I have always believed that the best stories find you long before you find them.
When Chaiti Narula, our Editorial Director, first spoke to me about Gulshanji, I understood almost immediately that this was a long-overdue act of recognition for a man who has spent decades making Delhi legible to itself, who stood behind the camera at every party, every fashion show, every significant social moment that the city of Delhi will one day call its history, and who did so with an authority that the spotlight, for far too long, forgot to return the favour to. Working alongside Chaiti to bring this story to the cover has been one of the greatest honours of my still very young editorial life, and I mean that with every bit of sincerity I can put into a sentence. Gulshanji says, time and again, that Chaiti Narula is a starmaker, and having experienced her mentorship and her belief firsthand, I can only say that being trusted by someone of that magnitude is something I carry with me every single day. I hope, very soon, to prove her right.
Earlier this week, I had my graduate show, where I displayed my work at French Press Global as part of my graduation project. My professors, having seen Gulshanji as the cover star of Issue Two, invited him. He came. And somewhere in that room, between my academic life and my editorial one, something quietly completed itself. It was one of the first full circle moments I have experienced as Executive Editor-in-Chief, and it was rewarding in a way that even as a writer, I find myself failing to describe in words.
This issue, I have also authored a piece I was quite excited yet anxious about writing. When Aditya Mani first wrote for French Press Global about the use of artificial intelligence in creative fields, the essay stayed with me in the way that only the best arguments do, rearranging the furniture of how you think about something. I wanted to push that conversation further, to take it out of the theoretical and into the lived. So I did what felt most honest: I reached out to the people who have actually built their careers in this industry and asked them how they are navigating a world where content is becoming increasingly synthetic. Speaking to Sujata Assomull, Pratishtha Dobhal, Archana Pandit and Santu Misra, people who have spent years at the very top of fashion journalism in India, and asking them what they make of all this, was one of the most clarifying experiences I have had as a journalist. The piece is a conversation between people who care deeply about authorship, about the integrity of creative work, and about what it means to make something authentically yours, in an age that keeps offering you shortcuts.
I think about that question a great deal, and not just in the context of AI. What does it mean to make something that is truly yours? What does it mean to report on fashion, politics, lifestyle and pop culture, and all the nuanced systems that move underneath those words, with the kind of rigour and care that the ones living inside those systems actually deserve? I dedicated myself to journalism from a young age, because I believed, and still believe, that it is a public service. The stories that matter most are the ones about the craftspeople, stylists, set designers, photographers, pattern cutters, the whole extraordinary ecosystem of people who are the glue holding Indian fashion together, but conveniently left out of the conversation when the work stops being glamorous, and when it’s time to receive their flowers for their work. This magazine is, in part, a commitment to making sure that conversation always takes centerstage.
That commitment is also what brought us to one of the stories I am most proud of in this issue. Front Page Muse, Fine Print Rights: Fashion's Queer Betrayal, is our examination of the trans community's contribution to the contemporary fashion landscape, and it asks, point-blank with no apprehension, why the people who have so consistently shaped the aesthetic vocabulary of this industry find themselves written out of its mainstream. It is the kind of story that fashion media has circled around for years without quite landing, and I am glad we landed it.
And then there is If You Don't Post It, It Didn't Happen, which began as idea in our edit list I put together when I first joined French Press Global, a brief that lingered in the back of my mind for months because I could feel it pointing at something substantial, and not yet fully articulated. The question of whether an artist can exist today without social media is, on its surface, a question about platforms and visibility, but underneath it is something far more unsettling: the idea that creativity itself is being restructured around the logic of constant performance, that making something is increasingly inseparable from the obligation to make it consumable at the speed of a scroll. My dear friend and fellow writer Yuvika Sachdeva related to the brief deeply and took it forward, doing it the justice it deserved, and reading her finished piece reminded me precisely why we are here. These are the sorts of stories that lifestyle journalism, at its best and most serious, was always meant to tell. Thought-provoking, genuinely curious, and written with the conviction that the people reading deserve more than what the algorithm would have served them otherwise.
Issue Two is based on personal stories, tracing back to the original thought that makes us human. It moves from Delhi’s most prolific photographer to the Indian art market, from a geopolitical argument to a story about an Indian debutant ball, from a runway to the architecture of marriage referencing Academy winner film Anora, from studying digital subculture to reviewing a bar in Bengaluru that has decided the most radical thing it can offer its guests is the permission to be unreachable for an evening. What connects all of it is that each of these stories is asking the same underlying question: what does it mean to look closely? Not just a glance at a trending topic, but actually going past the surface and picking at each angle possible.
I am twenty-one. I am still learning, every single day, what it means to do this job with the grit it deserves. I wake up every morning, devoted to approaching this work with more insight, more nuance, more curiosity and more courage than I managed the day before, and I dedicate myself, fully, to putting out stories that are well-researched and thought-provoking and that hold space for the voices that hold up this industry but are too rarely given the room to be heard on their own terms. It is a responsibility I do not take lightly, and I am grateful, every single issue, for the chance to attempt this.
I hope this issue gives you something to think about, something to argue with, and somewhere in its pages, a reminder that the world we casually call lifestyle is one of the most revealing archives of how a society understands itself, if only someone is willing to read it slowly enough.
Warmly,
Sia Sethi
Executive Editor-in-Chief
