Fashion

What are the three trends that you see shaping up e-commerce (from the fashion point of view) over the next five years? Abhishek Samdaria: More and more retailers will limit stocks and try to focus on customised merchandise in every major product category. Each collection will become theme-specific in order to give variety to customers. Pricing will play a major role in ecommerce going forward, differentiation for money spent will be the key. Varinder Singh Jawanda: Fashion e-commerce still...

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...

How did the idea translate into something as tangible as an organisation? During my training and career as an architect—spread between India and England for over thirty-five years, I was closely involved with various aspects of green, energy-efficient and sustainably-built environment projects. I was passionate about conservation programmes and heritage support to buildings, people and places. I had opportunities to conduct extensive research, as well as head community-based action programmes...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The June 22 textile package announced by the Union government is being described in many quarters as the proverbial stitch in time. But whether it will, like the proverb foretells, be able to save nine, is a question that needs circumspection. That said, there is little doubt that the Rs6,000 crore package has come as a much-needed whiff of fresh air for a desperate industry that has been gasping for breath. The last two Budgets had little on offer for the textiles and apparel industry, and the...

The problem with buzzwords is that they invariably whip up such a mindless frenzy and needless hype that people often forget what was it that had resulted in the creation of that buzzword in the first place. That's what is increasingly happening with "sustainability". Critics argue that so mired are companies with the "ends" in mind that the "means" are not being adequately kept track of. Many forget that sustainability is not an end in itself, but the means towards an end: a better world that...

Sustainability has been a business buzzword for a while. On the face of it, most brands seem sincere when talking about it. Given that, it comes as a surprise that big brands have failed so miserably. Is it because brands still see sustainability as just one way of doing business, rather than the only way of doing business? Richard Holland: The Cotton Ranking Report shows that a relatively small number of companies with consumer-facing brands are serious in word and deed. IKEA, C&A, H&M, Adidas...