The first time I met Samir Modi, he was wearing red lipstick. He was making no statement whatsoever. He simply could not see why he should not.
That is the thing about people who are genuinely free. They are entirely, almost disconcertingly, unbothered by your opinion of them. Samir built Colorbar into one of the most quietly subversive businesses in Indian beauty, put the same formulation, the same finish, the same result as the world’s most expensive names into the hands of an India that had been waiting, rather patiently, for someone to make that possible. He did this while wearing whatever he pleased. We asked him every hard question we had. His answers are in this issue, and they are worth your time.
A word, because it will be asked: French Press Global carries no advertising and sells no covers. Samir Modi is here because the work demands it. That is the only criterion that has ever mattered at this magazine, and the only one that ever will.
The Cockroach Janta Party receives, in this issue, the intellectual rigour it deserves. A generation reclaimed an insult, built a movement, and rattled an establishment. That is a civilisational story, and we treat it as one.
Riya Modi’s piece on male violence, and the quiet, grinding weight placed on the women who survive it, is essential reading. It is also a portrait of what FPG’s editorial voice is becoming: precise, urgent, operating at the exact point where pop culture, politics, and fashion converge, and refusing to blink at what it finds there. Riya and Sia, our executive editor, are two of the sharpest editorial minds working in Indian media today. I have watched Riya develop over five years, nurtured her editorial instincts with considerable investment and considerable pride, and what she brings to this team as editorial lead adds real weight to what Sia and the rest of the FPG team have already built. She will, at some point, take those instincts to the international stage, and when that moment comes, she will be ready. Until then, she is ours, and this issue shows exactly why that matters.
We also cover Divyanshu Joshi, the 26-year-old model and Kartik Research store manager who drowned on 28 May 2026 in an abandoned quarry in Kerala while scouting a location for a brand advertisement. The quarry had warning boards, a documented history of fatalities, and no shoot permissions in place. For 72 hours after his death, Kartik Research, a brand that has built its entire identity around humanness and craft, said nothing. No condolence. No acknowledgement. It took journalist Aishwarya Subramanyam speaking directly and publicly on Instagram to force the conversation into the open, and only then did the statement come. We examined every gap the system left open: the absence of mandatory shoot-day safety standards, the lack of an insurance framework for models in Indian fashion, and the stoic, costly silence of a brand that had the opportunity to lead with dignity and chose, for three days, to say nothing at all. Indian fashion has needed this conversation for a long time. We are having it.
Injectables. We went there, properly. The science linking Botox to shifts in mood, emotional range, and in documented cases depression, has existed for some time. The CDSCO has been unambiguous: these are drugs, administered as drugs, regulated as drugs. We applied the accurate framing, and let the facts do the rest.
The gemstone story is urgent, and deliberately so. The Prime Minister’s call to reconsider gold has made the question of where value truly lives worth answering with rigour. We examine coloured stones as a serious asset class, the lab-grown diamond debate, and the buyback reality of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and tanzanites. What sits in a vault deserves the same intellectual seriousness as what sits in a portfolio. We applied it.
Aneeth Arora of Pero has spent seventeen years doing something the industry perpetually underestimates: building a global label on the total mastery of textile, the weaver’s hand, the dyer’s yard, the embroiderer’s frame, and nothing else. The work, at the highest possible level, and nothing besides. Sia’s profile of her is one of the finest pieces of fashion writing we have published. That is a considerable thing to say, and we mean it entirely.
Issue 4 launches at Olive Bar and Kitchen in Mehrauli, on 18 June, as A. D. Singh’s restaurant completes twenty-five years. Olive endures because it has always known precisely what it is. Its team stays. Its guests return. Decade after decade. There is a particular authority that only longevity confers, and Olive wears it as elegantly as anything in this city. It was the only room for this moment.
French Press Global moves behind a paywall shortly. Serious journalism is worth paying for. We are asking you to agree.
Chaiti Narula
Editor-in-Chief
