Why exactly does the Indian fashion industry love Rohit Bal? Why do several cohorts of clients, celebs, PR executives, media, students and models get charged by his mention? Those who have beheld him, those who clamour for selfies with him, but even those who have only seen him in photos. 

Is it just because of his Couture First creations that bloom with beautiful blooms? Ivories and blacks, peacocks, lotuses and roses stitched into evocative garments that cover up men and women, zipping up bodies with fabric so that sexiness may emerge at its own terms instead of through an obvious language of revealed skin. 

That would be a simplification. 

The lineup from ‘Kaynaat’ featuring roses, lotuses and peacocks as motifs.

For this is a man who smiles with his crinkling green-blue eyes at everyone, but doesn’t easily make friends. Who has seldom shied away for his limited tolerance for fashion’s fools. Who has muted and edited his relationship with the media. Who lived in a perpetually no-reply zone after he was done with intrusive tabloids. Who chooses his appearances selectively, often more emotionally guided than strategic. Whose love for male models may be the stuff of scandal but his love for his close friends is legendary. Who has happily kissed controversy, sent out men wearing sindoor and chagrin, who dances on the runway making love to fame and glamour.

We can’t just be clapping and crying for Rohit Bal just because he was gravely ill a short while back, right? Now that he has risen from that close collision with mortality to return, dance and laugh on the runway yet again, might he be reminding us of what keeps fashion in fashion? 

Flowing pleated gowns and long jackets on display.

Rohit Bal Returns with Reminders

‘Kaynaat: A Bloom in The Universe’, Bal’s finale for the House of Lakmé, that closed the October 2024 edition of Lakmē Fashion Week x FDCI, at Delhi’s Imperial hotel was a climax of long-simmering sentiments. For the designer himself who had been seriously ailing, for fashion (particularly in India) that embodies a cauldron of emotions and not just materials, muses, trends, celebrities and sponsors. For the fraternity which jostles through toil and tinsel, cancelling each other at times. Clearly, it holds together through tragic interruptions in its march past. That’s what this finale showed. 

Tears of joy clambered up on the ramp as the October moon looked on and Bal beckoned those who love him. Audiences, in hundreds, clapped for fashion’s “Gudda” as he was helped up on the ramp, smiling through his fragility, waving with his ever so infectious cheer. Even if Bal were to repeat another such feat, this will go down as a never before, never after moment. 

Ananya Panday‘s gait and presence highlighted the “now” connecting us to Bal’s “then”.

Ananya Panday wears an embellished lehenga.

The night at Imperial on Sunday the 13th of October, as the moon played hide and seek through phone cameras while a moonlit sky, with one shuttered window was projected through lighting design and a ponderous violin by artist Madina played before the show started, was emblematic. Tears came easy for those blessed enough to shed them, because the fraternity applauded its own hopes as much as those for the designer, his talent, his significance to the industry, perhaps also his early years of rebelliousness and transparency about same-sex love. A standing up for self and life. 

Showstopper Ananya Panday, the face of Lakmē x Rohit Bal Rouge Bloom beauty range, may not have been wearing the most flattering of Bal’s costumes (some pieces were indeed multi-coloured and excessively embellished), she held the daintiness of his couture like a rose. Her gait and presence highlighted the “now” connecting us to Bal’s “then”. As did a long line of dandy male and lithe female models, some from the yesteryears, all in love with Bal and the buzz he generates. They balanced velvet and zardozi, flowing gowns pleated out of hundreds of metres of mulmul, indulgently gathered anarkalis in the colours of a full moon as well as of midnight. Long jackets slit high on the sides, kurta sets for men and women, decorative Kashmiri topis (perhaps also inspired from different regional interpretations), red roses, lives of leaves, and deer prancing on some ensembles. 

Velvet and zardozi embroidered jackets for men.

Nothing new when it comes to Rohit Bal couture. But wasn’t that the whole point of the show, to show Bal through a nostalgic prism? 

It may be the right time also to point out how Bal has always styled his models in reams of fabric and decorative confinement. His messaging has been about gender (not biological sex) and the body. Astoundingly, despite covering up the human form almost head to toe, he opened the idea of sexual fantasy for his viewers, where clothes were not a hurdle in an imagined sexiness, they were instead, a beauteous tool. 

Tears of joy clambered up on the ramp as the October moon looked on and Bal beckoned those who love him. 

Drawing from the ideas of American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag’s inquiry Illness as Metaphor, where she argues for a liberation out of the stereotypes of illness, it might be apt to analyse the response Bal got to his recovery as a wellness moment for Indian fashion. Which has often been slammed for its cultish lobbies, un-love and infights. The vulnerable tenacity of the designer, a metaphor for the fashion fraternity’s homing instinct may never get to be seen like this again. 

All is well.