Western wear rivals the Indian
sari By Indrajit Basu
KOLKATA - When Satya Paul, one of India's
most famous designer brands of saris, which claims
to have revolutionized the Indian sari and created
a demand for it worldwide, reveals its
spring/summer collection very soon, it will
introduce a style that no sari designer would have
dared even a year back.
The collection
will include a new line of women's wear called
"trouser-saris" and "skirt-saris" that, as the
names suggest, are pre-pleated saris with a
trouser underneath, and a skirt pleated and
designed to look like a sari. The designers say
the new line is
meant for those Indian women
who find wearing a sari cumbersome and are not
confident about carrying it off.
Although
the designers of this brand that mints money
selling "globally styled" saris "all over the
world" are unwilling to admit that saris are fast
giving way to Western wear in Indian women's
wardrobes, they add that urban Indian women are
"enamored" with Western attire and the sari needs
to evolve "beyond the traditional garment".
But the sari emerging as cumbersome for
Indian women? Isn't that almost like declaring
that Americans are losing confidence in being able
to carry off their jeans?
"Unbelievable as
it may sound, the fact is that the sari is more or
less disappearing as work-wear among the current
generation of Indian women," said Neeti Chopra,
marketing general manager of Tata-owned Trent, one
of the largest local retailers in the country. "As
regular wear too, the sari is fast shifting to a
place where it is considered as a dress meant only
for a family event or a special occasion. And even
if the salwar kameez [another popular item
of ethnic apparel] is still a favorite,
increasingly that too is giving way to Western
wear."
Indeed, as the Indian economy
rumbles ahead harnessing the power of
globalization that is not only improving the
earning power of a large population of Indian
woman, but also changing their outlook toward
life, ethnic women's wear in India, which as
recently as two years ago was considered
sufficiently deep-rooted in the culture to ward
off any competition from foreign styles, is
starting to face some serious rivalry from the
styles of the West.
"As the importance of
Western-style clothes is fast moving up the
priority list of Indian women, the prospects for
Western women's wear has never been more upbeat,"
said Sanjeev Mohanty, the India-based managing
director of the global fashion powerhouse
Benetton. "Over the past year, the women's Western
wear market has emerged as the fastest-growing
apparel segment in the country, which is growing
at about 25% a year, almost twice the rate of
growth of Western men's wear."
Driving
this growth are a number of factors. But according
to Vishal Mirchandani, the brand director of Allen
Solly, a primarily men's-apparel brand - owned
once by a United Kingdom-based company that was
bought out by a local garment maker - which has
also introduced a full range of Western women's
wear in India, the strongest motivator of this
shift is the rising independence of Indian women.
"This sudden explosion of the Western-wear
market is a manifestation of the increasing
independence of Indian women," said Mirchandani.
"The Indian woman today is stepping out to work,
and as they start getting financially independent,
they are exercising the freedom to wear clothes
that are easy to handle and maintain and more
comfortable to wear instead of getting dictated to
by tradition.
"This is why," added
Mirchandani, "while women in smaller or
medium-sized towns are still switching into
Western casual wear, women in the large metro
cities have already started adopting Western
formal wear."
Western-style clothing is
really not new to Indian women. "It is not as if
Indian women got exposed to Western wear only when
globalization hit India" about 15 years back, said
Chopra. In fact, Indian women were exposed to
Western wear as long ago as the 1950s, when
Bollywood (the Hindi film industry) started
introducing Western clothing in its movies. But
because of India's social values and stigmas, the
concept of Western wear remained limited to
schoolgirls and very wealthy young women until the
mid-1980s.
However, India's globalization
efforts from then on changed the scene
dramatically. According to Prashant Agarwal, head
of the apparel division of Technopak, a management
consultancy firm in the consumer-products space,
the direct impact of India's globalization for the
consumer-products industry was the increased rate
of urbanization (about 2% annual growth), which
triggered a series of developments, all of which
proved highly beneficial for the apparel industry
in general.
But particularly for the
women's-wear segment, the increased urbanization
meant "enhanced exposure through international
travel, and hence increase in the inspirational
values", said Agarwal. "Suddenly urban Indian
women wanted to be Western; they wanted to party
more, wear more convenient clothes, and they
became fitness-conscious, [which led] to better
bodies and physiques of women.
"With
better body types came increasing desire to flaunt
[them] through usage of ... Western wear," said
Agarwal.
But industry players cite many
other factors behind this trend, including growth
in the number of working women, hence higher
purchasing power and prosperity among the average
urban Indian and, very important, the explosion of
the retail sector in India that led to innumerable
outlets in every nook and corner of the country.
"Two years back, no brand would have dared
to set up a shop in a city that was not semi-urban
at the least," said Mohanty of Benetton. "Today,
thanks to the 150-odd hyper-malls, you will find
local brands hawking Western women's wear, even in
Latur, [a small town in the state of Gujarat] that
has a little more than 200,000 residents."
Small wonder, then, that this segment is
getting flooded; while almost all established
local men's-wear brands such as Van Heusen, Arrow,
Scullers, Allen Solly and Raymonds have expanded
into the Western women's-wear segment,
international brands such as Mango, Sisley, Tommy
Hilfiger, Bossini, and Esprit to name a few are
rushing in as well.
But you ain't seen
nothing yet. While the growth of Western-style
women's clothing has so far come largely from the
urban sector, there lies a huge untapped segment
in the numerous smaller towns and cities.
"In the metropolitan cities, women even in
their mid- to late 40s have started wearing
Western-style clothing, but in smaller cities it
is still the teenage and the college-going
daughter who has adopted the Western style," said
Chopra. "The market will explode when their
mothers too start adopting and adapting Western
wear. And that day is not too long away."
Mohanty said, "There is no doubt that
Western wear for women in India is at the tipping
point of growth, and it is a foregone conclusion
that it will grow much faster in India than in the
rest of Asia."
But the question is, as
happened in most of the developed countries in
Asia, and especially in Japan where the women have
almost discarded the kimono, will Indian women
shun the sari?
Never, or at least not in
the foreseeable future, is the unanimous retort of
the industry players. But all say the ratio of
ethnic clothing to Western wear in an Indian
woman's wardrobe is going to decrease in the
coming years.
"Ethnic clothing pieces in a
woman's wardrobe may increase in absolute numbers
because the size of the wardrobe is getting
larger," said Chopra, "but more and more of that
increased space will be occupied by Western wear."
Mirchandani said, "Two years back the
ratio of ethnic wear to Western wear was about 70%
in favor of the former [and] has now reduced to
about 50%. In the next two years it may come down
to 30% and perhaps even lower thereafter, but I do
not see ethnic clothing dying out."
The
sari, it seems, is not ready to go down without a
fight. Almost all stakeholders, including big sari
designers such as Satya Paul, Tarun Tahiliani and
Raghavendra Rathore, and even the eminent local
journalist turned sari designer Sobha Dey, are
crafting innovative programs to bring what they
call "the sensuous six-yard drape" on the comeback
trail.
"I think the sari still has a
bright future," said Mirchandani, "provided it is
positioned properly."
Indrajit
Basu is a Kolkata-based journalist.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
