Designer Masaba will have family reunion at next ramp show

Next time fashion designer Masaba Richards walks on to the ramp to acknowledge the applause after showing her clothesline, there’ll be a few special guests in the front row - her father, former West Indian cricketer Sir Vivian Alexander Richards and step-brother, cricketer Mali Richards.

The moment that she has been dreaming of right from the day she started going to school is finally going to come true. Sir Vivian has promised his daughter that he will come to India and cheer her from the first row right after the Twenty20 World Cup ends in West Indies this April.

Masaba says, “It will be a very emotional moment for me. Dad has promised me that he will be there when I am showing next. I always wanted both mom (Neena Gupta) and dad to be there on the front row but somehow it was not happening. But it will happen soon.”

The 22-year-old had made her debut at the recent fashion week this year. She says Sir Vivian had wanted to come to see his daughter on the ramp earlier but his cricketing assignments had prevented him from doing so.

“He would have come down (during the fashion week) but he was busy with his cricketing assignments. I told him that, nothing doing, I want him with me the next time and he said ‘yes’. He encouraged me when I had told him that I wanted to take up fashion designing over sports (Masaba was a state-level tennis player and a promising soccer player as well),” she says.

But there will be one more guest along with Sir Richards - his son West Indian cricketer Mali Richards who now plays first class cricket in England. “I am in regular touch with Mali and in fact, I am quite close to him. We regularly chat on the net. He has told me that he also wants to be there with his father,” says Masaba, admitting that she is not ‘so regular’ with the other members of her step family - Sir Vivian Richards’ wife Miriam and his daughter Matara (who stays in Toronto, Canada).