The Voice of Fashion
Short Term Memory
The Voice of Fashion is one year old. The inside-outside story of India’s first and only dedicated digital magazine on fashion and design
Last year on the 24th of July, The Voice of Fashion went into business. Of being seen, heard and read. Exactly a week after, I left for my annual holiday. I had been working on the platform for a year before, my trip had long been booked but the launch was mildly delayed beyond its set date. My bosses at IMG Reliance agreed to my two-week holiday on the condition that I would manage it from wherever I was. I was on a road trip in Europe. Yet each time I would find a Wi-Fi connection, I would compulsively look at my phone for emails, messages from the team and at the website itself. Log kya kahenge (what would people say) if something goes wrong. Log kya sochenge (what would people think) if something didn’t work. It wasn’t exactly registering in my brain on edge that very few readers or log (people) may even be looking at TVOF in its initial days except perhaps a few dozens in the fashion industry.
The naysayers were restless anyway: “It will soon turn into a mouthpiece for Reliance brands.” Or, “They will only write about Lakmé Fashion Week (LFW).” In fact, last year, I was repeatedly asked if we would “also cover the FDCI (Fashion Design Council of India) fashion week.”
One year later, as I am packing my bags again for my annual holiday, I can’t wait to turn my vacation responder on. The Voice of Fashion now has half a million unique visitors every month, 23.9K followers on Instagram and we published more than 950 content pieces—videos included. Social media only specials were additional. The strategic absence of advertising makes ours an objectively curated platform on fashion and that includes shopping guides that appear every Saturday under Real Shop. No advertiser tells us to plug their bags or shoes.
Among our benefactors who are our primary partners, are leaders of brands and design houses who have had the largesse to support independent writing, without demanding plugs. The business head of TVOF (yes folks, it is not VOF as many of you still call it), does not ask for news lists. Based on rigorous fact checks and as many personally collected reports as possible, TVOF could break through the clutter by choosing subjects that are not fashion formulaic, that don’t flutter inside the clichés of fashion journalism—Bollywood, airport looks, black is the new black score card, or what someone hilariously called the Taimur Ali Khan beat.
Photo: Shruti Sitara Singh
A tribal artisan from a village in Tripura weaves on a loin loom.
There is plenty of entertaining content on our website (and we write about film and fashion too) but you may be surprised to know that the maximum traffic to our site is driven by Fabric of India stories—a complex yet fun matrix of crafts, yarns, fabrics, textiles, art and artists that live and work at the intersections of cultural livelihoods in different regions of India.
“Intersections” the section itself is another reader puller, where nothing is exactly fashion, yet everything dances on its cusp.
Brilliant columnists, contributing artists, journalists who gave us stories that did not live in the fashion journalism landscape before this and the hunger of the TVOF team to chase the difficult, helped subvert the formula. We are “the voice of fashion” and thus our ambit goes beyond the daily diary of the Indian fashion industry and its designers.
Photo: Illustration by Alpana Mittal
‘The Unfashionable Truth’, published as part of designer-artist Alpana Mittal’s illustrative column Hashpress.
We will continue to include stories outside the pretty, cool-hot hangover of fashion writing. Including investigations and objective reviews. Not everything is going to get a few thousand likes. But if it is relevant to Indian fashion, you will find it on TVOF.
This first anniversary edition that rolls out for all six days this week starting today is created under the theme of Short Term Memory. After all, we are just one year old, plus the short, moth-like life of fashion’s highs and lows is its biggest truism. We invited our regular columnists and contributors to ideate along the lines of their fashion moment of the year—July to July. Something that spiked, boomed, zoomed or collapsed and burnt out but hit their radars.
From Tiktok and The Cult of Small Town Fandom to a probing piece on why Camp and Outcamp is caught up with appearances instead of the erotics, to articles that trace the zoom of certain brands last year (Nykaa, Anita Dongre couture), ideas (Face Apps, why gender and product must be delinked after the reading down of Section 377), future fabrics, an Oh My God on Sabyasachi and other makers of bridal finery, plus wise words from the reticent designer Rajesh Pratap Singh and the wardrobe of 15-year-old Swedish girl Greta Thunberg, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, we have lots to show and tell. Also a welcome restart of Amruta Patil’s column Rasa Replete that had gone on a break.
Thank you for reading, for being the readership of different kinds of stories inside the fashion universe. For being the reader writers dream of.
