Craft capital

Rahul Mishra took his craftsmen, an Indian sari and a lehenga to his 20th fashion show in Paris

- NAMRATA ZAKARIA

When Rahul Mishra presented his eighth fashion show at the Paris. Haute Couture Week on July 3-he has previously shown 12 times at the Paris Fashion Week-visitors witnessed something unique: Two Indian embroiderers, Afzalbhai and Noore Alam, sitting by the runway with their needlework stands, stitching glorious colours into the cloth.

Craft has been Mishra's mainstay ever since he launched his label in 2006 and then again, after an academic stint in Milan in 2009. He has been vocal time and again about the importance of craftsmen to the Indian arts and fashion, and most certainly its semi-organised rural economy. In an earlier interview he told me, "Luxury is not consumption, luxury is participation." Mishra, 43, is the only designer to initiate and advocate 'reverse migration, where he encourages artisans living in cramped city shanties to return home to their villages, and pays them an urban salary so that they can build rural economies. His Gandhian approach to fashion seems impractical to every other designer, and yet Mishra goes to Paris season after season on his own penny.

His new collection-'We, The People' was born last year when he read that India would soon overtake China to become the most populous nation in the world. "We learned in every social science class that overpopulation was a bad thing. But our people are our biggest strength, or can be turned into our biggest strength," he says with a smile. "I feel my label is as democratic and inclusive as my nation is. It is by the people, for the people and of the people."