All About Avanti

The first Indian model in history to open the Versace runway, beating out the likes of Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, Avanti Nagrath makes her Vogue India cover debut. DIVYA BALA meets the girl of the moment blazing a trail through the international fashion scene.

 

Picture this: you're a model from Delhi in Milan for the first time, fresh out of your teens. You're somewhere in the sprawling, sumptuous headquarters of Versace, perhaps feeling a little out of your depth.

You've made it through a room full of 70 other hopeful models and been approved by five gatekeepers of one of fashion's most storied luxury houses to be booked for your first international runway. A living legend-in this case, Donatella Versace is overseeing your fitting, ensuring the precision tailoring of the sharply-cut black suit you are wearing lives up to the Versace standard.

Suddenly, she flicks back her curtain of flaxen hair to look at you and, in her gravely Italian drawl says, "Do you know you're opening the show?" It's the kind of fairy-tale story that model dreams are made of, one that is Avanti Nagrath's reality. However, the 20-year-old has trouble believing it, even almost a year on. It was then that she burst onto the international fashion scene, opening the Versace autumn/winter 2022-23 show at Milan Fashion Week on 25 February.

"It still feels like a dream when I think about it-even while I was walking the show it felt like a dream. There were so many models around, it was Bella [Hadid]. It was Gigi [Hadid], and I'm the one opening the show?" Nagrath recalls, speaking from her home in Delhi, where she is taking a break before returning to the circuit in January.