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NEW DELHI, INDIA, May 13, 2003: Considering that India is historically credited with giving the world paisley, seersucker, calico, chintz, cashmere, crewel and the entire technique of printing on cloth, it is anybody’s guess why India barely registers on the global map of fashion. In the Western imagination India continues to represent fabric but not fashion, tradition but rarely innovation. “Western designers have been coming to India and ‘borrowing’ for 50 years,” said Jacqueline Lundquist, the wife of a former American ambassador to India and a tireless booster of Indian design. “It’s not fair that all these American designers should get the glory for Indian design.”



Hoping to change all that, Ms. Lundquist recently brought four contemporary designers to the attention of Lord & Taylor, whose executives responded by staging a storewide promotion called Into India, devoting 20 of its Fifth Avenue windows to clothes by Tarun Tahiliani, Rina Dhaka, Vivek Narang and Manish Arora.



“When we did our trend reports,” said LaVelle Olexa, the store’s fashion merchandising director, “India was such an influence and such an important fashion direction that doing an India thing seemed obvious.” For reasons that probably have more to do with a seasonal vogue for color than with an embrace of real changes in South Asia, the promotion turned out to be, Ms. Olexa said, “the most successful one that we’ve ever done.” Although she declined to release sales figures, the Into India boutique was nearly sold out by last weekend. There were silk tunics and sequined T-shirts and embroidered shawls that, if they posed no challenge to the hegemony of Western design, at least put New York on notice that contemporary Indian fashion has more to offer than neo-hippie gear and droopy yoga clothes. “Really, there is so much stuff happening right now in India,” said Alpana Bawa, a Punjab-born, New York-based designer. “It used to be that India was cheap cottons and poor finish work,” Ms. Lundquist said. “Buyers would look and say, ‘Hmmm, come back next time.’ ” Lately, international buyers and press have awakened to the prospects of Indian fashion design, some even trekking to India for Lakme India Fashion Week in Bombay, which, in the four years since its inception, has expanded from 33 to 53 designers, and which some credit with helping reshape an industry once driven by couture bridal clothing into one that more closely resembles the global business of ready-to-wear.

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