Last week,the Express team was invited to Delhi designer duo Lecoanet Hemant's Spring Summer 2012 show-interesting titled Fashmob. An obvious pun on Flashmob,it evoked the notion that this would be a fashion flash mob. Apparently the designers were keen to focus on the word mob but for those at the receiving end of the communication,it evoked a wilder,exciting anticipation on the lines of F(l)ashmob. The audiences had no way to sense that Didier Lecoanet and Hemant Sagar had punned upon a populist term "Flashmob" while expecting everyone to ignore its one half: Flash. I realised this but only in my later conversations with Hemant Sagar who didn't sound too happy with what Express's Somya Lakhani wrote about the show. Minus the Flash she had called it. Eighteen regular women wearing a white lily stalk each dressed in Lecoanet Hemant creations walked down the staircase at The Gallery in Mehrauli in Delhi led by Hemant Sagar. None was a typical fashion "model". They were tall,young,older,fair,dark,slim,plump,short,ordinary,exceptional,an interesting mix of the way we are as a people. They weren't fettered by the conventional or commercial idea of beauty. They walked amidst the audience with music playing in the background. It's an almost romantic concept-it strongly stands up against fashion elitism (of look and shape) and I have to admit that I found it initially relieving. Having had some intense conversations with Hemant Sagar on couture,fashion,the Indian fashion industry,its obsession with symbols of wealth and ostentation,it was a pleasure to see that he was walking his talk supported wholeheartedly by his partner Didier. But the implementation of this brilliant idea stumbled a bit. While the script had a life and language in the minds of the designers; they had presumably not debated it enough to be sure if their radical thoughts would transform into visual cues for the audiences. That didn't happen. A single blue dress on former actor Sonya Jehan surrounded by women in varying silhouettes and shapes in beige,nude,white,off white and one black slim dress on others became the mob. The clothes fitted everyone well,considering these were ordinary women like you and me and not models on whom fashion is usually displayed. Hemant later said that this was the true triumph of good tailoring. Yet,one of the reasons,the clothes failed to elicit an I want this too response (famously,the first innate response to fashion,unlike to fine art) was precisely this: the choreography and the presentation lacked fashion's quivering,sensual,tingling body language. If it had been only about an idea,admittedly,Fashmob was a super one. But since the core of fashion cannot be entirely bereft of glamour-its alter ego- Fashmob needed much more thought. Also,the word mob (even if we put aside the pun of Flashmob) denotes furious energythrough social and sociological descent,it evokes in most minds a passionate throng of people stirred by anger or joy,jubilation or madness-never mind the emotion. Never has it meant a bunch of people casually walking around opaque about their feelings.
