The Past, Present And Future Of The Indian Fashion Industry vogue.in

What was the industry like 20 years ago when I started out? It’s a question I get asked a lot. It was smaller, more nascent, but in a lot of ways it was formalised, like we see it now. The first stockist of my line of jackets and shirts was Amaya, a store started by Amrita Singh in Delhi’s Santushti Complex, and then Ogaan and Ensemble, where hanging on the racks with me were pieces by Suneet Verma, Ravi Bajaj (the pioneer of Indian fashion, Rohit Khosla, had passed by this time) and the designer whose aesthetic excited me the most—Shahab Durazi. He really went against the grain, and there was a quality to his clothing and strong tailoring that was unlike anything we had seen. His label gave me hope that the Indian market would extend beyond traditional wear and open up to other points of view.