From the pages of Images Retail (August 2009)

Fashion Forward
By Piasi Sinha

Until a few seasons ago, the word ‘designerwear’ would be synonymous with only haute couture and an image of an uber plush standalone boutique situated at a quiet, sophisticated corner of a city. Only a few knew where to buy a Rohit Bal or a Manish Malhotra label. With fashion retail coming of age in India, designer labels such as Wendell Rodricks, Suneet Verma or Rohit Bal are available on the shelves of major department store chains. Designers, too, are willing to retail their prêt lines to a wider target audience through the mass market stores.

As per reports of UK’s The Daily Mail, the lifestyle retail chain Marks and Spencer reportedly gained sales worth one million pound by roping in Sex and The City stylist Patricia Field last year. US-based value retail chain Target has tied up with designer Alexander McQueen to launch an exclusive diffusion line, after an alliance Issac Mizrahi sucessfuly propelled the discount retailer’s image into a a more ‘with it’orbit. UK-based Debenhams also reinvented its collaboration with designer Matthew Williamson and is in talks with various Indian designers to design exclusive lines for the store.

Name Game
The strategy of designercollaboration as applied by department stores like Debenhams, Selfridges or House of Fraser, has also been used by home-grown Westside and Shoppers Stop to pump fresh air into their fashion categories. The trend picked up pace up in the last few years with Wills Lifestyle and Shoppers Stop plunging into the high-end world of fashion maestros in India to develop ready-to-wear designer merchandise to the masses.

To cash in on the big and famous designer names, Westside has signed up Narendra Kumar, Wendell Rodricks and Manish Gupta to create exclusively-designed prêt lines at affordable prices for young, fashionsavvy customers. While Westside has been proactive in promoting the designer prêt lines during the last two to three seasons, Shoppers Stop started its stint in designerwear by offering a select collection designed by Priyadarshini Rao, Krishna Mehta, Anita Dongre and Nahid Merchant. Since 2001, Shoppers Stop has been associated with designers such as Raghavendra Rathore, Ritu Kumar, Manish Arora and Gitanjali Kashyap.


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