What is Fashion really about?

My journey into Fashion began at age 20, after I completed my degree in Commerce aka B.com.

Commerce was something I did against my will, lol. Like many kids.

So, for the fellow Indians reading this.. you might remember the buzz that surrounds you when you are fifteen years old and school is about to come to an end. All of a sudden you have 3 main things EVERYONE around you is talking about- Arts, Commerce and Science.

Well, my eye was on Arts the whole time; so much so, that I had even decided what I wanted to pick in my electives to graduate in, in the final year.. and it was Literature. I did get a seat into a college called Mithibai, but it was revoked on my mother's request when she found out that I had secured a seat in another college through in-house quota for Commerce. Something I was not expecting, given my score of 74.80 percent.

So, my mother and I basically went to the college and spoke to the Principal, requested a cancellation of seat, they released and handed over my documents and we went to this place called M.L Dahanukar college of commerce and we got my admission registered & finalized for B.com, instead. After we got home, I did cry the whole day like any 16 year old girl would.

But it took me a couple of years to understand that it was meant to be & it was the perfect thing for me to study in my teenage.

The first time I had measurable proof of it being a good thing that happened to me, was when in my first fashion job, being the eager fresher that I was, I took out a few files and learnt the specific technique and table that my company used for costing before sending a quotation to the client. Fashion is a very serious business that involves serious number-work after all.

I was in a team of two in my first job, consisting of just my senior and I. She didn't ask me to, but I learnt it all by myself during one of the lunch breaks. I was not supposed to... because I was not assigned that part of the job yet, since it had just been 3 months since I had joined. But I had a lot of fun being ahead and being in a learning curve of my own. Something I unknowingly ended up doing in each place I worked at.

Anyway...I completed my Commerce degree in 2015 & had a gap year to figure things out and let myself be excused from family's expectations of my life path. I prepared for the entrance exam at Pearl Academy, gave my interview & bagged a seat along with a scholarship.

Pearl was amazing. It was the best thing that happened to me in my life.

One pleasant surprise I had very early on, was that, almost everyone who had enrolled had to fight their families to get there. Because Fashion and Art is usually not very respected in India as a career choice and it is also heavily misunderstood here. There it was, first bonding point, before we had many others to share.

As a PGFD student (Post Graduate Fashion Diploma) ... you are given pretty much the same curriculum as Under Grads, to study.. but a lot of it is self study too, and the deadlines are much shorter than what is given to Under Grad students. I was not the most punctual student. Nor did I complete all assignments. But what I can tell you for sure is that I was a very fragile kid at the time. Lol. If you were in my cohort, you know what I'm talking about :p

In my personal experience, Pearl for me was a space that allowed me to be me. It was a relatively non-judgmental environment.

It was an institute that showed me how to think. How to think about Design and life at large too.

It was a place where I felt safe being myself. It was a place that had a library that wasn't any different than being in some sort of magical wonderland. Access to Vogue archives, Vintage comics, Biochemistry and it's merger with design, the world of retail, coffee table books about legendary Designers and huuuge heavy books on art history... I think it's fair to say, we pretty much had it all.

Two years of Fashion school is definitely not the only time you study Fashion.

When you are a professional who has real undying love for Design and Fashion, you are a student for life.

You may not be part of a fun and lively classroom and your work may not be cattily commented on and graded by your fashion school teachers, but the learning never really stops.

It can't.

Fashion is ever evolving and ever changing in it's nature.

As I have journeyed from being a fashion school aspirant to a fashion school student to a fresher in the industry, to someone who has been a fashion professional for some years now.. just in this duration itself, the industry has been through many changes.

I also find myself very lucky to be in the batch of people in the world who worked in the midst of, and lived through the Covid-19 pandemic. And I say lucky because it is impossible for any industry to remain the same after it has endured a world wide crisis. And to get to witness huge shifts on a global scale, is a rarity.

2018 was my first year of work. I applied for my job through the campus recruitments online portal. I did it while seated in one of the most relaxing places in Pearl... our canteen, lol.

I went for my interview for it weeks later, and got the job and started working there by June.

The usual scenery one imagines is; a central force of an iconic figure that we assist and on whose whims we scurry around, with a lot of workload in the office. [That is a very simplistic view on a fashion job which most people have. I was a girl who grew up watching That's So Raven and America's Next Top Model, so don't worry, I had the same preconceived notion too, before I did many internships during college and learnt there is a lot more to what working in Fashion is about.]

In India that reality exists, but another one exists too.

We are a country of massive amounts of people in need of employment and a country that has passed down many crafts, generation after generation.

That includes hand embroidery.

We have a massive work force of (mainly) men that work as hand embroiderers.

So, the very first job that I had, which I secured through campus placements, was with a B2B company...it was an embroidery export business. Exporting luxury hand embroidery work to Fashion companies outside of India. The clients ranged from modern Designers like Thom Browne, to Legacy-status Design houses like Versace, and the orders ranged from Fashion show pieces, to seasonal collection pieces, to one-off pieces like celebrity orders for red carpet and on-stage performances.

It was a company that offered luxury hand embroidery as well as finished product services. Needless to say the finished products were also products that included hand embroidery work on them.

There are many such companies spread across India.

The one I worked my first job in, had a slightly different approach. The Designer over there is responsible for every step of the process. You start the creation of it and you carry it over from department to department, until the very last one, where it is finally weighed and packed and shipped.

I was told by my senior that "It is hectic over here but once you have worked here, every other job will be easy for you". And those words of hers, turned out to be prophetic.

I was indeed handed the most difficult one in the beginning, by the universe.

I really love my first workplace a lot, even though I stuck out like a sore thumb over there. It taught me a huge number of things, including what it feels like to get cornered by office politics and to get fired. Lol.

Although I did have a kind soul who treated me to French fries (that were gourmet AF) and ice cream at night, after office, on the day I got fired....so it was alright.

But... it was just my first job... and I was 24 years old... and I had no idea what was about to come for me in the following years. Lol.

That's a gif of dementors, yes. :)

It did take a while to land my next job, but I left that company in a very short period of time and funnily enough I was hired by them again in 2021. I didn't think they would take me in again, after their experience with me in 2019 but this was not about luck or having charm during an interview. This was about still being under five years in your career and being considered a lesser expense for the company. Something I realized later on as I grew older. This was a company that I really admired when I was fresh out of the college because my thought process at the time as someone who had just graduated from Pearl was: "How nice of them that they believe in us freshers and want to give us a chance" .. jokes on the rose tinted glasses my 23 year old self wore. Lol.

There is this moment.... in a famous TV series. I'm going to share it with you.

If you have worked your ass off in a fashion company as a fresher, this will resonate. And you will HATE IT.

- from the TV show Mad Men. And yes, the woman who's complaining owns a fashion and lifestyle products department store in the show.

As someone who has worked for "practically nothing" and paid for many of her bills and expenses through that "nothing" in her early to mid twenties.. I do have to say as far as I am concerned, it isn't all for nothing if you have been paying attention all along.

Fashion and Design aside, as a human being I believe the greatest currency is attention. Whether it is your own that you work on making sharper or of others that you manage to gather.

It's true when we start out, we don't get paid a fair amount and in many industries, not just fashion, you remain ruthlessly underpaid in the name of experience and exposure being the trade off.

But what made my experience an enjoyable one was to read between the lines and hear what it isn't being said. Because a lot of that exists, as long as you work with other people. I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre. Hell is other people :P

I found myself repeatedly acting in the same patterns wherever I worked & whoever I worked with.

I found myself setting up systems, where systems didn't exist but needed to.

I found myself leaving things better than they were found, so when the person who comes after me, finds some ease in what they do.

I picked out on many flaws that were seemingly inevitable in companies because of the sheer volume of work and the pace of it. But do I believe they were unavoidable? Definitely not. There were many disadvantageous things and work flows that I came across that were not just avoidable, but also unnecessary to put up with and to consider normal/acceptable.

I'm talking about things like:

• Inventory that was grossly mismanaged. A huge amount of raw materials belonging to the company not being maintained systematically or accounted for.

• Meetings being repeatedly called upon for the same topic of discussion; not to finalize and make further progress but to digress and pull all the five people in the meeting blissfully back to square one, with three of the people in the meeting leaving the room with a level of air-headedness and oblivion that was truly unmatched.

• The CEO and HR using up two hours (!!) of their time on a Friday to pit two younger employees against each other and make that a "meeting" for their entertainment. Unsurprisingly, these are grown women in positions of authority, I am talking about.

• Unprofessional Marketing executives that override Design decisions and overlap the meaning of Design and Marketing. In Fashion companies, these two can be interdependent functions. Sometimes the lack of good design is made up for, with great marketing and sometimes great design needs tweaking as per directives from Marketing. They are interdependent in their functioning but must remain independent in their process.

• Elderly (read: age late 80's) men working for high prestige places like Hermès, having unexpected fixations like an addiction to gossip (lol?) and having power struggles and ego struggles with young female designers that work alongside him.

• The list can be long but I'll wrap it up with the worst one: Being openly abusive with employees and making them sign an NDA to release their FNF payment. (And yes, I am that employee, lol.)

Sometimes it's a circus out there, truly. But that is not what Fashion is about.

As with any creative industry... (if you have the choice to fly solo) you may choose to focus largely on the craft or you may choose to focus largely on the industry and the people that it consists of.

In my personal experience with being employed, a pattern I found within myself, was that I kept switching my jobs.

At the time... many of my peers were of the opinion that I was doing it for bumping up my salary but that was not the case. It is not easy to bump up your salary by frequent job switches in Fashion because you get paid peanuts even when it is bumped up, lol.

I was never after money. I was offered a huge amount in 2022 which I couldn't follow up with because I couldn't leave my current company at the time. The work was very time sensitive in nature and I didn't feel like leaving and switching at that time.

What I really was after, was a sense of creative fulfilment and purpose. I was told by everyone that you won't find fulfilment in a job.

Over my seven years of going from company to company in search of meaning and fulfilment.. I did learn a huge number of things.. about people, about systems, about my craft.

But I didn't find any role or pattern of working that quite hit the spot for me...

I didn't enjoy a nine to five thing because of the monotony that comes with it.

I didn't enjoy freelancing as much either, because it isn't always as freeing as it can appear to be.

Earlier in this blogpost when I mentioned that I consider myself lucky to live through Covid, one of the main reasons why I like the fact that I lived through it was because I got to witness firsthand what supply chain shortcomings can look like. How damaging it can be to have too many touchpoints to make something as simple as a basic handbag *yawn*.

I'm also happy that I got to live through the transition of entire belief systems shifting from a perspective of the need of working together to working from home. And the best and my most favourite one yet - solopreneurship. (Although this has obviously existed before the pandemic too, the difference being that post-pandemic solopreneurship has a digital and technological upper hand compared to what existed in the world, before.)

By definition what solopreneurship means : is to start and run a business alone, without employees or partners, handling all aspects from conception to completion.

Now... it wasn't something that I always wanted to do.

It took me a while to realize and conclude upon this being my path.. being the most effective for me and in alignment with me.

When you are talented and intelligent, and have had a broad range of life experiences and work experience.... people will have a tendency to look at you as a short cut to benefit from.

So yes, I did have to dodge a few ill-intentioned people who claimed wanting to work with me or help me for my good. But I am quite adept at saying good bye and leaving nasty situations, so I was my own knight in shining armor from the social climbers I came across in my life, lol.

Fashion is not about glam and status.

As Kiki Astor once said:

"The obsession with status, that's just another form of poverty"

She's brilliant for saying that and I second it.

So, what is Fashion really about?

Is it just clothes?... Definitely not? The eyewear you use to protect your eyes, the insanely huge number of hues and patterns and tools available for perfecting and polishing a body part as tiny as nails, the socks beneath your shoes, the clips on your hair, the decision to leave your coat worn fully or just draped over your shoulder, the silhouette of your hair, the tattoos and piercings on your body, the faking of a tan or the faking of a freckled face, the decision to iron your cloth or to leave it crinkled, the decision to hem your pants or to leave them frayed, the choice to button up or button down.. all of it is Fashion.

It is your second skin. It is also Psychology. It is also reflective and representative of not just the climate you live in but also of the political climate you live in, and of the economic conditions of your time.

But if you ask me, being a Designer.. what can Fashion be for a Designer from a Designer's point of view?

In my opinion , for the wearer, it can be a super power that you can have without being a super hero.

In my creations I have constantly strived for authentic expression of my personal interpretations.

To me, Fashion should be about novelty.

It should be something new even in the face of the reality that everything that can possibly be created has already been created.

[But here's the catch.

YOU were not created before. If you are a fellow Designer who is reading this, from one Designer to another, I need you to understand there was no YOU before you were born.]

How we think as an individual, differs largely from the collective voice if we are brave enough and patient enough to tune into our inner world and maintain the ability to follow our own voice.

At Studio Nandita, my dream, is not just to be a Designer & Artist, but to also be a time bender.

In my solo practice.. it's not just the itch to create something new for people to wear, but it is also about how they feel when they wear it.

And when I say "time bender"... what I mean is..

how can I honour the traditions of the past, remain relevant to the present, while still shaping a vision for what the future can hold.

All good fashion... is time bending in it's nature.

We have been through the 1960's where the need to create futuristic space age looking clothing was popular, we have been through the early 2000's where technology and it's arrival inspired fashion to a great extent, and fashion being cyclical in it's nature, we had been witnessing a revival of the Y2K aesthetic, not too long ago.

So what is Fashion really about?

Fashion can be many things and at the same time, it can be something as simple as where the pleats on your saree or skirt, are. Or the world of a difference sometimes something as small as a centimeter or a millimeter can make, while you are in the process of creation.

At Studio Nandita, apart from wanting to be a time bender with my designs, another thing I would really like to be, is a hope giver.

The giver of hope that great design can be accessible.

And it can come from a place as simple and yet as complex, as a small business owner on Instagram.

Thank you for reading!!