Copycat Fashion

I accessed my Facebook account after a ten day break, and the status updates gave me a crash course on what I missed while on holiday. Besides the tragic news about the plane, rail and bus disasters in India, I learnt that Kites, the movie is an utter waste of Rs 200, and temperatures in Delhi hovered around 44 degrees. But the biggest news on my Contacts List was the opening of Zara, the high fashion store at Delhi’s Select Citywalk mall. “Zara India Rocks!” screamed one excited update and “Cheapest Zara in the world opens in India” said another.

For the uninitiated, Zara is a Spanish clothing brand that specialises in copying the latest catwalk lines, way faster and probably better than the original labels can sell them. Maybe in some exalted circles it isn’t really cool to be seen sporting a Zara label, but hey, if it’s good enough for Sienna Miller and Lara Dutta, it’s good enough for most of us. In Europe, among the high street labels, the craze these days is for celebrity-designed, celebrity look-alike fashion: take H&M, a label that Kate Moss and Madonna design for. But Zara relies on a bunch of anonymous 25-year-olds straight out of design school to churn out a pretty fantastic product, not original maybe, but who cares as long as it looks good?