On the ramp were bubbly beauties Preity Zinta and Kajol, sporting pristine white creations from the designer’s all-white diffusion collection titled Freedom. While the star shower did make for a befitting start to the big week of fashion in the Bollywood den, the flipside was that the overdose led quite a few other designers to shun star appearances at their shows, making the ramp almost Bolly-free on the rest of the days.

Sabya’s Snail

Crusade couture

If the fashion-aware crowd was sailing through the week, putting behind it all the bitterness surrounding the big split between Lakme and FDCI and the resultant impact on the industry, Narendra Kumar forced it to sit up and take notice. At his show on Day 4, models with their mouths gagged walked the ramp in pin-drop silence, as they flaunted the designer’s line titled In Protest. Narendra had filed a case against FDCI under the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission following the council’s decision to debar designers from participating in both the Mumbai and Delhi fashion weeks. He lost the case on March 28 and hence he was In Protest mode.

While the tell-tale title of the line was enough to drive home his point, the silence stunt made all the difference. Resounding footsteps on the wooden ramp was the only sound during the catwalk minus any music, followed by a thunderous applause from the audience in the end, breaking the silence and supporting both the clothes and the cause.

Narendra’s Protest

Global garb

International with a capital I is how one can best describe designer Ashish Soni’s collection titled Memsahib Maharani. The designer who bagged quite a bit of global glory with his participation at New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week last year, presented a collection unique in its interpretation of Indian history. His autumn-winter line was inspired by the “world of rajas and sultans of India? where pretty European girls were swept off their feet by charming maharajas? to become royal begums and bahus”.

Ashish drew elements from the royal lifestyles of these women, who twisted Indian fashion to set their own style statements, and fused them seamlessly with western sensibilities, styles and silhouettes, keeping a strict eye on forecasts for autumn-winter 2006-07.

Ashish’s Memsahib

Last let-down

The biggest draw of the fashion extravaganza, the grand finale by couture queen Ritu Beri, was a let-down of sorts. The clothes ? Ritu’s interpretation of Lakme’s summer 2006 statement Happy Hours ? failed to match up to the hype. An overdose of embellishments, loud colours, shine and shimmer presented a look quite loud, heavy and overtly glamorous, which didn’t go down too well. Heavy surface ornamentation with threadwork, zardosi, pearls, stones, mirrors, patchwork and more lent a feel that was in stark contrast to the much-appreciated clean, straight line “international” look presented by quite a few designers over the week.