About Shefalee

Shefalee’s journalistic career started with her writing for the Gujarat edition of The Times of India’s amateur page. She would later win trophies at The Times of India Public Speaking Prize (Gujarat state) as an undergraduate student. A stint with the Sunday desk of The Navhind Times in Goa was her first full time journalistic job followed by another brief stint in the mid-Nineties at The Asian Age in Delhi. She then joined the launch team of the Cosmopolitan India published by the India Today Group.

Shefalee later joined India Today, the newsmagazine as an assistant editor where she wrote on gender, society investigative features. It was after her extensive stint at India Today, which included impactful cover stories and long form features on culture, health and urban sexuality that Shefalee became the first editor of Marie Claire India launched by the Outlook Group in 2006.

Her first book Powder Room: The Untold Story of Indian Fashion, was published by Random House in 2012. It used an intimate, journalistic reportage style to narrate the unspoken dilemmas of the Indian fashion industry, it’s dark and light spots, the people, their politics. Powder Room, the first such book that delved into fashion’s “other side” was widely reviewed by major Indian publications.

After senior roles as Associate Editor with The Indian Express and then Style Editor with Mint Lounge, Shefalee joined IMG Reliance (later rebranded as RISE Worldwide) as the founding editor of The Voice of Fashion, India’s first digital only magazine on fashion, culture and design. Launched in 2018, The Voice of Fashion is intersectional in tone and content, it bridges the crafts and cultural industries of India with luxury, mainstream fashion, technology and design. India’s crafts, textiles and artisanal traditions, dress and identity issues inform Shefalee’s work.

She is a recognized public speaker and moderator.

Shefalee was born and raised in Adipur in Kutch to writer parents. Both her parents, the late Indra and Harish Vaswani were honoured with Sahitya Akademi Awards for Sindhi literature. She currently lives in Noida. Her only son Eklavya Vasudev is a legal activist currently pursuing his PhD in Germany.