By Book or By Crook

Maybe the days of a magazine editor being the arbiter of fashion and style died with Diana Vreeland,who edited Harper’s Bazaar for 25 years and then Vogue for another ten. (She famously said ‘Pink is the navy blue of India’ and ‘The best thing about London is Paris’). Maybe what is more desirable to stiff-suited publishers is someone more interested in pleasing advertisers than one with a keen eye to promote young talent. And maybe daddy’s big bucks can buy you anything,even credibility.

And yet,the most exciting bit about Indian fashion in the last decade is the rash of zines that abound. Except for Elle ,the country’s first and still most successful glossy,the rest are just toasting their second or third anniversaries.

Magazines are a very exciting business. While they were born as weekly or bimonthly newspapers promoting fabric and trends,wigs and gauntlets,they’ve moved on to being the finest touchstones of a country’s economy. If growth is strong,the mags are doing well. If not,the big shake-out happens and the weaker ones begin shutting down.

Fashion magazines,for me,are also great chroniclers of culture. The manner in which they capture the mood and mores of society,they’re as good as history books. They are hugely democratic in that they reach out and connect to women of privilege and also to those who are aspirational. Not only are they devoted to beautiful fashion,they also promote photography,art,illustration and literature. People who work in these magazines are pure aesthetes,cocooned in a world where everything is togged up and transient,far removed from the drudgery of ‘regular people’.

And they’re full of incendiary gossip. It’s super-fun to know who schmoozed her way to the top at one mag. And how another will only promote the editor’s mummy’s designer friends – even though no one wears their clothes anymore. And how a third’s fashion editor and its features editor always have their daggers drawn,the poor publisher can barely keep his office together.

Our fashion weeks reveal more than the trends of the season; it’s easy to know who’s friends with whom as who’s ready to gouge another’s eyes out just by the seating arrangements in the press section.

What about newspaper fashion hacks you ask? We’re the boring types,trundling into newsrooms almost apologising for the new Dior bag while the Parliament’s in a Naxal-induced tizzy. Or sloppily attending fashion shows in work-wear flats. Waiting for a publisher to call. Or not.

( namratanow@gmail.com )