Interview with Darlie Koshy

Darlie Koshy
Darlie Koshy
DG & CEO
ATDC & IAM
ATDC & IAM

Institutes need to focus on the business of fashion
Dr. Darlie Koshy's pioneering contributions to fashion and design education over the last three decades have been well acknowledged by stakeholders. Koshy's efforts towards institution building are well known too. A doctorate in management from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Koshy has been also trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York in fashion marketing & merchandising, and had established the fashion management department at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) New Delhi which he headed as senior professor and chairperson from 1987 to 2000. He has also been the recipient of a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) fellowship for research in India's destination markets for apparel (i.e. the United States, Europe and Japan). Koshy is currently on the boards of Future Lifestyle Fashions (FLF), Lakme-IMG Fashion Week, the Apparel & Home Furnishing Sectoral Skill Council, besides being an executive committee member of the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC). His Indian Design Edge (Roli Books, 2008) traces the evolution of Indian design and envisions a future of design-enabled India that has an edge in innovation and design in the global context. As director and governing council member of the iconic National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad from 2000 to 2009, Koshy initiated and developed the National Design Policy which was approved by the government in 2007. The Apparel Training & Design Centre (ATDC) being the largest vocational training institute for the apparel sector, along with the Institute of Apparel Management (IAM) headed by Koshy as director-general and chief executive officer, have set up over 200 directly-run ATDC-AVI and ATDC-SMART centres across India in 23 states and have also trained over 2 lakh candidates. Koshy obviously is one of the best persons to speak about the state of fashion education in India. Here, he discusses the subject threadbare in a freewheeling interview with Subir Ghosh.

Do you think the fashion education system in India is able to meet industry requirements at all-both in terms of numbers as well as quality? For an industry that is forever-growing, quality fashion institutes need to be established much more than they are. Do you agree?

The world over, various segments of the textiles-apparel industry do not see themselves as just 'raw materials' of fashion, but as an 'integrated global fashion system' in which cotton growers/manmade fibre producers, fabric manufacturers, designers, fashion-related media-all work towards promoting the current or forthcoming fashions for garments, home furnishings, lifestyle products and accessories, so as to ensure better retail sales in keeping the industry moving on a selfsustained basis. Unfortunately in India, this cycle has not been established so far. Turf protection by each segment, and not having a holistic view (of the subject at hand) have created serious impediments in the growth of the textiles apparel industry. The most unfortunate part is that there is hardly any dialogue between each other and also among one another. Only an 'integrated fashion' system that collectively moves towards creating consumer pull and demand for products can effectively create global leadership. Only then can the education system be productively interwoven and used.

For example, the textile spinning and weaving units will hardly employ a fashion graduate from the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), or a textile designer from the National Institute of Design (NID), as most of the designs are dictated by foreign buyers. Similarly, fashion designers are still an enigma for the exports sector which has not been able to optimally use them except as 'merchandisers'. Similarly, Indian retailers find the practical aspect of commercial designs probably missing in the graduates. NIFT was never supposed to have too many centres, and now there are nearly 20 centres of NIFT! Unlike the London College of Fashion (London), Fashion Institute of Technology (New York), Domus Academy (Milan), etc, which have made global fame with a single campus, NIFT was set up to produce high quality designers, merchandisers /market leaders and top production managers to change the face of the textiles-apparel industry in a global context.

Between 1987 and 1995, NIFT was able to produce many outstanding designers who have made a mark- like Ritu Beri, Ashish N Soni, Rina Dhaka, Narender Kumar and a host of such designers, following which you can see the flow has become a trickle. Similarly, the marketing graduates of that period like Sanjiv Mohanty is now managing director of Jabong, tipped shortly to become managing director of Levi's. Raymond managing director Gaurav Mahajan or Manjula Tiwari Malik, who is the chief executive of Cover Story, or garment technology graduates like Manish Bharti in Li &Fung and Padma Reddy in Triburg and a host of others, who have become leaders in their respective fields, were all products of NIFT Delhi between 1988 and 1996. Other NIFTs came up in the late 1990s, though with good buildings and infrastructure, offering the chance to redefine fashion education in a local context, but the leadership needed to break the glass ceiling were found to be missing.

Unfortunately, NIFT did not have a proper human resources policy and just under a decade it lost all the FIT-trained senior faculty members like Asha Baxi, Elsa D'Souza, Ela Pally, Mitra Dewars, Chetna Bhatt, David Johnson, Archana Shastri, Geeti Sen, Sangeeta Shroff, Jatin Bhatt, Ramalingam, Vidya Sagar and Dhapodkar and host of others, including myself. Of course, I left after 13 years of working as head of fashion management at NIFT New Delhi to become director of NID Ahmedabad. This unfortunate exodus took place because the administrators foisted from the ministry of textiles had no real knowledge of the fashion industry, and they saw the freedom of expression as anathema, and hence suppressed all senior people, who eventually left one after the other. Today, after it became a statutory body in 2007, the main attraction is that students get degrees but the quality of education is no more the focus. At most NIFTs, including the national headquarters, officers from the administrative or revenue or forest services rule at the top, and now NIFT has a chairman who has nothing to do with fashion. I do not agree with Sunil Sethi's point that anyone can become chairperson of a specialised fashion institute like NIFT.

Look at the world over, whether at Institut Français de la Mode, Paris or at FIT New York or London College of Fashion or even any of the top fashion schools-they are all led by a group of professionals who focus on the quality of education. It is a sad story that the NIFT somewhere has lost the way, and it seems to be on a downward spiral. I don't see any research papers being published by the faculty members or any papers presented at international or even Indian seminars, and they are not even seen in the fashion shows organised by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) in Delhi or the Lakme-IMG Fashion Week in Mumbai. There has been no international activity to promote fashion in the entire last decade. NIFT is now like any other government university or college which produces degrees, but fails to promote the fashion ecosystem for the country.

On one hand, there is a need for more fashion institutes. On the other, there have been far too any NIFTs and this has diluted matters. How can one maintain a balance?

I do not think that there is need for more fashion institutes in the country any more as I think there are already 400+ universities and departments and 17 NIFTs and sufficient seats are available for the students to pursue fashion design education. The focus should be to retain the spirit of the initial years of the work of the FIT with NIFT, and the NIFT initiative with IFFTI (NIFT initiated IFFTI in 1997-98) for networking with fashion Institutions, to restore leadership. The institutes need to redefine their roles and goals in the new Digital Fashion Age with a large part of trade shifting to e-commerce and m-commerce as Alibaba and Amazon have proved to the world. The new fashion idiom is a 'distributed model'. At the local level, fashion has become no different from pizzas as it has to be delivered within a day, often thus making 'fast fashion' to capture the imagination of the youth. Our designers have to be brought up in a new fashion environment where speed, skills and imagination without boundaries matter. Couture has its place but prĂȘt, d'fusion and fast fashion require a different level of training and a new mindset where change is accepted as the 'new normal'.

Right now, among students, the most sought-after stream seems to be fashion design and fashion communications. What does industry have to say about it? Is this fascination causing a shortfall of quality human resources in other areas of the fashion industry?

In Korea or Taiwan, experts used to say that for automobile and fashion design one requires only a limited number of high quality designers, but the same require a large number of model makers or design assistants, etc. And similarly for the fashion industry, the actual demand for fashion designers will not be very huge, but more pattern-makers, design assistants, design technicians, technologists and draping assistants and numerous other lower level functionaries are required to support them. While India has a commendable number of fashion designers, they have to struggle hard to find the assistants to carry out pattern-making or other such technical construction workers who are in acute shortage. So, currently 'fashion design education' is rather imbalanced.

If you go by the new National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF) which is promoted by the Sectoral Skill Council (AMH-SSC), a socalled 'fashion designer' can be skilled in six months (540 hrs) and a certificate obtained as well, whereas a 'full-blown' fashion designer at NIFT spends four years, and a designer at NID too spends four years for completing the education. Thus, nobody is able to differentiate properly between the work of fashion designer or product designer from a product technician or design technician, or between good coins and bad coins! You will know the difference of proper duration in the case of medicine because the patient may die, and in the case of fashion, it may not have any immediate fall-out but can eventually pull down the quality of the entire industry. Just take the example of fashion design technology records at the World Skills Competitions in Leipzig (2011), London (2013) and Sao Paulo (2015). At all three events, there was a difference of about 125-150 points between the eventual winners and the Indian contestant. This means that our basic skill levels have still to go a long distance to attain world standards.

Fashion communication (FC), on the other hand, can only grow once fashion journalism is taken seriously, and fashion shows become an actual commercial medium for buyers and sellers, and there is an active media to promote it to create positive consumer trends. Today, FC remains at a rudimentary level as Indian designers have not become brands like Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, or Donna Karan, etc-which is again the result of an underdeveloped fashion ecosystem. Other courses need to be developed by working closely with the industry rather than going with outdated curricula in most cases. For example, today the all-consuming medium for most of fashion communications is Facebook even more than Google, Twitter or LinkedIn. A Facebook-generated lead costs less than ?150 whereas Google leads cost about ?800. If a designer wants a trained person to develop a digital media strategy, the designer or brand will find the going very difficult.

Nevertheless, there seems to be more emphasis on fashion design and fashion communication at the fashion institute level too. Do you agree? Do you think business/management is quite a neglected aspect that is possibly creating a big HR gap in the industry?

The fashion design institutes are not being still trusted for producing rounded managers, especially because they lack qualitative and analytical strengths. However, the original apparel marketing and merchandising programme at NIFT that later converted to a fashion management programme certainly has proven that it can produce top class managers as well. As the fashion industry moves to e-commerce and m-commerce, the new aspirants require understanding of fashion with 'business fundamentals' to become successful. Certainly, therefore, the 'business of fashion' should be a clear focus of fashion institutes to succeed in this business in the long run.

But then, fashion also needs to be global. Is the fashion education system in India able to meet international standards? How can we score over other countries?

A complete reorientation of NIFT, along with a restructuring of the textiles apparel industry to work in tandem, can bring in global leadership for India in fashion as it has got the largest creative resources base to do so. Unfortunately, our designers have to go to Sri Lanka to create a brand like Amante, or go to other countries to create designs which get noticed globally. Substantial achievements of the first generation fashion designers have upped the ante, and to some extent the domestic industry especially the bridalwear and to some extent casualwear for women today have benefited. Zara, Mango, Vero Moda, H&M, M&S are all the Indian youth's toast, but they hardly care for Indian labels, if any. This should have shown whether the Indian fashion education has succeeded or not, apart from the fact that Indian apparel exports have been stagnating since 2005.

You have earlier said that the fashion curricula needs to be both industry-led as well as capable of leading the industry. How do you see the state of affairs today?

I have explained why fashion education needs to lead the industry because a fabric-maker in Erode or a flatknit-maker in Tirupur or woolknit-maker in Ludhiana or an embroider in Rajasthan or a block printer in Bagru or a Zardozi craftsperson in Uttar Pradesh all need to see these as part of a robust fashion system working for the consumers and target groups so as to complete the cycle. This has not happened because fashion education has focused on curriculum delivery rather than creating 'leadership'. The state-of-affairs need to be changed to one of increased active interface with the Indian and international industries and fashion education system for deriving maximum synergy.

You have written about All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) norms. But there has been no progress on this front. What do you think needs to be done?

The University Grants Commission (UGC), AICTE, etc, have failed to appreciate, understand and accordingly create policies for 'creative education'. Design is the process of application of innovation. Today, innovation comes mainly from technology; combining technology and design is the new paradigm for the world of algorithm, sensors and robotics. But the UGC and AICTE consider fashion as 'applied art' and have clubbed it with other technical education. As director of NID, I had seen during my two terms (2000-2009) that one never gets invited by AICTE or UGC for any discussion on higher education, and even today being the only director who has served two terms at NID during this century and having also worked at NIFT for over a decade, I need to reiterate that design thinking and innovation are critical for Indian education to go forward. The only time when I was able to convince the AICTE was when a committee was constituted under my chairmanship in 2012 to come out with 29 courses in fashion which was subsequently approved. It would be correct to say that regulatory authorities are in a 'time warp' as the world has moved on from earlier education models.

The entry/role of foreign universities has suddenly come under a cloud. How do you think foreign universities can bridge the HR gap?

If we say that only universities can enter into foreign collaborations, it is a sad story indeed. The world over fashion institutions are standalone institutions. Fashion is a global industry. What you buy in London or Milan is what you get in AmbienceMall or Select City Walk. However, our UGC thinks that a fashion institute should not have collaborations. It has interpreted that one cannot take help of even an Indian university to expand its education. Isn't that strange for an emerging economy?

The National Design Policy of 2007 is still gathering dust. And much of the world has changed. Do you think there is a need to re-write the policy all over again?

The National Design Policy was formulated with my leadership under the aegis of Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) during 2005-07, and approved by the Cabinet in February 2007. As a result, the National Institute of Design (NID) could become an 'Institute of National Importance' in 2014, and two more NIDs could be established in Andhra Pradesh and Haryana out of the four elements stated in the policy. However, I am deeply concerned and disappointed that the India Design Council (IDC) has failed to make any progress, mainly because NID wants to keep it as its own preserve (turf) without creating a separate office or finding a separate director for the same as FDCI or Lakme Fashion Week have done, to the detriment of progress of design in the country. Between 2009 and 2016, there has been no significant international design activity in the country or any progress in design movement. I will squarely blame it on the India Design Council's leadership for having failed in continuing with the same tempo of design movement created during 2000-2008.
Published on: 14/09/2016

DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.