This issue is all about change, questioning old ideas and imagining what comes next for fashion.
There is something neat about the timing of a fashion issue. One season gives way to another, wardrobes shift, and we start talking about what comes next. New silhouettes, new proportions, new ideas. Fashion has always been comfortable with change.
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Outside fashion, change is rarely quite so orderly. The student protests over the past few months, around examination irregularities, were one reminder of that. What stayed with me was less the politics of it and more the instinct to question systems rather than to simply accept them. That idea found its way into this issue too. We look at handloom as political language and at the rise of butch aesthetics in Indian fashion. We speak to women designers about building businesses in an industry where access remains uneven. And in our story on the economy of the first copy, we look at what happens when aspiration, affordability and ownership meet.
“For me, fashion is about change. You have to break out of the trappings the luxury world has caught itself in.”
— STELLA MCCARTNEY
Then there is legacy. Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla complete 40 years together this year, continuing to take Indian craft forward while remaining unmistakably themselves. Forty years in fashion is not really about staying the same. It is about knowing what to hold on to. Elsewhere, Abhishekh Khedekar documents the fading tradition of Tamasha, Megha Singha looks at the lives behind Mumbai’s carefully constructed influencer culture and young Asian fashion students imagine the industry they want to inherit.
And then, of course, there is the new season itself. Fashion will always give us a new coat, a new shoe or a reason to reconsider something we dismissed six months ago. That is part of the fun.
The changes I find more interesting are usually less obvious when they are happening. An old idea begins to feel dated. Someone questions a rule that has been around for too long. Something we thought was fixed starts to shift. That, for me, is where this fashion issue sits. Not just spotlighting what is new, but what is changing.