“Before Nift came in, the export business was really taking off but India really didn’t have professionally skilled trained people to help the growth of this export business,” explains Baxi. “Nift studied the requirements and needs of the industry and started off with three programmes—design, management and technology—and each of these was focused on imparting technically sound education to the students.”
Along with instituting a change in perception within the industry as to the value of fashion design education, the faculty and founders of Nift found themselves gradually bringing about a change in cultural and social attitudes.
“Fashion was always treated like a frivolous activity,” adds Baxi, “and it was treated as a profession which only was about gender bending and people getting into all kinds of nefarious activities. I think Nift has been instrumental in bringing about realization amongst people in India that fashion is a serious profession. In the beginning, it was very difficult for us to make people understand this. They would think that fashion is only glamour, money, models and fashion shows.”
Today, males outperform females at the school, with the majority of award winners being male, and the proportion of males to females standing at roughly equal.
The school also credits itself with infusing the design industry with pride in itself, so that international success was no longer held up as the sole measure of success and designers could consider themselves established on the basis of national acclaim.
Additionally, the school has seen itself ride the retail boom, which has expanded the range of opportunities offered to young designers.
With the opening of the Indian economy in the 1990s, the market underwent a radical change, and the launch of chains such as Shoppers Stop and Pantaloon “redefined” the choices of consumer India and, along with it, the fashion landscape changed, according to Jha.
The India Fashion Week launched in 2000, created a “ready to wear” market which then served as the trigger for aspiring Indian designers to expand their market to international shores, and set the scene for the arrival of fashion design as a serious career choice.
Nift, which counts many of India’s leading fashion designers among its alumni, including Ritu Beri, Manish Arora, Ashish Soni and Rajesh Pratap Singh, receives 20,000 applications for just 2,000 places each year, and offers courses for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Undergraduate students applying to the four-year BFTech (bachelor programme in fashion technology) can specialize either in design or technology. Within design, the courses covered include design training in fashion, leather, accessories, textile and knitwear, as well as fashion communication, while the core focus for technology students is apparel production.