Directing passions in New Delhi’s world of fashion

The Indian fashion industry and strategies of capture

Fashion is primarily a business (Entwistle, 2009; Hoskins, 2014), a business that runs on desires, hopes and fantasies rather than on simple seductions of material textures; only secondarily is fashion a creative profession for a selected few. The Indian fashion industry, initially modelled upon the example of the fashion systems of Paris, London and New York, is barely 30 years old. ² Most designers cater predominantly to the Indian market, followed by the Gulf countries, Russia, Singapore and western countries with Indian diasporas. The financial crisis of 2008 became a turning point when many designers pulled out of western markets and rejected the idea of seeking recognition in Paris, Milan and New York that they were after in the ’90s and early 2000s. Instead, they re-oriented themselves at the growing Indian upper-middle class and elite clientele. This shift coincided with the rise of nationalist sentiments, pride and belief in India’s future superpowerdom (Kuldova, 2014a).

Most designers have jumped, in one way or the other, onto the wave of ‘artistic nationalism’ (Ciotti, 2012), thus selling varieties of the ‘essence of Indianness’ to privileged Indians. Nationalist myths have a good record of capturing the people’s power to act, which makes them a conscious favourite among designers. Being a young industry, it is also far more centred on the persona of the designer, who is often one with the brand, than is the case for globally well-established western fashion brands.

While in India, as in the West, celebrating designers as unique creative artists systematically obscures the fact that fashion is a cut-throat business, pushing into invisibility actual relations of production and complex distributions of creativity within the industry – I have written about the problem of invisible labour elsewhere (Kuldova, 2014b, 2016) – what interests me here are the skills Indian designers employ as both businessmen and seductive mythmakers. They have grown especially skilled and aware because of the constant pressure to justify and legitimize their position within society. The concept of the fashion designer as a creative artist has been up until the ’90s relatively foreign to the world of Indian textile production dominated by artisans, weavers, tailors and factory workers. Even today, with design institutes and fashion weeks in all major cities of the country, Indian designers still struggle with legitimization of their profession. In the process, they have become skilled in devising strategies of claiming their superiority and distinction from tailors (Khosla and Johnston, 1996), from both world of the bazaar and the shopping mall but also from Bollywood’s costume design. ³ Having to constantly seek legitimization also means that they have grappled with the question of how to seduce and entice their potential customers and patrons, how to mobilize their affects and turn these into profit. They have had to offer something beyond clothes, namely a passionately embraced ‘natural habitat of the elite’, as one designer framed it. In order to see how their efforts at mobilizing affects and directing passions play out in practice, I shall investigate here two cases of recognized designers, first JJ Valaya, the designer to the elites known for his neo-aristocratic opulent aesthetics, and second Nitin Bal Chauhan, the designer to the young, aspiring and ‘alternative’ crowd.

Frédéric Lordon in his Spinozist critique of political economy remarks that ‘to induce an aligned desire is the perennial goal … of all the institutions of capture’ (Lordon, 2014: 98). The first question is: what exactly is being captured? Together with Lordon, we could answer that it is the power of acting of individuals. But the second question is: how can an aligned desire be induced, i.e. what are the actual strategies of capture? While Lordon remarks that we tend to be blind to the ‘immense amount of social labour that is required for producing this “setting oneself in motion for another”’ (Lordon, 2014: 4), he remains conspicuously silent on what exactly such ‘social labour’ and attached ‘practices of co-linearization’ entail in practice beyond the ‘reinvestment of certain acts with joyful affects’ or even amorous passions towards the master and his desire, be the master a boss, a fashion designer or a brand. Another question is, however, are we really blind to this social labour? To answer these questions, we must step into the territory of practice, where devising strategies of capture is tightly connected to profit, but before that, let me briefly outline some of the current marketing premises with which the designers also operate.

‘Finding a way back to love’: Affect and materiality of ideology

Kevin Roberts, the CEO of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, has argued that what brands need, in order to succeed in the contemporary market, is to find their way back to love (Roberts, 2004). A lovemark, according to him, must tap into people’s dreams and create narratives that encourage passion and commitment; it must be loved and respected ‘beyond reason’. By mixing the brand message or its ‘ethos’ into seductive fragrances, design and music, the lovemark is meant to acquire an ambient presence. Such immersive ambient spaces are deliberately created to intensify the experience of the customers and to ‘influence the unconscious’ (Van Praet, 2012), while orienting the induced joyful affects in the direction of the brand and translating them into profit. These strategies are intended to operate covertly and be invisible to the customer.

But inducing affects is one thing, directing them another. For the purpose of directing these affects aroused by sensory branding, Roberts proposes the strategy of mythmaking, of framing them within a larger narrative structure of the brand. In practice, his advice means transforming brand ideology into a set of aesthetic, sensory and material experiences and practices set within an ambient environment, accompanied by a compelling narrative. The reorientation of the emphasis from the discursive towards the aesthetic, material, sensory, ambient and affective suggests an implicit understanding on the part of marketing professionals that ideology, on whose power they rely to sell, is most effective in its practical or material form of everyday acts, rituals and behaviours (Althusser, 2008). It does not matter what people say they believe, so long as they act in alliance with the master-desire of the brand.

While economists still appear reluctant to critically engage with the fantasy of the rational homo oeconomicus driven by calculated self-interest, marketing experts have strayed away, endorsing a vision of an ‘irrational market subject’, an impulsive shopper thrown around by affects. Fashion designers in particular know well that their trade is not about utility or rational choice, but about carefully designed narratives and production of new ritual venues and events. Designers and marketers have also understood the key insight of ‘neurological Spinozism’, namely that our relations to out material surroundings are of an emotional nature and that without emotion we would be left totally unable to decide (Damasio, 1996, 2003). And so, increasing amounts of ‘aesthetic work’ (Böhme, 2003) go into the production of seductive (Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012) and affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009) that embed the ‘ethos’ or ideology of the brand in a chosen space-time rather than bombarding the target audience with direct advertisement (Gobé and Zyman, 2001).

Invisible ‘atmospheric affects’, as we can read in the Journal of Business Research, are a new way of creating value, making profit and gaining a share of the customer (Babin and Attaway, 2000). The social labour of aligning desires of potential consumers with the master-desire of the brand culminates in designing experience. Experience design (XD) has become a serious interdisciplinary subject taught at design colleges across the world, drawing on disciplines as diverse as cognitive science, haptics, ethnography, and so on. The main concern of XD is to induce desired affective and emotional reaction of ‘participants’ rather than consumers, and to transform these affects into loyal behaviours (Pullman and Gross, 2004). Covert advertising strategies of co-linearization, that attempt to engage audiences seemingly spontaneously or even plant fake grassroots movements (astroturfing), have become part of larger efforts ‘at “casualizing” the exercise of marketing power’ (Serazio, 2013: 30), of inscribing it into everyday material practices. Direct advertising of the ‘Uncle Sam’ type, who was pointing at us to join the army, is being replaced by the self-effacement of advertisers, resulting in a proliferation of strategies of subtle, deliberately invisible consumer governance through which, as Serazio (2013) argued, subjects are disciplined to spend and throw themselves passionately into debt – with joy. And so the US military has replaced the old Uncle Sam with a free-to-download computer game devoid of any explicit injunction to join the army and yet demanding participation while effectively socializing the player in the key army codes. They say that the most powerful PR and marketing is of the invisible kind (Cutlip, 1994), joyfully embraced. But the question is – are we really as blind to the ‘invisible marketing’ as these experts suggest? And if not, why is it that we still fall for those tricks?

I think that we should not underestimate the player here. Even when advertising is deliberately covert, chances are he knows well that the game produced by the US military is intended to ‘turn him’, but still he plays it and takes pleasure in it. Knowing better does not rob the game of its efficiency – to the contrary, what matters here is the material practice. Knowledge has very limited power to unsettle ideology; to use the Althusserian point, ‘an ideological formation co-exists simultaneously with the science that breaks with it’ (Pfaller, 2005: 110). Or, as Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly insisted, ‘it is precisely our “subversive”, “cynical” distance towards a certain ideology which subjects us to this ideology and allows it to exert its social efficiency’ (Pfaller, 2005: 115). In this sense, as we shall see, it is precisely the failure of the advertisers to be covert that subjects us to their tricks.

Anthropology, a discipline specializing in the study of the disjuncture between what people say they do and what they actually do, can provide us with some examples here. In what follows, we encounter two designers and their strategies of capture: very practical, material and ritualistic. Both have their niche market and profit by effectively mobilizing the affects of their devoted customers. This again does not mean that we should imagine these ‘devoted customers’, who often call the designers their guru and seek his private darshan, ⁴ as some mysterious dupes that really buy into the whole idea of the designer having magic transformative powers, and who really believe that buying his clothes will fulfil all their dreams. No, to the contrary, the customers are typically well aware that it is a game they play – they act ‘as if’ the designer had such powers.

Take the example of the wealthy women who patronize their favourite designer. They often visit his studios, ⁵ opulent ambient spaces with luxurious interior, libraries, relaxing music and sultry scent; there, together with the designer, they indulge in ‘celebrating Indianness’, in admiring the heritage of the nation, the handwoven silks and embroideries (Kuldova, 2016). The designer tells stories of the maharajas and their tastes in luxury, the women try on his clothes while he adjusts little details, telling them how much they resemble the maharanis of the past. Contrasting the studio to the noise, pollution and poverty on the streets just outside, the women describe it as an oasis of peace, as a world apart. It becomes an enclosed ritual space, a play-sphere out of the ordinary. The women’s visits follow almost a scripted pattern each time, from the greetings, followed by tea, champagne or whisky on the rocks, to socialite gossip, admiration of textile heritage, private updates, selection of pieces, trying on, fitting discussion, final order, relief, kisses on the cheek, goodbye. The women appear excited, seduced by their own playing of the roles of the designer’s disciples (in terms of taste) and of his benevolently generous patrons (in terms of buying power). The celebration of the greatness of India, its heritage and future potential, appears to particularly enchant the women as they touch embroideries from across India, taking pride in their culture and imagining themselves as its neo-aristocratic leaders.

And yet, when the women leave the studio, back in their chauffer-driven cars amidst the chaos, heat, and dirt of the streets, they are quick to remark: ‘he is only after my money, what theatre he puts on again, as if he thinks that I buy all that nonsense about tradition and this great India. Look around, piles of garbage, thank God for air-conditioning!’ ⁶ The cynical attitude, a pattern rather than an exception, should not detract us from the material fact that these women enthusiastically participate in the ritual and they pay up. What is at stake is the capture of the power of acting; hence what matters is the joyful repetitive participation in the ritual. Therefore neither the designer, typically equally cynical about his own practice, nor the customer have to share the illusion they enact for that illusion to be effective in practice; instead the ritual appears as if performed for a naïve observer (who might actually believe). We are dealing here with what Robert Pfaller (2014) describes as ‘illusions without owners’, i.e. an illusion that no one really believes in, and yet one that is for that matter no less powerful and no less capable of structuring reality; to the contrary, it functions as a source of pleasure.

When played out in the studio, within the enclosed and carefully designed commercial ritual space, the illusion grows in its affective power. The power of play resides in its ability to induce such heightened affect, a ‘sacred seriousness’, as Johan Huizinga (1955) has argued. Hence, the ‘psychic intensity produced during play … is greater than the extent of affect that appears otherwise in life’ (Pfaller, 2014: 74) – talking of the greatness of India within the studio can easily bring tears to customers’ eyes, but rarely has reality the same capacity to induce affective responses. In real life, the same customers remain indifferent to the nation or to the poor on the streets, yet when at a charity gala they are moved by the screened, carefully edited, stories of the nation’s destitute and by theatrical speeches made in their name. This logic of the ambient studio as a gated play-sphere where a ritual unfolds is replicated on a large scale during the elaborately staged fashion shows; there, the commercial ritual makes people move together.

JJ Valaya, Indian business neo-aristocracy and the commercial rituals

One aspect is the deliberate production of ambient affective atmospheres and spaces, aimed at arousing joyful affects; another is how people collectively move within such spaces. It is largely in the collective movement that one embraces the embedded ideologies and brand mythologies. Here the importance of staged events comes most to the fore. As within the private realm of the studio, so at other venues, the profit-oriented designers aim at an ecstatic state of shared excitement capable of aligning people’s affects with their master-desire. Hence, fashion shows should be as powerful as a sacred ritual celebration, resulting in ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim, 1965), i.e. an alignment of the affective states that produce a sense of belonging in the participants, a social glue – a ‘fusion of particular sentiments into one common sentiment’ (Durkheim, 1965: 262). While rituals can arouse powerful passions and sway people, these passions need to be directed; affects understood as unbounded energy can certainly push us to act, but the question is in what direction they push us.

As Yves Citton argued, affects can become effective only when integrated into a narrative structure or a storyline that can make sense of our experiences and structure our future paths of action – ‘we feel in and through stories’ (Citton, 2010: 64); this is an argument reminiscent of the Roberts instructions for creation of lovemarks. Ritualized action here provides similarly structured and patterned frameworks as narrative, taking the form of a lived and felt narrative. As Durkheim pointed out, ritual is essential in the making and remaking of society because it exercises profound force and influence over its participants; hence it must be understood on a collective basis, existing outside our own individual subjectivity and having its own epidemiology. JJ Valaya is one of the designers who brought theatrical fashion shows to perfection, turning them into ritual spectacles culminating in standing ovations. His shows move and charm the audience, but they also feed them the narrative of India’s greatness and of the greatness of the selected crowd within the gated space, its ‘rulers’.

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Design: JJ Valaya (in the middle), ‘The Maharaja of Madrid’. India Bridal Fashion Week 2013, New Delhi. In footnote: https://thefashionslave.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/seen-at-india-bridal-fashion-week-delhi-2013-kabir-bedi-jj-kangana-ranaut-as-the-showstopper-jj-valayas-opening-show-maharaja-of-madrid.jpg

For his Azrak collection inspired by the Ottoman Empire and showcased at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week 2012, JJ Valaya ⁷ created a lavish stage set. It featured replicas of a lively Turkish bazaar with trademark chandeliers glittering above it, balconies and domes at the backdrop, musicians Volga Tunca and Christian Chose Vare, belly dancers moving through the scenery and aerial dance performed by gymnasts on fabric trails. While the models walked the ramp like royalty, the stage was decorated by fake bazaar people, by impoverished embroiderers and craft sellers impersonated by theatre students, all painted in blue. Like other top designers for the rich, Valaya’s shows are a powerful ritualistic spectacle of elitist distinction steeped in embellishment, ornamentation, texture, detailing, and craft, pregnant with uncontrollable references to the past and aristocracy that transgresses any imagined boundaries of time and space. The more the elite business clientele insists that they deserve their wealth based on their meritocratic achievement and hard work, the more they seem to buy into the neo-aristocratic aesthetics that invokes hereditary privilege and strict hierarchies; the aesthetic reveals here the actual character of ‘competitive inequality’ in India that more often than not reproduces hereditary privilege (Béteille, 2002).

As Valaya regularly proclaims, he is determined to show the world the new India, resplendent with the aura of blue-blooded elegance, innovative craftsmanship and modern sensibilities. For his show one year later, The Maharaja of Madrid, Valaya placed on the stage a huge white replica of a Spanish battleship, hinting at India’s conquest of the world. The show culminated with the show-stopping actors Kabir Bedi, impersonating the phantasmatic Maharaja of Madrid, and Kangana Ranaut as the maharaja’s daughter. Kabir Bedi walked the ramp proudly, with a touch of royal pomp, inciting the ovation of the audience. Inspired by Spanish nobility, the collection combined elements such as Spanish headgear with heavy Indian royal style. Valaya did away with the first row, replacing it by a lounge with tables covered with wine and cheese. The audience was dazzled, emotions running high. The neo-aristocratic aesthetic placed within the narrative framework of the conquest of the world by the few at the top has provided the necessary direction to the induced joyful affects. Playing with the notion of conquest by evoking the Spanish or Ottomans and projecting their exploits on the canvas of contemporary and future India, these fashion shows tap directly into the dreams of mastering time and space prevalent among the business elite.

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Design: JJ Valaya, ‘Azrak’. Wills Lifestyle Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2012. In footnote: http://akkidokie.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/tps_32921.jpg

The spectacular show is a result of months of preparation and collaborations with artists, stage designers, musicians, photographers and, most importantly, other brands. The whole show depends on numerous sponsorships – no bottle of wine or whisky served is accidental (Kuldova, 2015), all elements of the environment are soaked in more or less visible commercial messages, feeding off each other’s power and creating a total ambient environment, a hyper-designed space for the theatrical rituals. Great amounts of social labour go into developing ambient spaces, theatrical fashion ramps and ritual practices that take place within such spaces; from the repeated security checks, seating orders, pre- and post-show gossiping and refreshments, to the after-parties. But while all these events surrounding the shows tend to reproduce internal hierarchies between socialites, celebrities, old wealth, new wealth, wannabes, fashionistas, bloggers, designers, their fans and their patrons, businessmen, promoters, advertisers and models, during the show, if successful, these internal hierarchies for a moment vanish as the audience collectively indulges in the fantasy staged in front of them. The wish to re-live this powerful moment often structures their future actions – purchases – against their better knowledge that it is intended to do exactly that.

Indeed, there are shows that amount to little more than presentations of clothes, lacking the emotional charge and theatricality, sterile in comparison to JJ Valaya’s shows that really mobilize the affects of the audience, even against their own will. Even a critical journalist, who normally likes to expose the hypocrisy of New Delhi’s elite, told me that she cannot help but fall for the magic of Valaya’s shows: ‘they just move you, you can’t do anything about it, even if you keep trying to resist it’. ⁸ Framing, wording and editing are as crucial here as ambience, lighting, music and ritualized action – the silence before the fashion show, the anticipation, the male voice resonating in the hall: ‘please take your seats as we are now about to commence the show; out of respect to designers we urge you to silence your mobile phones …’, the silence before the first tones of the music, dancers and artists anticipating the first model, claps, snaps, escalating music, opulent pieces, repeat, showstoppers, the parade, the designer kissed and applauded, standing ovations, admirations, thanks. Every move is rehearsed and timed, nothing is spontaneous or accidental. To increase the power of the show, Valaya dresses not only models but also people of significant social power; industrialists, pop historians, businessmen, socialites and actors walk the ramp for him and pose in his art photography (Valaya’s foray into the world of art was sponsored by Glenfiddich whisky), believing that in the manner of sympathetic magic (Frazer, 2009) his clothes will appropriate the power of the wearer, consequently transmitted onto the buyer.

Even outside the show, a lot is invisibly scripted. Indian designers for whom haute couture is the major source of income, as ready-made lines are still limited, commonly provide selected prestigious individuals, typically influential socialites, opinion makers, artists and other glitterati, free design pieces in the hope that their prestige will transmit onto the brand. These socialites operate ‘undercover’ for the designer, spreading a good word about him/her while appearing as genuine customers. This reminds us of the turn of the century Parisian couturiers’ covert strategies of co-linearization when they used very similar methods of creating a positive reputation for themselves. But even here, knowing about the existence of these strategies does not make them less effective. I do not know if JJ Valaya really distributes his haute couture pieces freely to key opinion makers, but I heard people say that. No matter the reality, what is interesting is that all who said that and frowned at the practice of being ‘covertly’ manipulated still owned and flaunted his creations. Again, the awareness about being pushed in certain directions does not prevent the mobilization of affects and their alignment with the master-desire from being effective. This is especially true when pride and elite belonging are at stake; both are inscribed in material practices and are a matter of maintaining public role and face (Sennett, 1977).

Most of the designers’ clients are themselves businessmen, who know well the tricks of the trade, always looking for the next hot thing in marketing. It seems that the better they know the kind of strategies of capture used against them when they mingle in the fashion weeks, the easier they let themselves be seduced and shop till they drop. ‘A “sacred seriousness”, an extreme affective investment occurs here, precisely where there is a “better knowledge” … obedience is often commented on with ironic and even self-despising expressions’ (Pfaller, forthcoming: 3) such as, ‘I am such a fool for buying into this, it is really a waste, you know? One can get the same stuff done elsewhere cheaper, just copy it, same quality, after all, it is the craftsmen who do it. Still I buy Valaya’. ⁹ ‘The mobilizing force of this ideology is considerable …. Obeying its requirements may bring relief, in some cases pride, often joy or pleasure. Disobedience would cause shame, anxiety or feelings of uncanniness’ (Pfaller, forthcoming: 3), especially in a society where maintaining public image and role is imperative.

Echo-chambers or else utopian islands of plenty

And there is no escaping these rituals and plays when one belongs to the Indian elite. There is no escaping the gated hyper-designed luxury spaces infused with the same mythology and aesthetics of distinctly Indian elitist and neo-aristocratic exceptionalism. Private farmhouses, five star hotels or palaces and luxury shopping malls follow the same logic as that of the theatrical stage set of Valaya’s show. Elite spaces are ‘islands of sanity, security and peace’, as one of my Indian friends called them, but also spaces that demand performance and high investment in appearances. They are profoundly utopian spaces where past greatness merges with unlimited world luxuries and the inevitable future conquest of the world by the Indian elite. As John Carey remarked, ‘paradises, like utopias, tend to be on islands. This may be because they suggest seclusion and purity. But it has also been pointed out that the human foetus is an island. So the island-paradise may reflect man’s longing for the protective fluid that once surrounded him’ (Carey, 1999: 11). Each venue, including the homes, is gated, protected from the outside world of poverty by an actual physical gate, hired guards, and security systems (Brosius, 2009; Waldrop, 2004). To the elite bodies that move from one gated space to another, transported by luxury cars, observing the dusty, polluted, impoverished, and sweaty outside through the darkened window, luxury spaces do function as a protective fluid; they are like an echo-chamber where the same ideas resonate, intensified, amplified. The elite inhabitants are well aware of their own little bubble, of its boundaries, its rules and its rituals. But most of the rituals within these spaces are commercial rituals – fashion shows, exhibition openings, launches of special editions.

In the same way that models are often hired to come to elite nightclubs and roam around with free drinks merely to beautify the space by their presence, brand messages, opinions, and fashions circulate and become part of the ambience of elite spaces. The ambience itself is a product of collaborating brands, rather than competing brands. Designers have often emphasized to me that coming together enriches everyone; capital accumulates through inclusion, not through exclusion, as we are often led to believe. When we step back, we see that JJ Valaya uses the same neo-aristocratic aesthetics, mythology of eliteness and Indian exceptionalism, revitalization of Indian crafts and heritage, and artistic nationalism as most other designers at the top of the hierarchy, all heavily supported by ‘diverse’ alcohol brands (albeit all owned by Pernod Ricard), signing up the same assortment of selected artists and so on. The top segment recites the same mantra, irrespective of the staged individuality of the brands; there is more sameness than difference, more repetition than uniqueness. The interiors of the spaces are designed by the same selected recognized creatives, ‘curated’ objects and artworks come from the same limited set of artists and brands, clothes worn come from the same designers and few western luxury brands, and so on. Even though extremely cynical about the whole business of showing off and dressing up, the elite invest great amounts of its power of acting into reproduction of what are largely brand mythologies; they religiously collect premium cards, post images of themselves on Instagram in designer fashion, and hire interior designers for every festival and celebration. Their public face is at stake.

Indian Gen X and the passionate madness of Bhootsavaar

While the huge investment in strategies of ambient governance in the elite segment of the fashion and luxury industry won’t surprise us, we often tend to think of alternative, cheaper, youth fashion as somehow different – sometimes as revolutionary, political, be it the hippies or punks, or just anti-establishment, driven by genuine passions. And yet, the few designers who have decided to create for the ‘Gen-X market’ in India use the same strategies of capture and promote very similar nationalist narratives as we have outlined in the case of elite fashion. Only here, the ultimate master-desire of the designers, i.e. their fantasy of making others identical to themselves, becomes more visible. Most designers say they desire to ‘create their own world’. We should take this statement literally here. The desire to build a powerful fashion brand is driven by nothing less than a desire to create a niche world of one’s own, where the designer’s subjects passionately and obediently buy their belonging and place in that world. As often as they speak of building their empires, so they dream of ‘loyal followers’ that are ‘passionate about the brand’. If we did not know that they were speaking of a fashion brand, we might have thought that the talk is of a religious cult What we see in youth fashion are attempts at using brand rituals and events to form ‘new’ and commodified ‘pseudo-subcultural’ social groups (in this sense, even in the case of elitist fashion, rituals serve the same function of group-formation, yet this becomes typically blurred by our perception of the elite in terms of class position).

While in the West the term Gen X is often synonymous with kids born in the ’60s and ’70s, the rockers, punks, and so on, in India the concept of Gen X (‘x’ here stands simply for next) is applied to youngsters between 17 and 30. The Indian metropolitan Gen X is the digitally connected, post-neoliberal reforms generation comprised largely of the members of the urban middle and upper classes. It is the praised and condemned Facebook generation that lives in the globalized India, a generation of India’s exemplary ‘consumer citizens’. As such, Gen X, much like the elite, refers to a rather small segment of Indian society, no matter how hyped in the media that equate it with India’s shining future (Steele, 2008). While on the one hand the hope of the future, on the other, as compared to the generation of their parents, who were often concerned with saving money and with secure governmental jobs, the youngsters are perceived as great wastrels, defined by their insatiable consumption habits, big dreams and rising debt. It is hard to tell to what degree the hip and cool Gen X is a creation of marketing and media, or to what degree is it an effect of passionately embracing the master-desire of youth brands and politico-economic ideologues.

Nitin Bal Chauhan is one of the few of India’s second generation of fashion designers ¹⁰ who decided to create for Gen X, with his brand Bhootsavaar (‘Possessed’). Nitin’s middle-class background enabled him to see both the plight of the underprivileged and the charms of elitism, and motivated his desire to create for the ‘like-minded crowd’. As he said:

The face of global India and Delhi is a witness to the change that they [Gen X] are creating. This eclectic mix of professionals lives by their own rules and never forgets to party hard. They are the generation behind huge turnouts at the music festivals and an ever growing night life in the city. They are the reason why more and more youngsters can imagine taking a more challenging path to lead their life. A lot of Bhootsavaar is also bought by teenagers and college students who aspire to strike a different chord with the world around them. Bhootsavaar follows a simple ideology of following your heart. Everyone is mad about something and that feeling and compulsion that comes from within to do that thing is the spark that one needs to acknowledge and respect. ¹¹

Within this narrative it is not the wealthy elite but the mass of youth that will deliver India’s future prosperity and progress (Das, 2000; Kamdar, 2007), while enjoying the benefits of their labour, according to the motto ‘work hard, party harder’. In this sense, while the brand aesthetically looks ‘subcultural’ and ‘alternative’, it in fact utilizes one of the dominant narratives of future India directed largely at the aspiring middle classes. The brand mythology of Bhootsavaar matches the larger narratives of transformation in globalized India and the youth as its driving force, while giving an aesthetic form both to the myths and to the very notions of youth, creativity and passion. As Nitin says, he creates for ‘people who constantly push themselves outside their comfort zone’, for people ‘from various walks of life – musicians, DJs, artists, graffiti artists, social entrepreneurs, graphic designers, tattoo artists, architects, dancers, theatre artists’ and so on. Nitin is as skilled in associating the right brands and collaborating with the right people as is JJ Valaya. Again, in his practice we observe the same emphasis on (1) engaging audiences through affective ambient environments, (2) directing these affects through carefully framed narratives about a distinct emergent class of young creatives and (3) engaging the audiences in ritualized fashion events. In order to achieve maximum impact and for his products to appear spontaneously embraced, as a true grassroots desire, Nitin employs regular people to walk the ramp for him, or to appear in creative fashion presentations staged in clubs and bars. As Nitin says:

When common people who have style or are achievers walk the ramp, I think it creates an aspiration value inside the audience. The ramp no longer belongs to the well-built and beautiful. In fact, the ramp becomes a place for the real, unabashed and talented people. This is the future of fashion and this is the way Bhootsavaar is trying to build a community around it.

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Design and image copyright: Nitin Bal Chauhan.

Nitin, too, collaborates actively with a whole army of taste and style makers, from designers and artists to musicians, and no less with party and event venues such as the bar Turquoise Cottage in Vasant Vihar, known for its ‘underground’ and yet privileged invite-only parties. The same gated structures re-appear; the echo-chamber effect is a clear aspiration as new venues and events keep popping up, to which the same people are invited time and again. Nitin wants to see his ‘Bhootsavaar family growing’. As of today, it comprises brand endorsers such as music bands like Menwhopause, Reggae Rajahs, Indigo Children, Featherheads, Drop, Minute of decay, Fuzz culture, Mob Marley, Totara Jack, Kern Dalton Collective, and numerous others, break dancers and hip hoppers from the Brooklyn Academy of Dance & Arts (BADA) in New Delhi, or graffiti artists, photographers, and so forth. Nitin puts up almost weekly online interviews with ‘Bhootsavaars’, i.e. passionate youngsters working in creative industries, who share their life stories, enhancing the larger brand narrative about the rise of a contemporary hip, young and wild creative class that lives on its own terms, unburdened by tradition. Within the echo-chamber of the Bhootsavaar family, the myth of the great Indian creative youth that will bring the nation to new horizons is effectively reproduced through very material practices, in events, gatherings, launches, parties, music festivals and interaction in social media environments.

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Design and image copyright: Nitin Bal Chauhan.

And yet again, few of the Bhootsavaars do really explicitly buy into the vision. Upon questioning they say things like: ‘India is screwed, nothing will ever happen here. Let’s just party and forget it.’ But still, when on camera, on the ramp or in interview, they talk of their passion and their desire to change India – and that is what matters, the material reproduction of the ideology of national greatness that pushes problems, inequalities and misery into invisibility. Of course, privately they tend to distance themselves from such beliefs, saying that it is all just theatre, and that to succeed they have to play along, maintain their face. They know quite well that the vast majority of young people in India are burdened by traditional roles, poverty, aspirational pressures, feelings of lack and inadequacy, structural violence and so on. They know that those with real holes in their trousers, and not the designed Bhootsavaar holes, are ‘expelled’ (Sassen, 2014) and not welcome in the ‘new’ India of shopping malls, IT industry and futuristic smart cities. The problem is not lack of knowledge or ignorance. And yet, in their everyday acts they reproduce precisely those mythologies that expel the impoverished majority. It is precisely here that we see ideology operating at the level of enjoyment that leads to passionate participation, driven by collective libidinal investment. Both versions of the belief in India’s future superpowerdom are smoothly incorporated into simple brand ideologies, mobilizing collective affects of the privileged consumers. No matter how different in their aesthetics, both youth and elitist fashion are framed within the same overarching narratives of India’s greatness and rise to power, and indeed use identical strategies of capture.

Mobilization of affects and the pleasures of illusions

In both cases, the strategies of capture employed by the designers utilize the power of play and of rituals set within ambient and gated play-spheres separated from the everyday by gates and ‘entry rituals’. Specifically, they utilize the powers of play and ritual to induce heightened affective states (Huizinga, 1955). Here, commercial rituals, as any other rituals, function not only as a social glue (Durkheim, 1965) but also as vehicles of social group formation, be they the elite ‘rulers’ or ‘India’s future creative leaders’. Indian culture at large has a great sense for rituals, theatricality and performance in everyday life, dressing up for others, pretending for others, and taking both great pleasure and pride in its own theatrical performances. In this sense, the carefully staged branded rituals feed off this culture that already privileges ritual play, and that is why they are also so effective. Paradoxically, we see that no matter how much the advertisers aim at self-effacement, at complete invisibility, they still cannot fool people into believing that they are not present, and yet what they might perceive as their failure is their victory. Their failure to create ‘authentic’, ‘genuine’ or ‘real’ spaces makes their attempts at seduction effective. The designers’ clientele indulge in lavish spending and take pleasure in the fashion shows precisely against their better knowledge, perfectly aware that the whole theatre is aimed at their seduction. The same goes for the belief in and carefully cultivated illusion of the greatness of India that is celebrated time and again by the designers in their theatrical shows (Kuldova, 2014a). As Robert Pfaller argued, there ‘can be no desire without knowing better’ (Pfaller, 2014: 93), showing that the extraordinary power of play to fascinate is ‘bound to one condition’, precisely the knowledge that it is ‘just’ a play – ‘a player who does not know that the game is play cannot be captured by “sacred seriousness”. He or she remains trapped in profane seriousness’ (Pfaller, 2014: 91). Hence, we remain ‘absorbed by the illusion of play only if and when we see through it. Knowledge does not help us gain emotional distance – on the contrary, our intellectual distancing pushes us into the throes of the affective captivity of play’ (Pfaller, 2014: 93). It is precisely this power of play in service of commercial mythologies that makes people passionately embrace them, while providing them not only with pleasure but also with a collective sense of belonging, pride and self-esteem, even if they hold the whole commercial theatre in great contempt, or precisely because of that.