UK: Indian designer Manish Arora amongst fashion greats to show special collection at London's Victoria and Albert museum

As Indian Fashion Week gets underway, one of its most noted designers, Manish Arora, showcased a retrospective of his shows in London that underlined how much the industry is enamoured with designs from emerging markets. Joining the ranks of European fashion designers Vivienne Westwood, Christian Lacroix and Jean-Paul Gaultier, Manish Arora showed a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert museum of his native Indian-inspired designs. "To see people waiting in a long queue four times a day to see this is quite incredible," Arora, whose clothes are sold in London at Harrods, told Reuters Television after one runway show. The retrospective was shown throughout the day on Friday (September 7). "It's a great privilege I must say, and me being the first Indian person to show at this museum, in this gallery, it's an absolute pleasure." Against a backdrop of Raphael paintings, Arora filled a catwalk with models wearing 40 outfits from his past collections -- jackets, skirts and skin-tight trousers in rainbow colours and densely embroidered with animals and plants. The 34-year-old designer is renowned for his visual, vibrant clashing colours, texture and print with attention to detail, often mixed with a sense of humour. The Delhi-born designer said it's important to be able to take a light-hearted approach to design. He ended the show with his signature "Delhi dress" and "London dress" inspired by the capital cities which he lives and works in respectively. Oriole Cullen, the curator for the Victoria and Albert museum's "Fashion in Motion" series which Manish was asked to show his collection for, said the fashion world is becoming increasingly interested in designs from emerging markets, like India. "Being a museum, looking at the context of people's cultural and historic background, again Manish (Arora) using very traditional Indian craft skills in his work which are phenomenal. He has access to these amazing types of embroidery and really another way of looking at things, particularly colour. His colours are particularly Indian but he's translating that into something that much more modern and really relevant to international fashion today," she said. The tribute to the Indian designer comes as Europe's leading fashion houses clamour to enter India, which is one of the world's fastest-growing markets for luxury goods alongside China and Russia and also is holding its premier fashion event in New Delhi this week. In a sign of the industry's eagerness to make lucrative gains there, fashion magazine Vogue is set to launch its first Indian edition in late September. Arora and contemporary Anamika will also unveil their latest collections in the world's fashion capital Paris in October, becoming the first Indians to do so. The world's population of extremely wealthy people -- whose appetite for monogrammed luggage and 10,000 U.S. dollar gowns is behind an unprecedented boom in luxury goods -- surged to 9.5 million last year, up 8.3 percent, with India leading the way, according to the latest Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report. Industry analysts expect European investors and fashion groups, like world leader LVMH, home of Louis Vuitton, sooner or later to snap up Indian fashion houses.

ITN Source | September 10, 2007

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