Beyond Rohit and Manish

This event is seeing fewer celebrity designers. For different reasons. crowd-pullers like Manish Arora,Rohit Bal,Rajesh Pratap Singh,Ranna Gill,Varun Bahl and a few others are not participating. The names that are drawing full houses and appreciative nods belong to faces that don’t often appear in the society pages and are very often not recognized in a crowd. The stars of the day are names like Aneeth Arora,Anand Bhushan,Kallol Dutta and Rahul Mishra.

Jenjum and Jasleen form a pair and they design under the label Koga. Their flowers-meets-French chansons collections earned them a deafening applause and celebrity stylist Niharika Khan said they had the “most fantastic and varied colour palette”. Aneeth Arora’s Mughal inspired western wear was bought out by Ensemble,the biggest and most reputed fashion store in India.

“In ten minutes after arriving at this venue,I realized that the younger designers have taken over the runway and a fashion week of this scale can function without the big daddies of the business,” says senior designer Wendell Rodricks,one of the very few veterans participating this fashion week.

However,there’s the fact that big names these days often come in only if backed by a financial sponsor. “The emergence of local fashion ‘melas’ has pampered the top-rung designers with too many freebies and also given them a bit of fatigue,” says Sunil Sethi,president of the organizing body,FDCI. “And how many collections can you present in one year? But not one buyer has asked why is so-and-so not showing. You could say this fashion week is a tribute to talent.”

The result is a relatively unknown Hyderabad designer,Anand Kabra,opened the fashion week,a slot that often went to the likes of Manish Arora and Ashish Soni. And someone like the fresh and hugely talented duo Pankaj and Nidhi can have a coveted evening slot for their fashion show.

“Many from the newer lot are becoming successful commercially when earlier they were only known among the fashion folk,” says Tina Tahiliani Parikh,proprietor,Ensemble.