Editor's Cut

From shaping catwalk presentations and edit ing collections to styling campaigns, fashion magazine editors are collaborating with the industry’s f inest and changing style narratives

- Kimi Dangor

At the recently concluded Summer/Resort 2016 edition of Lakmé Fashion Week, stylist and creative consultant Ekta Rajani worked at a feverish pace, styling multiple shows a day, editing collections, mediating between designers, preventing wardrobe malfunctions, perfecting a pallu drape here, artfully layering a jacket there. And all this apart from her duties as Grazia fashion director. Rajani’s keen eye for aesthetics added cornrows to the hair at Ekam’s show in keeping with the label’s urban street style credo, gave Hemang Agarwal’s models a graphic “almost geometric” dark eye, and provided a whimsical contrast to Antar Agni’s severe all-black line in the form of wispy flyaway tendrils of hair, spelling dark romance in an instant.

Elsewhere, Edward Lalrempuia, fashion director of Harper’s Bazaar caught selective shows between styling the ramp presentations of Kallol Datta 1955, Suhani Pittie, Arjun Saluja and Kunal Rawal among others. We noted fine details like the prose written on the faces of Pittie’s models depicting the anguish of refugees and displaced persons from around the world for her emotionally-charged show ‘The Nowhere People’. Or the glitter lips that added an instant pop to Datta’s otherwise stark lineup for ‘Low Res 2017’.

What we took away the most was the fact that show stylists and creative consultants are now, more than ever, steering fashion collections as much as the designers, lending their inimitable touch to runway presentations.