Ashley, Avanti, Amrit, Saffron, Radhika, Bhumika, Deepti. While these names may form the collective consciousness of our recent fashion history and our global modelling transplants to the world, the road to glory has been a long and winding one. All-pervasive social media and quick minutes of marketing on the phone screens may give these names top-shelf status in our minds, but it would be ignorant to not recall and remember the ones that created the blueprint for Indians on the global fashion map today.
“I was lucky enough to start with Yves Saint Laurent, which is the best visiting card in the world”—KIRAT YOUNG
Anjali Mendes, Kirat Young, Marielou Phillips, Ujjwala Raut, Lakshmi Menon. It was a time of unadulterated fashion, parties, champagne, and designer-muse relationships that stood the fraying strands of time. From the 1970s until the mid-2000s these women, all legs and high cheekbones reigned supreme on international runways. Their attitudes and gaits made clothes look covetable and made their lives seem unattainable. The fact that they were Indian became a postscript on a show note.
It all started in 1971. Before Parisian ramps had seen women of colour—before Grace Jones and Naomi Campbell—a dark, six-foot-one-inch-tall sari-clad model waited in French designer Pierre Cardin’s salon for eight hours. Mendes had bought a one-way ticket to Paris with modelling money she made back home in Mumbai. She wanted nothing more than to be an international model. Instantly, she was granted a role as Pierre Cardin’s house model and the designer cut his couture collection on her for 20 years. Colour was hardly a question.
League of her own
Credited with teaching Naomi Campbell her first walk for Yves Saint Laurent, Kirat Young (née Bhinder) was a force on Parisian runways.
Models of that time embodied the fashion houses they aligned with. Their walks, a mix of twirls and hip sways, became signatures similar to the embellishments that decked the designer’s clothes. “There was never really an issue or discussion around the fact that your skin colour was different,” says Phillips, a de facto Chanel girl for over two decades, from 1991 till 2013. Karl Lagerfeld spotted her on a flight back to Paris from Rome. “My flight was delayed,” whispers Phillips through the phone, as if speaking her story louder might spoil it. “There was someone who looked like Karl Lagerfeld at the airport. I thought he couldn’t possibly be on the same flight, but it was him, and they called my modelling agency the next day, saying there was an Indian girl on the flight, and asked for her to be sent for a casting. I went, and stayed on forever.”
Model behaviour
“Lakshmi Menon’s achievements at this point was the stuff of dreams. Whilst she walked the ramp for industry behemoths like Chanel, Hermès and Dolce & Gabbana, it was Jean Paul Gaultier who is credited with ‘discovering’ her when he dressed her in his iconic corsetry”—BANDANA TEWARI
When Menon and Raut found their footing on global ramps in the early aughts, they were handpicked for their ability to draw attention to the clothes they wore on the catwalk. Journalist Nonita Kalra, the former editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, reminisces, “Ujjwala was a perfect clothes horse and ally on the runway. My first memory of her was her walk—she glided down the ramp, sans distraction. There was a perfection in her posture that allowed you to focus just on the clothes.”
“My last show for Chanel was in 1997. I was four months pregnant when Karl [Lagerfeld] asked me if I’d like to design shoes. I didn’t know how to, but I was always interested. A few years later, when they needed someone to represent the brand in India, I was the girl for the job”—MARIELOU PHILLIPS
The fashion industry in India was surging ahead full steam, too. “The mood was electric. Powerful legacy brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Hermès and Tod’s were all in the throes of establishing themselves in India,” says Bandana Tewari, a former fashion features director at Vogue India. Menon became the face of Hermès and Givenchy campaigns while walking the fashion circuit of New York, London, Paris and Milan, her career reflecting the momentum and consolidation gaining ground in her country’s fashion industry. In many ways, not much has changed. Fashion houses still look far and wide for models to lend life to their clothes.
A TIMELESS CLASSIC
A few years ago, as Vogue India traced the flight paths of two new Indian faces seen on global runways, Radhika Nair and Saffron Vadher, we spoke to the casting agent of the Balenciaga show that launched Nair’s transatlantic career. “Designers today are interested in characters with a look and attitude,” Henry Mackintosh Thomas, founder of Arqa Cast, told us. “They want to dress these characters and their stories. Radhika, and girls like her, represent this as well as a youth culture that’s more accepting of the way people are.”
ANOTHER WORLD
The one to have firmed up a place for Indian models on the global map, Anjali Mendes served as the house fit model at Pierre Cardin for 20 years.
A cultural exchange was key even then. Phillips remembers Lagerfeld feeling inspired by the stories she told him of her homeland, such as the significance of the bindi to a woman’s everyday adornment. Weeks later in the atelier she witnessed Lagerfeld acknowledge her heritage with the addition of a bindi and sparkles to her final look for the spring/summer 1996 show. For Kirat Young, née Bhinder (before the Punjabi supermodel changed her name while working in the ateliers of Yves Saint Laurent), when she decided to stop modelling in 1987, her final send-off as the long-time YSL muse was a party at The Palace in Paris with an Indian theme that wove itself through the food, decor and dress code.
While Young didn’t follow the same path as Mendes, who became Pierre Cardin’s face of India operations, or later Phillips, who embodied the Chanel brand for its launch in India and worked in Lagerfeld’s atelier as a shoe designer, her own career in fashion continued as a jewellery designer with her first customer being her long-time friend and co-creative Oscar de la Renta. He bought the entire range for his wife, giving her brand an organic impetus.
“Being loved and remembered by designers is an amazing feeling, but to also appeal to the masses makes you iconic. My advice to young models out there is to do your work, and then push the bar a little more”—UJJWALA RAUT
Supporting role
Model Ujjwala Raut, now settled in New York, continues to return to the runway for her favourites even today, including Indian designer Bibhu Mohapatra.
What perhaps misses today in the trajectories of our Indian models making international waves is the longevity and camaraderie shared by the modelling and design world back then. How do you carve more than a spot in the system and leave more of a dent in culture? We now have the lives and times of the supermodels that will guide us.
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