Emporio Vasant Kunj is on the outskirts of Delhi, and the venue for half the shows in this year’s fashion week. It is a brand new building, purpose-built for the upper-middle class of Delhi: nothing but the highest end, biggest names of fashion couture: Dior, Chanel, DKNY. Here, the young and fabulously rich (and often fashionably-challenged) drop their Lexus off for valet parking and return a couple of hours later with their hatboxes and be-ribboned Gucci carrier bags. Less than five minutes’ drive down the road, we pass children returning from school with tattered backpacks, and women bent over with the weight of firewood to sell, and mouldy vegetables to buy.
We walk through the barriers, flashing our media passes with superior pride. The buyer’s entrance is bustling with the Eddies and Patsies of the Delhi glitterati, clutching glasses of Stoli Vodka and soda, and grabbing each others’ arms, whispering.
In the corridor outside, there is an art exhibition. It’s called ‘Wander Lust’, and devised by an unnamed artist. Each picture, blown up to a length of six feet or so, depicts an Indian villager – herd boys, women with wrinkled, careworn faces, girls with little flesh on their bones, men who stare, eye sockets protruding, into the camera. Each of them is depicted in India chic: expensive diamond rings through their noses, linen shirts, saris shining without a crease, in the finest of silk. A new trend is creeping into the nascent Indian fashion scene: peasant chic. India Vogue has just celebrated it’s first anniversary. In August, it published a controversial spread, styled to the nines, in which Indian peasants and beggar children were dressed in designer fashions. Small malnourished boys wore striped designer-kiddie striped jumpers. Young, tired mothers were smothered in angora. Women hanging off the back of motorcycles clutched VL-logoed handbags, while their husbands, at the front, were wearing tailored blazers. And on each of their faces, that familiar, haunting, hollow look that is so often the central appeal of charity leaflets. Instead of making poverty history, Delhi Fashion Week was making poverty sexy.
In a society where two thirds of the population are illiterate, and around 40% live below the poverty line, it’s a situation that’s easy to condemn and difficult to really understand. No matter how clean and fragrant their life lived in India, affluent Delhi-ites come face to face with the smell and grit of poverty every day. Children selling magazines at stoplights, weaving in and out of cars that narrowly scrape past them. Hunchbacked men, holding their bent arms out for a handful of rupees. Toddlers sitting in gutters that stink of sulfur and human excrement. And here we are, slipping on marble floors and gasping for a cappuccino.
In London, we are shielded from poverty. The beggars we do see are bums, we reassure ourselves. They are drunkards, or layabouts, who could get shelter and sign up for the dole if they want to. Real, dire, inescapable poverty is something we rarely, if ever, have to see firsthand. And so we fear it, and fetishize it. We leave it to Bono and Bob Geldof and Africa. We give to charities and cry out whenever human rights are broken but most of us don’t do anything useful about it anyway. We are scared of what we can’t see.
But every Indian knows what poverty looks like. It’s a way of life, even if it’s not their way of life. It’s not something to be afraid of, and it’s not something to be tiptoed around. The photoshoot might be tasteless, and it might never have run in American Vogue, but it’s not as stupid an editorial decision as it might first appear.
On the way back from our first experience of fashion week, we drop into a hotel to make a film for the newspaper. We’re videoing India’s most famous drummer, at a concert he’s giving as part of a hospitality event hosted by India’s largest telecommunications company. Somehow, we manage to impress said drummer, who invites us backstage to eat and drink and watch his show. We meet one of the most famous Bollywood composers and singers. We meet diplomats from various foreign consulates, who distribute their business cards and demand ours, inviting us to travel and drink wine and come to parties in five star hotels. Barely is our back turned before our large tulip-shaped wine glasses are refilled with the finest Shiraz and Chardonnay by waiters with scarlet turbans, wearing impeccable white suits. Driving back in the dark, more than a little tipsy, it is impossible to see, in the shadows, the camps of children living under tarpaulin, and fathers crouched by the roadside on thin moth-eaten mattresses, waiting for the night to come. They aren’t dressed in Prada polo necks today.
The gap between the most wealthy and the poorest of Indian society is gargantuan. Women get a french polish in a five-star spa, where barely a hop, skip and jump away, kids sell coconut segments to tuk tuk drivers and their passengers, before settling down for the night on an ancient blanket. But what to do is another question. The answer is not to drip them in diamonds, but it’s also not to take out a 100 rupee standing order to a charity that will probably never deliver your money to the right place. There’s no point in covering guilt with an ineffectual contribution.
As the sun sets over the stage of the hotel, we swat the flies from our bowls of chocolate mousse and think back to the photos in the Emporio Mall. What next for the anonymous faces of suffering, now such a worn-out phrase that they are considered iconic enough for the fashion industry? Whatever the answer, it probably won’t be found in the Stoli Vodka tent.
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