Judge Sabyasachi on the basis of his core strength: business

On the heels of the biggest global fashion collaboration featuring an Indian designer, we’re asking the wrong questions. The Hindu Weekend finds out more

Barely a week into designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s global collaboration with fashion retail giant H&M, everything that could go wrong has done so. The ‘crashed apps and stubborn carts’ as he called them on an Instagram post, problems with fits and not enough size inclusivity, the alleged return period of a single day that left many disgruntled, and that very bad word: viscose. Not to mention a collective open letter from the country’s craft communities that has gone viral. Plus, a total of nine Indian magazines that allowed Sabyasachi to literally give them their digital covers, which quickly became the butt of jokes about how print media has sold the remainder of its soul. This could be a two-pronged masterclass in how not to do a fashion collaboration and yet, having done it, how to market it to the high heavens. In the midst of all this, I feel we have forgotten something crucial about Sabyasachi the designer. That he is, foremost, a businessman. He has made no secret of it ever since he started doing interviews, which was pretty much from his debut on the ramp at the then Lakmé India Fashion Week at the turn of the millennium. And I, for one, do not see a problem with that.