I graduated this month, and the first thing I did was come back to the desk.
That is probably the most honest summary of who I am and what this magazine means to me. Four years of learning journalism, design, creative direction and filmmaking from the best, while simultaneously practising it, being offered the opportunity to build French Press Global from the inside out, under the mentorship of Chaiti Narula, an industry veteran who took a chance on me. Whether it was academic or industry, I have been blessed in being guided by the absolute best, and for this I couldn’t be more grateful.
Issue Three is the most ambitious thing we have attempted yet, and the reason for that is simple: we decided, as an editorial team, to reestablish the true intent and meaning of fashion journalism. We stripped fashion of its romance, and instead we put it under a magnifying glass. And what we found underneath the sequins and the runway photographs and the carefully art-directed cover shoots was what was always there, a deeply embedded set of economic structures, power hierarchies and labour conditions that the industry has spent decades asking us not to look at too directly.
With Issue 3, we look at them directly, and attempt to confront them head on instead of dressing them up to make them digestible.
Our cover story is 'The Woman Who Outlived The Showstopper, And Always Will' featuring Lakshmi Rana, which I was given the opportunity to author, and I would like to make it known that this is far from a profile, rather it is a story that has been brewing for a long, long time and we finally ahead the pleasure of confronting the realities of the Indian fashion space head on with someone who has spent years, not only prospering herself as a top supermodel, but also creating a legacy that is nothing short of extraordinary.
I grew up watching Lakshmi Rana redefine what it meant to be beautiful in an industry that had very narrow ideas about what that word was allowed to mean. She walked into rooms that were not built for her and made them look like they had always been waiting. For a generation of young women trying to understand where they fit in a world that kept handing them a very specific and very limited mirror, she was something rarer than a cover star. She was proof that the mirror could be wrong.
Lakshmi has spent decades doing what almost nobody else in this industry can do, carrying a garment with the kind of presence that makes the designer's work the point of the photograph, not an accessory to someone else's mythology. She is one of the foremost supermodels India has produced. And yet the industry she helped build has spent the better part of two decades systematically sidelining the supermodel in favour of the Bollywood showstopper, which is a choice with consequences far beyond the runway.
Here is what that choice actually costs. When a film star walks the finale of a major Indian designer's collection, the conversation that follows is almost entirely about them. Their outfit, their presence, their relationship to the brand, their Instagram posts from backstage. The garments, the karigars who spent months constructing them, the designer's creative vision, the textile heritage embedded in every stitch: all of it becomes backdrop. And on a global stage, where buyers and editors and critics are trying to understand what Indian fashion actually is and why it matters, what they receive is not a coherent argument for craft or culture. What they receive is a celebrity appearance. India is a country the entire world is currently looking to for creative inspiration, its textiles, its embroidery traditions, its centuries of material culture. The showstopper model takes that inheritance and subordinates it to star power, and then wonders why Indian fashion has not broken through internationally the way its craftsmanship deserves.
The same instinct that produced that story also produced our Cannes coverage, which Chaiti Narula reported and wrote herself, and which I am particularly proud to have in this issue. Every year, Cannes Film Festival produces two parallel news cycles: one about films, one about red carpets. The films cycle is where the conversation about cinema, about storytelling, about what Indian creative work is doing on a global stage, happens. The red carpet cycle is increasingly dominated by a very specific phenomenon: Indian influencers and personalities who pay their way onto the carpet, wearing looks that read more like costume than craft, in what gets framed, generously, as Indian representation. While this is happening, the Indian films that are actually in competition, the directors, the actors doing serious creative work, go largely unreported in Indian lifestyle media. Chaiti's piece instead very sophisticatedly highlights the films in great detail, with an articulate account of all Indian showcases - an attempt to restore the patronage to the arts we risk losing in the pursuit for headlines and limelight, and it is a manifesto of the original mission of French Press Global when Chaiti first began with FPG.
That same magnifying glass runs through the rest of Issue Three. The Devil Wears Amazon Basics, which I wrote, begins with a single evening and four facts about one man. Jeff Bezos co-chaired the Met Gala. His media company had shed three hundred thousand subscribers. A third of his newsroom had been let go. His opinion editor resigned rather than comply with directives that converted a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper into a vehicle for the owner's financial interests. Only one of those facts made the Vogue livestream. The piece is about what happens when glamour is used as a press release, and what it costs everyone else when the most photographed evening in fashion is sponsored by the same logic that has workers in Amazon warehouses recording injury rates thirty percent above the industry average.
Mayank Choudhary's Blood, Sweat and Sequins went where the cameras did not. While the internet debated outfits, Mayank was in Shahpur Jat with Wasim Masterji, a tailor who has worked in Delhi since he was fourteen and whose studio runs on overtime because the rates barely cover costs anymore, and in Manipur with Reena Ahanthem and Jayshree Koijam of 11 Tareng, a sustainable luxury label built out of conflict, where weavers are paid without negotiation because the craft commands that respect. He was asking the question the Met Gala press room was structurally designed to prevent: who made this, and under what conditions, and what do we owe them.
This issue also carries our feature on Anu Ahuja and Vaishali S and their work on Vishwa Sutra for the Femina Miss India pageant with the Ministry of Textiles, which is a story about what it actually looks like when craft is centred rather than used as a keyword or hashtag. Our feature on Seema Gujral uses her work as a lens on what Indian bridal fashion owes the women who wear it. And Mariyam's column documents something I find genuinely moving: a block-printing workshop, an all-women team, a community being built at Altogether Experimental Glasshouse in Lodhi. Fashion as collective making, which is what it always was before it learned to forget.
None of this would exist without Chaiti Narula. She built this magazine on the conviction that ambition and rigour are not negotiable, that the stories worth telling demand to be told regardless of whether they will perform well, and that a publication can hold glamour and gravity in the same hand without dropping either. Working inside that conviction has made me a sharper journalist, a more honest editor, and considerably less willing to accept comfortable explanations for uncomfortable truths. Every story in this issue is, in some way, a product of the standard she refuses to lower.
We are also building a subscriber community, for the readers who have been here from the beginning and also believe in our mention to restore lifestyle journalism to its former glory. More on that soon.
For now, there is Issue Three. It will make you think. Some of it will make you uncomfortable. That, as it has always been, is precisely the point.
Warmly,
Sia Sethi
Executive Editor-in-Chief
