(From above) Outfits by Ashish Soni; Rocky S; Rina Dhaka; and Ritu Kumar

Most of the 35 shows during the Lakme India Fashion Week (LIFW) 2002 in Delhi's Taj Palace were 30-yard demos in pret prudence and polite classicism. For many of those who live by the ramp, change is considered a deadly introduction, confusing simple clients and scissoring the list of domestic buying houses and shops, the real intention of the fashion week. But first-time participant Chennai designer Rehane Yavar Dhala wasn't impressed: "Why can't they be more sexy?" she bellowed to a group of huddled designers having rajma-chawal in the makeshift cafe. "I mean it's just like they have read Dostoevsky or something. Look at Mumbai."

Intercity comparisons renewed memories of a Delhi and Mumbai couturier rift but Dhala was just making an innocent sartorial point. Her posers for the capital were generous layering, ruffled, rasping fabrics, bright corsets and plenty of ribbon craft in lean constructions of cloth. Many of these elements were part of the well-publicised "Victorian look" that seemed to have swept much of the fashion week and was acknowledged as a belated infiltration of a western trend. This essentially meant that there was an overload of frills, fringes, pleats, long skirts, petticoats and corsets which found varying expressions in the collections of Aparna Chandra, Puja Nayyar, Manish Arora, Deepika Govind, Sonali Mansingka and Priyadarshini Rao, among others.

Chandra, whose 47 outfits could well be separates, had used Bhutanese brocade and the colour black for the first time along with a lot of layers and fabric in her afternoon show. Arora, whom one buyer called "dim-witted" because of his weakness for low, ghoulish lighting that revealed only the colours of the devil, experimented with over 60 types of skirts and underskirts and his models had magnifying glasses over their eyes, melting them like glycerine. "The tassel and fringe look is completely in," says choreographer Vidyun Singh, who along with her partner Asha Kochhar, has been observing fashion for about 15 years. "In fact, a lot of detailing is now going into the fabric to get the right look, so many of the dresses have to be seen up close."

That even stands true for the common denim. Having passed through the fashionable stages of distress, affliction and abuse, denim was among the most widespread of fabrics, and no one to visualise popular pret in its absence. Used as a jacket, an asymmetrical skirt or pants, it was more often than not overheated with embellishments and embroidery work like quasi zardozi, double-stitch pop patterns and a constellation of beads, rivets, studs and sequins.

(Clockwise from top left) Frilly and layered designs by Raghuvendra Rathore; Anshu Arora Sen; Manish Arora; and Puja Nayyar

Current Miss India Neha Dhupia, unfortunately, was exempted from going through the taut tribulations of the fabric because, as one unsuspecting designer said, "she couldn't even fit into the pants". As a result, she was entrusted with only more eulogistic silhouettes and was hardly seen during the entire week, most of the applause being reserved for 17-year-old fresher Shivani Kapur, whose briskly cultivated innocence propelled her to the top of the model heap. She also managed to be conspicuous in the denim-dependent collection of Ashish Soni, who had his models parcel their heads with bandages in a bizarre display of head-injury chic ... clearly an internal injury since there was no red paint on the straps.

Denim was fundamental to Rocky S' razored and shredded look, and Rina Dhaka's visionary line, shown with Indian wear specialist Anju Modi's, punched the ramp with oat-brown low riders and T-shirts with specially acclimatised Phad paintings and kitsch cracker-box visuals. Even Ritu Kumar's usually polyethnic oeuvre, steady for many years, couldn't resist the temptation, using the fabric as pants that were sometimes folded from the ankle like a capri.

Since the collections were for the coming winter, leather, both simulated and bona fide, gave epidermal texture to the growing range of fabric. Dramatist Rohit Bal flaunted his partly S 'n' M-ish men's label Balance, (the first three letters of which had been broken and flashed on the clothes) with gagged men in jackets showing anklets that had been subverted to their heads like thready bandanas. Cue, by Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna, distanced itself from the Hell's Angel uniform and used leather cutouts in knitwear and trimmings of suede and faux fur. The shy and punctilious Rajesh Pratap (and the only guy who didn't have his photograph printed in the brochure), Nandita Basu, Raghuvendra Rathore and Anita Dongre were some of the other trumpeters of leather and its lookalikes.

Sub-trends were a part of the plot throughout the event. These were mainly quilted garments, crushed fabrics, short kurtas, drawstrings, subordinate layering, opaque jewellery (like turquoise) and plenty of animal prints, mammalian and reptilian. The Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), promoters and organisers of the event, has now even jumped into the impressive business of trend forecasting, getting erstwhile designer Rajiv Goyal, earlier with Pierre Cardin, to pen down what he thought would drape the body in the season to come. He thinks baroque laces, jungle foliage and redefined lehngas will be hot while buttons will lie really low.

New Find 2002

SABYASACHI MUKHERJEE Niftian Sabyasachi Mukherjee, 25, says he invests considerable intellectual energy in planning outfits. The Kolkata designer's show is being touted as the best of the lot, a skilful melting pot of Bohemian style, Gujarati patch and mirror-work, Uzbek gypsyism and desert glamour. The collection got approval by a writer from New York's Women's Daily Wear magazine, who said he could visualise it on a Manhattan runway. In India, global ratification always helps.

So did the LIFW witness any big sales? There were 150 buyers there, notably Selfridges, fresh from their Bollywood festival, and they said they were back "to prove their commitment to Indian designers". Bal, Pratap and Monisha Jaising, all with their independent labels, sold more than 85 per cent of their stuff this year at the Oxford Street store and this year they're scouting for more talent. Among the domestic buyers, conventional pret lines, essentially those rejected by the critics as brutally mediocre, were a hit, giving rise to the puzzling question of how credible designers will find it hard to find pan-Indian acceptance.

The FDCI also got plenty of flak for selecting bad designers (and there were quite a few). Someone even suggested that they had chosen the lesser known ones so that the better designers appeared superior in contrast.

Controversies, it seems, will never leave India's premier fashion week, but the truth is the LIFW has now grown from being an experiment in fashion marshalling to an internationally accepted platform for promoters and designers. This year there were more buyers, more shows, more designers, more confetti in the finale, and the possible birth of a star-Kolkata boy Sabyasachi Mukherjee whose Janpath patchwork found a global silhouette. It certainly looks like the ramps will continue to get covered with imprint of models' stilettos and the bouncers at the entrance will keep pushing the swelling crowds because the velvet ropes on brass stands won't hold them.