The Voice of Fashion
If everything inventive is assigned the potential to be art, India might be at a cultural crossroads. Will this clamour last?
If you suspect that you have read this story before, yes, you have seen its cousins. The growing clamour towards art and art fairs, newly minted curators, gate-crashing collectors, style savants, Instagram authors and their simmering collisions with grimacing critics and established artists with long, reflective careers has been noticed. Is this another rant about art as India’s new luxury? Not entirely.
This story explores a taut premise: why does “everyone”, well rhetorically, want to be an artist? Why do so many people in creative urban professions, in fashion, crafts, textile renaissance, symbolic capitalism, content consultancy, entertainment, industrial prettification, rhetoric management and socialite worth, want to be seen at art fairs? Or worse, try their hand at art themselves, even if that sometimes means mounting a diaphanous textile to view the galaxy through it. Why must dilettantes call themselves curators unless they bring experience? Is it the economics of art or is it currently the most seductive positioning for social media notice?
Some of this reads cynical. It matches the satirising eye roll of ‘art as the new handbag’. After all, there is more to its romp.
Admirably, what fashion events could not achieve in two and more decades—true wokeness, tearing down incestuous clubs of celebrity showstoppers, collaborations beyond mapped territories—art seems to have found. The inclusion of audio, film, material diversity, embroidery, technology, poetry and performative art, parties with glamour on steroids, designers dressing artists, the Fanta of Insta trendiness—it’s a hard-to-resist bubble.
Naming festivals that have fuelled this surge is in order: the “sold out” India Art Fair in Delhi, the must-do, must-see heft of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the conversation-starter Art Mumbai, Goa’s Serendipity Arts Festival that marked its ninth year in 2024, Madras Art Weekend, Mumbai Gallery Weekend, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, NMACC’s Art House…some new, some old and others currently at the bottling plant. Many properties are border porous—they frame the South Asian identity (and perhaps its crises) through its curations. Clearly it is not just a glitzy ball without commercial promise, trends can be suicidal.
But, are we shooting stars?
“This is not about the Emperor’s New Clothes. It is about the country’s growing economy, bigger better lifestyles, bigger better exposures, conversions towards aesthetic choices, discernment, awareness…it is only going to grow,” says Amit Gupta, founder and editor-in-chief of STIRworld, also a designer, curator and entrepreneur. Gupta cites the example of the recently held and first of its kind Architecture & Design Film Festival, organised this January by STIR at NCPA in Mumbai. Strictly ticketed, the festival had no VIP passes or special invitations and was attended by 7,400 people. There were film screenings and panels, stirring, quite literally dialogues from a new order. “People are looking for something disruptive,” says Gupta. He talks about the growing nuances of creating and appreciating craft, good pedagogy in India’s art schools and changing technologies of expression.
Art Doesn’t Wear Fashion’s Handcuffs
A majority see this as an exciting cultural movement. Especially when compared with fashion which still reels with Bollywood showstoppers, front row politics, mired in the maze of paid influencers, finally ending up at the altar of bridal couture.
“There is more freedom in art than in clothing, I can express myself better. Fashion is about people pleasing, art is more inclusive,” says Delhi-based designer Jenjum Gadi who made his foray into art last August. Gadi chose brass as his medium to create fruits and vegetables, as memoirs in art from his mother’s garden in Arunachal Pradesh. As a fashion designer, he had been interpreting textiles from his home state and this is another way, he says, to argue for that identity.
Bridging voices from unfamiliar territories like at the Young Collectors’ Programme at India Art Fair, building music art like at Serendipity Arts Festival, consciously adding climate related and resistance stories like at Royal Enfield’s ‘Journeying Across The Himalayas’ has stretched the canvas. Jigmat Norbu of Ladakh-based Jigmat Couture sees it as a paradigm shift. “Indigenous craft and textiles and slow fashion as art have opened up individual storytelling. It has given Ladakhi artists a platform; who were formerly only represented by a few NGOs,” says Norbu. He now displays some of his art-textiles in the “art category” in his gallery in Ladakh; works priced above ₹1.5 lakh.
In this hungry country, if art is the new fashion, it doesn’t need the Louis Vuitton logo.
Art Doesn’t Need Louis Vuitton, it has Kiran Nadar
The clamour is also an outcome of optimism in Indian cultural life. Collective enchantment is possibly moving beyond cinema, film actors, airport looks, cricket and drum beating about global luxury. In this hungry country, if art is the new fashion, it doesn’t need the Louis Vuitton logo. Here, collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar is a logo. Metaphorically, too.
“It is a beautiful incubation of the divergence of interest. Formerly those with artistic or fashion design ambitions were not enabled unless they came from privileged backgrounds. But the art community opened its doors towards contemporary ideas instead of established family backgrounds,” says Nimish Shah, founder of fashion label Shift, who was creative director at Bhaane. He appreciates the fact that art and sculpture can be admired by those who are not artistically minded or have critical standpoints. In 2019, helmed by Shah, the label Bhaane, which he calls a community of creatives, walked this “bridge” that he says India Art Fair opened. Bhaane was among the early brood of young fashion brands that participated at the fair. It wasn’t about fashion—he sees it as a parallel but evolutionary shift.
How You Wear It, Not What You Wear
Fashion week audiences in fact, might want to lift some style tips from Art Style Hangout Fashion. No longer about the coolest boots worn with high saris but about fluid men’s skirts, banana fibre dhotis, blouses made from acrylic yarn and vegan bags. About styling an attitude.
Raw Mango founder and designer Sanjay Garg among the pioneers to “dress” the India Art Fair team in handloom saris and innovative textiles since almost a decade, as did Aneeth Arora for péro in the initial years (who has since stepped off the spin) gave art fair dressing a point of view. Garg’s annual party, which coincides every year with India Art Fair is also a driver of aspiration. He cooks a mean party—rose petals, folk performances, mad-fun dancing and culinary deliciousness. That’s not the only art party with fashionable insouciance. This year, art patron and collector Tarana Sawhney’s after-party with duct-taped bananas alluding to Maurizio Cattelan’s controversial ‘Comedian’ artwork and Duchamp urinals blew balloons of mentions.
Wribhu Borphukon, who heads the Young Collectors’ Programme at India Art Fair says that extending the disciplinary reach of the programme has widened the perspective. “There are dedicated spaces for politics and aesthetics, for visibilisation of disciplines outside mainstream art,” he says. This year, collaborations included Boruphukan’s Bodies, an intimate exhibition looking at representation of bodies intersecting through histories, politics, and material.
Like Gupta of STIR, Borphukan as well as Shah don’t see this trend as ‘instant gratification’. “Cultural moments are not just trendy. Groups may shift and there will be some fatigue, some questions will be raised but I don’t think these conversations and partnerships are knee-jerk,” says Shah. Whereas Gupta, when asked for a comparison with fashion weeks, says they lack disruption. “There has been zero audience development and little attempt to break the mould, unlike art,” he says. Borphukan feels that long term commitment will need courage and persistence leading to lucrative businesses.
Admirably, what fashion events could not achieve in two and more decades—art seems to have found.
Art is Penance, Not Magic
But let’s not get ahead of contradictory arguments. “I believe in the inclusivity of art beyond the view that only those who went to art school are artists. But too much media and social media leads some people to look at art as fashion. There is glamour and there is money and intellect of course. It makes people attracted to art,” says applauded artist Mithu Sen. She agrees that among the positives behind this rush is the growing cultural capital of the country. “But I might be a little sceptical of mid-career professionals from other fields transitioning into art with assistants to complete their work. After all, becoming an artist is not a miracle or magic. It is a long, hard journey,” she says. “Art is about one unique thing. It is not a factory of creativity, else it will lead to superficial sophistication at the cost of depth and meaning,” she adds.
Sen is gentle in her concerns about the cross-overs from other disciplines and the emergence of industrial houses showing interest in art because of glamour and profit. She likens artistic practice to that of a Zen monk’s penance—who take years to draw ‘Enso’ circles—open, incomplete circles created with a single brushstroke, symbolising enlightenment, the interconnectedness of all things and the concept of ‘emptiness’. This boom, she says, reminds her of the spike during the mid-2000s, when art galleries began to mushroom, exhibition “openings” were noted as success on Page 3 and art agents moved into the mix.
Bhavna Kakar-Saxena founder and director of Latitude 28 and editor and publisher of TAKE on art magazine, has similar echoes. “The notion that everything is art and everyone is an artist has gained traction but like many movements, this feels more like a market-driven trend, than a fundamental shift in practice,” says Kakar. “We have seen this before in the art boom of the mid-2000s when hastily produced works commanded staggering prices and the rise of artists often positioned as celebrities, where branding and visibility began to overshadow substance,” she adds. Kakkar says the recently concluded India Art Fair was a telling example. “Nearly 40 per cent of the space was dedicated to design which did not always receive the most favourable response.” She doesn’t want to take away from the worthiness of fashion and design objects but, like Sen, argues that “the artist’s lifelong commitment to their craft is vastly different from those who shift between merchandise, fashion and design while also being positioned as “artists”.
Sen must have the last word here. “Being smart, or knowing what to say, how to caption social media photos is not a mandate for the artist. Art is not ephemeral.”
