Fibre2Fashion

This is your second year. What was the response last year that encouraged you to continue with Nayaab this year as well? The first edition of Nayaab took place in Delhi and then Chennai. We received a phenomenal response from the patrons. We garnered a lot of appreciation and glory for the initiative we had taken. It’s not only an exhibition to showcase the latest fashion trends, but also an effort to exhibit old textiles. The positive feedback and the love encouraged us to go ahead with another...

Brexit. Trump. TPP, RCEP. Amazon. Innumerable keywords kept cropping up through 2016, but not all of these will shape fashion, nay the textiles and apparel industry, in 2017. But some will dictate the direction that the fashion industry takes in the years to come, and the process starts with 2017. Myntra’s acquisition of Jabong: In July, Flipkart’s Myntra pipped Snapdeal to the post by acquiring online fashion store Jabong for $70 million. Though Jabong itself had been on a downswing since 2013...

In September this year, leading fabric and fashion retailer Raymond decided to truncate its workforce by a third. The company decided to replace 10,000 of its employees with robots. And this was a company that employed roughly 30,000 people across 16 manufacturing units across the country. Raymond CEO Sanjay Behl told a newspaper on the occasion, “Roughly 2,000 work in each plant. Through technological intervention we are looking to scale down the number of jobs to 20,000, through multiple...

Fibre2Fashion (F2F): At which stages of the value chain, will the Goods and Services Tax (GST) have an impact on the retail sector? Which of these would be the most crucial? Rohan Sharma (RS): The GST envisages the taxation based on the destination principle, which means tax will be payable at the place of supply and consumption end of the retail chain is where the tax credit will stick. What is essential to note is that the cascading tax input at the input goods and services level shall be...

The fashion industry, across the chain from fibre to retail, is an extremely dynamic one. Most aspects of the industry often make for stimulating debates. But usually lost in these battles of ideas and predictions are the most crucial element that make each of these links in the long and fragile chain: the people. There is a need to look at the people factor too. The industry is no longer what it was at the beginning of the globalisation era. The world has changed, and so has the fashion...

The keywords when determining the outlook for an industry, by and large are drivers, restraints and opportunities. Each, again, can be broken down into innumerable factors. The interplay of all these, in turn, may make for a chaotic situation. Whether there is a method in this madness is what usually makes the bottomline. It is also inevitable that both perspectives and forecasts may vary. This writer sought the opinion of two experts on the subject of textile machinery, and saw them in the...

Researchers at Birmingham City University (BCU) in the United Kingdom (UK) are working on a connected wardrobe that addresses the problem of unworn clothes by reminding you to wear them—or just to give them away to charity. The idea is to create an 'Internet of Clothes' that wherein garments will be tagged using washable contactless technology, known as radio-frequency identification (RFID). The project has been made possible by Maker Monday, an open innovation project from BCU that brings...

The way manure is thought of may change soon. An Eindhoven designer has developed a technology with which manure can be immediately transformed into bioplastic, biopaper and biotextile. Designer Jalila Essaïdi pursued the project titled Mestic with her BioArt Laboratories as a way of addressing the global manure surplus, which is responsible for excessive amounts of harmful phosphorus and nitrogen in surface and groundwater. Essaïdi, who is known for her work ‘2.6g 329m/s’, also known as...

Sometime in the late-1990s, just months after Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai won two major international beauty pageants, a fashion consciousness started taking shape. For the uninitiated as also for common people, this was reckoned to be the turning point for Indian fashion. But the more discerning and the more aware know for certain that none of this would have been possible had the fertile ground not been laid another ten years earlier through a rather low-key initiative of the Indian...

Do you think the fashion education system in India is able to meet industry requirements at all—both in terms of numbers as well as quality? For an industry that is forever-growing, quality fashion institutes need to be established much more than they are. Do you agree? Darlie Koshy: The world over, various segments of the textiles-apparel industry do not see themselves as just 'raw materials' of fashion, but as an 'integrated global fashion system' in which cotton growers/manmade fibre...