New Delhi : Former MP Renuka Choudhary at Neeru Kumar’s show, textile guru Rta Kapur Chishti for the same, cultural maestro Rajeev Sethi at Rajesh Pratap Singh’s and MP Shashi Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar for Payal Jain’s show–gave photographers some reason to build up a front row reel at WIFW this season. Yesterday, even Maneka Gandhi came, to see a show where she had heard that clothes made from animal prints would be paraded. While Choudhary and Gandhi were surprise guests, why did the photographers go crazy upon seeing Sunanda Pushkar? They surrounded her frenzily, clearly starved for glamour. Sunanda looked good in that typical way of hers–peroxide hair, bangs and bling, a well-groomed lady who sat with poise, legs crossed, holding the right bag, wearing the right shoes. Last IPL season, we couldn’t stop chiding her, this season we have turned her into a diva. Can’t we make up our minds? Even she seemed uncomfortable with the attention that was more than what she would have envisioned. She sat a bit unsure, finding it hard to face up to the frantic flashbulbs.

CLUTTER AS ART

Installations, innovatively dressed mannequins, eco-friendly art, organised stalls, restaurants, bars, a dozen interesting ideas in decor and event props stand tall at WIFW this time. Joy Mitra’s installation with clay lanterns hung over a dress form, a mud coloured chunni, alerted attention to earthiness and meaning. It looked fab. Whereas Kolkata designer Kiran Uttam Ghosh, whose stall was full of Issey Miyake like pleated drapes with zippers and bling playing artful hide and seek got pieces of colourful paper strewn all over her stall floor. “Take one,” she insisted and I picked a flashy orange that seemed to have been first curled up into a ball and chucked on the floor. “You are All Cut Up”, it read. That was her theme: she had interestingly done razor cuts on some of her garments, slicing them up, creating patterns from a whimsy. The best part was you could curl up the piece of paper and throw it on the floor again. Nice. Only the sweeping assistant at the Week was confused. He would arrive every half an hour with a jhadu and attempt to sweep away the paper pieces. He was really cut up when told not to.

MANDANA ALERT

Model Mandana, an Iranian, who Express wrote about a few days back, doesn’t know how to walk the ramp. Stiff as a pole, with arms glued to her sides as if they had been tied there by a fittings tape, she walks in a manner that must leave her choreographers really embarrassed. She may have the face and the figure but spoils the show with her inelegant walk. On her, garments look listless and a reluctant clothes horse is a disservice to any designer.