As an editor who writes about six articles a month (the phew emoji here please), and is constantly on a carousel of expressive words and phrases framed to form a semiotic language, I find myself impaled on the idea of the “six”. In plain fact, six is the age of The Voice of Fashion, launched in 2018 as an independent digital platform, with a “voice” to decode and lead conversations around fashion. But not just fashion. 

(L-R:) Ravi Shashtri when he hit six sixes at the Ranji Trophy in 1985; The ‘Iconic’ cricket jumper by Polo Ralph Lauren.

When I began worrying about how to dress up “six”, it was the sixer that kept throwing darts at me. The sixer, delightfully, is a plural word. It defines a leader of six in a pack of brownie scouts in the Girls Guide Movement, in Britain and several other countries. The sixer in cricket, is hardly just about scoring six runs, it is, as sports writer Sharda Ugra writes in a column in this issue, “a rave party” it owns oomph like nothing else. There are Tamil and Kannada films titled Sixer (I have seen neither); it is also the name of a TV series released in 2022, about a ragtag group of cricket enthusiasts. There is a Sixer club soda, a Sixer lager beer, and a Sixer lemon drink. 

At The Voice of Fashion office, when we saw the photographs taken for the cover story featuring the sculptural work of designer Rimzim Dadu, the one you actually see on the cover on model Rikee Chatterjee on the escalator at Delhi’s Nehru Place metro station threw a ball at us. It is a moment alright, there is no saying if the escalator is going up or down. 

Stepping Up, Covering Ground, the cover line came up when that escalator was paused (for the shoot) to cheer the moment as well as contemplate six years. 

Model Rikee Chatterjee in metal dhoti pants with drape by Rimzim Dadu.

Adil Hasan for The Voice of Fashion

The special edition, now also our annual print x digital issue is a Six Sets of Six matrix. It has six big ideas, each has a few articles under it. Most single pagers focus on the number “six” to devise a format—phrases we un-liked, shoes that fell off balance, films that reset the feminist discourse, brands we are rooting for, TV shows that should be called back…

Ask correspondent Unnati Saini for her favourite “worst” phrase of the year and her laughter will lift your spirit at least six times. 

The math of six doesn’t matter you may argue. Rishabh Batra, our junior photo coordinator may agree, he has never counted so many photographs that must be brought down to a final six. 

An archival photo from Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla’s book ‘India Fantastique.’

But indulge me for a moment. Six matters as a six- sided polygon which makes hexagon—a non-self-intersecting geometric form. See the complexity a number offers? 

This edition is almost a non-intersecting mix of the popular with the unusual (like TVOF’s DNA). Six Home Objects from the Northeast of India by Parismita Singh, author, artist and creator from Assam, among our first ever columnists, leads that list. That and Snigdha Ahuja’s delicate framing of Rimzim Dadu’s resonance and relevance offsets popular stories where Jaipur As India’s Hottest Live Location sits alongside 39 Years of Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla’s chikankari. A profile of crafts connector and curator Lavina Baldota dispatched from Hospet-Hampi turns another direction. 

James Ferreira, a part of the Collector’s Confidential series.

Meetesh Taneja for The Voice of Fashion

We often claim that TVOF print issues are “collector’s editions”. In house, this is taken literally. As through the year, now and then, we keep seeking out private collectors and their collections—art, craft, jewellery, textiles, tales even. Anannya Sarkar has collected the collections for this edition, do turn the pages to see what sets a collector apart from a regular browser and buyer. 

I will leave it to you to decide if this edition has the bounce and brazenness of a sixer or not. 

Until the seven-year itch then?