'Fashion needs to change'

The very glamour that finds fashion so many followers is causing one of the industry's spawn to turn against it.

Top designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, 32, says fashion must drastically change the way it does business if it is to survive over the long term.

"I don't think the world needs two annual fashion weeks anymore," says the couturier, who takes that approach with his international line, only doing one showing in New York each year, besides his key India shows.

"At one end you're talking about global warming, and at the other you're talking of summer and fall collections," he tells Emirates Business in a quiet corner of Dubai's Hyatt Regency. He was in the UAE to promote a new line of bed linen in collaboration with Indian textile major Bombay Dyeing, which has opened a new store in Dubai.

One of India's top designers today, Sabyasachi exploded onto the country's fashion firmament in 2002, when his debut collection at India Fashion Week won him both rave reviews and lucrative international contracts. The collections that followed proved he was no flash in the pan, and he soon found shelf space at Selfridges and Browns in London and was asked to show at Oxford University's annual charity gala.

The whizkid has since styled several Bollywood films, and as well as showing regularly in Milan, New York and the Indian fashion capitals of Mumbai and Delhi, besides retailing in forward-looking stores everywhere from Los Angeles and London to Moscow and Dubai. He has many clients in the emirate, particularly for wedding trousseaux, and says he's open to having a store here.

But the real success story is in the numbers. In less than a decade, from annual sales of Rs4.4 million (Dh375,177) in 2002, this young man – named one of the 10 most influential Indians in Asia – has built a business that employs 245 people and saw a turnover of Rs145m in the financial year ending April.

Sabyasachi's success comes from a clear focus on his roots and he uses his Indian heritage to craft clothes that speak to the soul in a language anyone can understand. With tactile fabrics and rich colours, his garments are easy to access while evoking faraway lands.

It is this fine sensibility – not to mention clear eye for the economics behind it – that he brings to bear on the future of fashion. "I have nothing against fashion, the approach is wrong," he starts off, explaining how trend forecasting has leeched the whole process of creativity. "With almost criminal precision, you can predict the next big thing: something that's not been around for two years. It's not creativity anymore, just a marketing cycle."

Fashion, he says, is in the throes of change, as stagnating sales necessitate a shift in the way the industry does business. While this plateauing of turnover is masked by an overweening expansion into both new markets and new product lines, the all-encompassing brand focus that has been fashion's mainstay since the eighties is giving way to a more sustainable attempt at luxury – an approach he believes will ultimately emerge triumphant.

"What bothers me is that a person has to spend an arm and a leg for something that will be dated in six months," Sabyasachi says. "I want my customers to breathe. What's important is that while you create customer width, you look into customer depth too. A good business thrives on repeat clients, but brand loyalty is a thing of the past."

One reason customers are not returning to favoured brands as often as before is the rise of the knock-off high street shop. "Today, as much as we talk about ethical shopping, everybody goes to Zara to buy a Prada copy at 1/20th of the price. Ninety per cent of my customers pick up my copies, only buying the original to make a gift of it, or if they have to wear it to a very important event." (On this first visit to Dubai, too, he says he has seen copies of his clothes wherever he looks.)

Ergo, the focus on unique, key pieces is the way to go – not just for consumers, as arbiters of style have been advising us for aeons now, but for designers as well.

And the winners will be those with clear stories to tell and with products difficult to replicate. When a garment is designed in India, sourced in Spain, manufactured in Italy, finished in New York and sold in Colombia, the seller can use that experience to justify premium prices – as opposed to the current scenario where the name on the bag determines its worth. "Prices have to be proportionate to the labour put in, they cannot just be backed up by some silly juvenile thing that we call brand, because all people care about is a good product at a great price," says Sabyasachi.

This "slow fashion" approach to business – producing one-of-a-kind labour-intensive couture-style products that are built to last – is being echoed by such avant-garde trendsetters such as Olga Berluti and Martin Margiela. The former's bespoke shoes retail anywhere from $5,000 (Dh18,350) to $90,000, and are reportedly produced over some 80 hours at a cost of $57 per hour, while Margiela's Artisanal line has bath wraps that can take nearly 30 hours to assemble at an eye-popping $230 per hour and a price tag of $6,245.

Sabyasachi's own clothes are testament to that philosophy. While his intricately detailed, fabulously textured bridal ensembles retail for $50,000, he is now working to demystify the Indian wedding outfit by using 800-count cotton handlooms far more expensive than fine Italian crepe, pulling luxury back to its basics. "To survive, you have to bring the experience back into the product".

These designers, and others such as Narciso Rodriguez and Raf Simmons, target consumers who have stepped off the treadmill for a moment to determine what they want. Liberated from the need to conform to the trend of the moment, they can steer clear of fashion victim status.

These new shoppers, he believes, will soon be the majority of consumers. And they could want anything as high-end as Artisanal's pricey wraps or as everyday as the more culturally rooted boutique-style Fabindia, which he calls India's world-domination retail answer to Gap.

Like many other designers from his country, it is the Indian market that excites Sabyasachi – despite having as many stores in India as abroad. Annual GDP growth rates of more than eight per cent and the consequent growing demand in India means designers don't need to look at foreign markets.

His bed linen collection is part of an attempt to secure his position at home. "When Zara comes to India, no Indian designer will be able to compete with their huge advertising budgets," he says. "So this is in part laying the foundation for my brand."

He now wants to venture further afield into jewellery, furniture, even a designer hotel – provided there are only two or three in the world. "I want to do it all. But I'm constantly battling this greed. My biggest ambition is to have an eclectic store with a little coffee shop and a film theatre. It will be a product born out of love, but then there will be termites creeping out of the woodwork everywhere, wanting to be part of it."

The conversation often turns to his constant hankering for a return to the simple, artistic life, an image at odds with the established fact that he is a young man atop a multi-million-dirham empire.

But even as he has all the numbers at the tip of his fingers, Sabyasachi is more comfortable chasing an ethereal wisp of an idea, choosing to talk instead of the relationship between communism and fashion, or how the Gucci bag he carries is valuable almost only because it was a gift from his sister.

"Handling a creative business is like flying a kite," he tells me even as he bemoans his inability to find the Pierre Bergé to his Yves Saint Laurent. "Business is all about creative instincts. I work with a lot of brands and sometimes I am almost appalled at the complete lack of common sense. It is common sense that builds a business. Instead, people hold on to their winning formulas, but other players can do that better than you. Run a business creatively and it gives you better dividends."

But with thinking like that, perhaps he needs neither a Pierre Bergé nor a behemoth such as LVMH to take care of the business. He says he has had talks with corporations in India and laid out his business blueprint. "But they are too scared to sign on the dotted line. Probably because I refuse to talk their language of research and statistics. To be successful in business, you need to have the pulse of the market – which is changing every single moment. There has to be a gut feeling about what is right."

Which is what fashion is about, after all.

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