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Unless you pull your blanket over your head when your wake up and keep it on all day, you will have noticed that Lakme Fashion Week was on till Saturday. Even without wardrobe malfunctions, the event consumed enough newsprint to keep a hungry Godzilla happy. Disproportionate attention,you would think, for something that affects a miniscule part of our population. Or does it?

Fashion shows make us think automatically of haute couture, which is a rarefied commodity. But couture is what we do not really have; what we have is prêt and something that’s between prêt and couture. All this has evolved through trial and error in response to market forces, which is as it should be. The next step would be for prêt lines to be made available in retail chains, which will happen sooner than later. That’s when fashion, generally an easy target for mockery, will begin to serve two important social functions: first by generating large scale employment. And second, smartening us up.

Go to Milan to see this first hand: the average man (and especially, woman) on the street is unarguablybetter dressed than the average man or woman elsewhere. Not just that, a sense of aesthetics, possibly fashion driven, pervades much of Milanese life, and you see the effect of this everywhere: better signage, better buildings, better shop window displays.. Heaven knows we could do with a bit of sprucing up ourselves, on our streets, our shop fronts and of course, ourselves.

This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, because although only a minority of Indians will be able to afford even multi-outlet prêt, there is nothing that our friendly neighbourhooddarzicannot duplicate, thus waving a magic Wanda on many a Sandra from Bandra.

But who is our fashion addressed to?

Indian writing in English has largely resolved a similar dilemma starting with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children. Rushdie’s content was Indian, not exoticised Indian. His language was a playful inventive English that used and subverted the style and syntax of the original language. His narrative had universal appeal. Thus he and a whole host of subsequent writers were able to find readers both in India and abroad. However, their job was made easier because the Indian readership they addressed was a minority and already internationalised.

But fashion, like Indian cinema, faces a more difficult problem, because every Indian wants to watch a movie and every Indian needs to wear clothes. An Indian film, unlike an Indian novel, thus has to follow its own idiom, alien to a western audience. The clamour from many Indian designers during previous fashion weeks has been to invite foreign buyersand fashion writers. And what has been the consensus among these foreigners? That when it comes to clothes, Indian designers have such a wonderful heritage so why do they need to look anywhere else for inspiration? In other words, we have embroidery and embellishment, zari and zardosi, texture and textiles.

That’s when you come up against problem no.1. “But we are designers,” say our designers. “We want to be inventive and cutting edge! As it is, our most ubiquitous form of clothing lends itself to design, not designers. With a sari, you can change content, not form.

Problem no.2 has to do with the customer. The modern Indian woman, the one most likely to go to fashion shows and seek out designers, wants ‘western’ clothes. The precise area, the foreign buyer and fashion writer is asking the Indian designer to abandon. So what does the designer do? Does he resolve this dilemma by doing what Bollywood does, which is to focus on its core audience i.e.,the designer has to continue being Yash Chopra, while hoping that occasionally he can be Mira Nair.

Tough questions to grapple with, but luckily not for me. The only onesI have to think about go like this: If everyone wants to sit in the first row, why not get the ramp to snake around the audience and only have front row seats? If female models walk crossing one leg across the other, why do male models walk straight? And why do all models look so grim? Are they all made to wear shoes one size too small?