Letter from The Editor. Fashion imploded this year, driving style shrapnel and culture shock across. Retail plunged, but trends went tripping. If everything is in fashion, what should we remember?

In terms of the sheer number of events that took place—fashion shows, art fairs, culture collaborations, textile-craft exhibitions, designer debuts and milestone anniversaries, colour bursts, the litany of symbolisms which emanated from the Ambani wedding, 2024 has been breathless. India’s most famous designer Rohit Bal passed away, leaving his scented garden of beautiful clothes and thin-skinned joy wilted.

2024 is easy to capture in summation because in its terrifying muchness, it holds a microcosm to almost any kind of route you take to deconstruct it.

Parts of the world continued to be ravaged by war, leaving large populations of adults and children agonisingly wiped as others witnessed the horror in irreparable anguish. Climate change stares us in the face even as fashion industries continue to grapple with carbon emissions, preservation of people, animals and forests while dealing with the growing greenwashing narrative that leaves us with sand in our eyes. Retail and luxury plummeted in terms of sale but trends and micro-trends went on a rampage. Including those in popular written and spoken expressions. We are urged to be ‘underwear adjacent’ in outerwear and ‘brain rot defiant’.

Too Many and Too Much

Red carpets from Met Gala to Cannes, Oscars to Golden Globes bristled with political restlessness in dress and accessories. Fashion’s growing power—outside its own sake—was most noticeable this year.

Alia Bhatt “went Gucci”; filmmaker Payal Kapadia showed us how light can be imagined, couturier Gaurav Gupta and his life partner met with a serious fire accident. Gupta cancelled his Paris couture show in July but went on to dress singer Adele. Designer-artist Amit Aggarwal elevated his couture in ways that need an engineer, art critic, a recycling scientist and a fashion savant to unpack it. Book critic Somak Ghoshal profiles Aggarwal in this edition without the trappings of a fashion writer in awe.

Designer duo Shivan and Narresh mark 15 years as the haute boys of Indian fashion. We chase their business surge in Tier 2 towns in Love, Sex and Surat.

Stylist and influencer Anaita Shroff Adajania left everyone behind in her genre of work, garnering the year’s fattest assignments to become the power stylist of the year. Bollywood’s star kids drove us nuts again over nepotism while Kangana Ranaut became an elected member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra wore long hair and rested her handloom saris for salwar kurtas. Sonam Kapoor Ahuja became Dior’s first Indian brand ambassador. PETA’s Natasha Garnier stormed the Dior runway protesting against exotic skins for fashion. Hurray to her.

Power Politics

Fashion’s (positive) bias for royalty resurged in India as some members of erstwhile royal families showed up for art, culture and fashion wrapped in flashy titular glory pushed by good PR. Some magazines bowed, more to their influence than work. I have reported a piece on Fashion’s Royalty Bias to understand why fashion loves royals so much while there is barely a story about Dalit designers. Photographer Asha Thadani’s photo essay on the Banjara women of Telangana is another bridge to the forgotten. Attired in heavy nomadic garments and head-to-toe accessories, these marginalised women who work in stone quarries are on the fringes even of the informal labour economy.

Year of Textile Art

Giant leaps of curatorial evolution took place in terms of multi-disciplinary explorations of textile, thread, fibre, yarn and fabric as art. The representative story of this renaissance is a profile of Chennai gallerist Sharan Apparao in this edition.

It would be remiss to not mention the litany of socio-cultural symbolisms that the wedding of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant offered to bloggers, cultural commentators, fashion and jewellery designers, choreographers, scenographers, chefs and performing artists.

Our year end edition titled Provocations 2024 is an attempt to bring you some thoughts plucked from the many above—each chosen for its provocative prism.

Fashion’s growing power—outside its own sake—was most noticeable this year.

Bye, For Now

With so much in the boiler room, how does one make sense of fashion?

This bewilderment of sorts is among the reasons, I am taking time away from my job to rediscover fashion’s fabulousness by hitting pause on my work as full-time editor-in-chief of The Voice of Fashion. It has been seven and half years at this incredible, career-changing opportunity.

As the co-founder of this platform with business head Jaspreet Chandok, going on to be its core ideator, I found myself married to TVOF. Laurie Paul, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of the profoundly provocative book Transformative Experience compared marriage to a textile, in an interview to The New Yorker talking about her divorce after 22 years of marriage. Her identity, Paul said, “had become so tightly woven together with that of her spouse that the individual stitches were no longer detectable.” I could well borrow that analogy to say I want to identify threads that are about me, without the designation of TVOF editor. It fits the quest narrative pattern of my work life.

And as life gurus teach us—I am a fan of British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ views on conversion—you only understand how the change changed you once you make the change. Everything before that is a study in blind optimism.

Our brilliant team which infuses daily meaning and energy to this platform, led by managing editor Snigdha Ahuja, will continue to give voice and echo to diverse stories that our readers find only on The Voice of Fashion.