2012: Fashion’s firsts

In 2012, fashion went from the clothes rack to the book rack; from ramp to museum. January’s Jaipur Literature Festival saw designer Wendell Rodricks launch Moda Goa: History and Style, a history of Goan costumes that took him 11 years to write. The first such book after Ritu Kumar’s 1999 tome Costumes and Textiles of Royal India, Rodricks’ work re-instilled our hope in Indian designers as chroniclers.

The very next month, an Abraham & Thakore sari was chosen to be part of the permanent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A piece of vernacular dressing in charcoal silk with an inlaid cycle rickshaw, worn high and short with an appliqué tunic tucked into the waist, a slim leather belt and mojri wedges, it was from the first collection designer duo David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore showed in India (Autumn-Winter 2010) after 18 years in the industry. Symbolic both of retro-modernism that dominates our fashion movement and the world’s deepening curiosity in Indian design, the sari is our inheritance of gain.