My first sojourn at the Paris Fashion Week was many moons ago, at a time when Madhu Sapre and Milind Soman were our reigning super models and attempting to take their first baby steps, albeit gingerly, on the mighty catwalks at Salle Rivoli beneath the hallowed Louvre museum itself. 

Fashion shows then were a somewhat sombre affair. Everybody invariably wore black, and the pecking order of the front row was in its infancy and not necessarily a matter of life and death like today. The humble camera reigned supreme as even the mobile phone was a little twinkle in Nokia’s eye. The paparazzi were obedient and almost well behaved. And mercifully, the ubiquitous smart phone and the all-pervading Instagram ‘show and tell’ culture had not completely overwhelmed and corrupted our collective conscience. 

It was difficult to imagine that one day an Indian designer could storm that haute couture firmament with authority and create a visual extravagance of scale and panache, outdoing many established and legendary fashion brands. The sheer poetry of form and graphic sensibility that Gaurav Gupta unveiled on the Parisian catwalk both delighted and  invigorated my somewhat jaded photographic eyes.

I believe that fashion shows are primarily a brand statement of intent and creativity.

They are projections of wearable art for an audience hungry for some visual entertainment. After all, the mundane fashion that we subscribe to in our own miserable attires cannot possibly be entertaining on a catwalk with hungry expectant eyes waiting to consume their visual drug for the day. 

But what has gone totally haywire and turned the fashion spectacle into a true theatre of the absurd is the audience itself. It’s no longer about anything but the insatiable desire to broadcast and curate those ten microseconds where one is actually in close proximity to fame.

When Cardi B arrived fashionably late in her parrot green showstopper outfit accompanied by her 168 million Instagram followers, it created a minor riot and turned the front-row celebrities and till then mighty influencers into a desperate wannabe mob. They were fighting among themselves to squeeze into that one elusive frame with the pop star in the hope that it would provide them that one fleeting visual spark and succour that justifies a hollow existence.

For me, in that very instant, the front row became the ‘Death Row’. A magical surreal setting with the condemned holding on to that last glimmer of hope before fashion could hang itself. 

And much before Beyoncé found her new clothes.