Fashion Shows in India portray the Indian urbane scenario, the incredible India. India has been acclaimed for its rich textile heritage, but the fashion industry, yet faces challenges with several infrastructure and industry issues. Earlier, the leading Indian fashion designers originally focussed on couture lines and wedding trousseaus. However, recently, quite a number of people (designers, textile designers, models, make-up artists, hairstylists, stylists, photographers, etc), have joined the designer/fashion industry.
They have come forward to display their work through fashion shows. Thus, the target customer base has witnessed limited growth in the same period. Indian Fashion is the reinstating of the factual notion and the assorted fact as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it into words: "The post-colonial diasporic Indian who seeks to decolonize the mind"
Fashion is a lingo of signs, symbols and iconography that non-verbally communicates what is to be told in a collective unconscious. Fashion in all its forms from a tattooed and pierced navel, to the newest hairstyle, is the best form of iconography is the expression of individual identity. Indian Fashion is the face while style is the face contour which enables one to "make a face to meet the faces" as Eliot would put it!
Recognizing this, in 1998, the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) was born as a single entity representing the business interests of the designer fraternity across the country. To address the need to grow the target customer base and the industry, FDCI launched their `Fashion Week` initiative, which would serve as a single platform to facilitate buyer-seller interaction within the fashion industry by showcasing the collections through the fashion shows. The event was titled as India Fashion Week, to represent the national scope of the fashion industry of our country unlike fashion weeks held internationally, where they are city specific (such as New York Fashion Week or Milan Fashion Week).
After the independence, Indian Fashion industry witnessed the effects of cultural globalization. Due to this, changes occurred in the dressing style of Indians, which even led to the fusion of Indian and western dresses. Wearing kurtis on jeans, spaghetti with saris are the examples showing the effect of western culture on Indian they are the trends of multiculturalism flowing in. The work of Indian designers is highly appreciated all over the world. Western brands are also coming to participate in Indian fashion weeks, as they see a lot of potential in our market.
Since the last decade the Indian fashion industry has moved from the embryonic stage to a blossoming take-off. Fashion designers have contributed immensely to the spread of fashion as a driving force, both among Indian consumers and select segments of Western markets. India can now boast of dozens of leading fashion designers, who can match any European fashion designer in their concepts, styles and designs. Ritu Beri, Rohit Bal, Ritu Kumar, Abraham and Thakore, Deepika Govind, Gitanjali Kashyap, Indira Broker, J.J. Valaya, Lina Tipnis, Manoviraj Khosla, Pavan Aswani, Payal Jain, Ravi Bajaj, Rina Dhaka, Sharon Leong and Chandrajit Adhikari, Shaina NC, Sonali and Himanshu, Wendell Rodricks, Anna Singh, Ashish Soni, Jatin Kochar, Madhu Jain, Manish Malhotra, Ravi Bajaj, Salim Asgarally and Tarun Tahlliani top the growing list of reputed fashion designers in India.
