Why are there no retrospectives of Indian designers?

Mint

7 days ago

Designer Manish Malhotra ensured his return to India couture week after five years was a night to remember. His Couture Cocktail Evening on 26 July had all the ingredients of a memorable fashion party—flashy guests, a 10ft-tall eagle made of mirrors, video excerpts from Malhotra's past shows projected on the walls, a live DJ, a grazing table, and a 20-minute runway show closed by Brazilian supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio.
In a room across the hall, Malhotra had an interesting exhibit—mannequins displaying 10 of his designs from the last three decades, including the ensemble Rekha wore for a Vogue Arabia cover two years ago, the Parsi gara gown Natasha Poonawalla wore to the 2025 Met Gala, and Kajol's green lehenga from the song 'Mehndi lagake rakhna" in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995).
Some guests, misleadingly, called it a 'retrospective"—a word social media used for the exhibit the next morning.
A retrospective, usually put together by an independent curator, is not just a display of archival clothes. It shows the evolution of the designer, their groundbreaking moments and their impact on the fashion world. While doing so, they also offer an insight into the country's culture and history. It's something we've rarely seen in Indian fashion.
The Indian fashion industry, as we know it, is on its way to marking 50 years. Doesn't it deserve just such an independent, critical look-back?
A retrospective needs 'criticality, which is largely missing from Indian fashion," says Pramod Kumar K.G., co-founder of Eka Archiving Services, a museum and cultural advisory firm that has created archives for brands such as Tarun Tahiliani, Anokhi and Amrapali. 'An (independent) curator will tell you which pieces to edit out and which to include, something many designers aren't comfortable with. They would prefer to have a piece that brings them money; they are still very connected to their business."
Indian fashion and design also lack public archives. While designers have started maintaining personal archives, they still haven't shown a keen interest in opening up their past work to the public to help them understand why, say, Malhotra's chiffon saris that became a rage among Bollywood stars in the 1990s, or why Tahiliani remains the master of the fish drape despite many others attempting it.
'Where are the cultural institutions to present such shows?" says Kumar K.G. 'We don't see too many fashion-related events from a cultural perspective."
The last, and perhaps the first, mega event dedicated to Indian fashion in the country was the exhibit during the opening of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre two years ago.
A retrospective show also offers a window to materiality—why a particular fabric or colour was used, why the costume falls the way it does, what the embroidery signifies, how a craft has been interpreted to suit the mood of the time—the kind of information that's as useful to a fashion or a design student as it is to a layperson who wants to understand how India's culture has evolved.
'But who is interested in knowing all this? It all boils down to the bottom line," says Sathya Saran, an author and professor of fashion journalism at the National Institute of Fashion Technology. She was the editor of Femina magazine from 1993 to 2005. 'Today's audience doesn't want to understand fashion; all they are concerned about is looking good, and if the market is going to rule what works, then why would designers be interested in keeping public archives or retrospectives?"
A reason for the lack of interest, says Saran, is the absence of critical writing that deconstructs fashion as a concept, taking it beyond just how many crystals were used in a lehnga-choli or how many man hours went in adding feathers to a pair of pants.
Critical fashion writing is slowly fading, with PR-driven and influencer-led interviews showcasing only the shiny parts of a designer's journey. Even on social media, the lines between sponsored and organic content are getting blurred. 'If nobody questions, nobody will learn. And then, people will complain that designers are making the same kind of clothes," says Saran. "If there's hardly anyone pushing the envelope, what retrospective will you do then?"