I read management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company’s State of Fashion report year after year. They get many things right, as consultancy firms are experts at reading numbers and stating the obvious. Their ground-level surveys—oh, they’re another matter altogether.
I have yet to find a consultancy that has made accurate predictions about India at least. I have been writing on retail and the business of fashion and apparel in India for almost 25 years. And there’s nothing a consultancy firm can tell you which hanging around malls cannot. I’m always reminded of the magical year 2015, when every consultancy firm had predicted India would be a major luxury powerhouse market for European labels. Our sweet middle class and burgeoning startup set sweetly smiled and said, “Gee, thanks, we’ll build our own luxury brands instead.” And so we did.
India’s luxury market is in such an exciting space right now, with small- and medium-size companies that make artisanal products—right from cheese (Eleftheria, Darima) to coffee (Araku, Nandan) to leather products (Nappa Dori, Sabyasachi Mukherjee) to fashion (from Sabyasachi, Rahul Mishra and Tarun Tahiliani to 11.11, Eka, Arjun Saluja, Lovebirds and many others)—enjoying a great growth curve.
A mall in Kochi | Shutterstock
But India’s high-street market? That has always been a tricky terrain. To start with, India has not had any high streets historically. Its mall culture is barely 15 years old even in urban metros, and fewer in tier II cities. It is very easy to get half-decent clothing at less than high-street prices—our shopping streets of Mumbai, Delhi and Jaipur have sold block-printed outfits, jootis, Kolhapuris and such for a few hundred rupees. We never needed a high street or a mall.
Newspaper reports earlier this week announced McKinsey’s findings on India and how our country will be the focus for high street brands turning to the rest of Asia after the economic deceleration of China this year and the return of international travel to pre-pandemic levels (sadly not the airfares though). And that our forever growing middle-class and digitisation will make us bigger shoppers.
“The Indian government has invested around $2.5 billion in production-linked incentives and reforms to quality control orders, while foreign investment has increased 3x since 2019,” stated the report. “India is expected to play a more prominent role,” it added, highlighting we are set to take on a bigger role in the global apparel market.
As a footnote, the report pointed out that despite India being a major apparel supplier to the west, it was the biggest waste creator thanks to apparel quality failures in 2023. So much for our various incentives and marketing catchphrases like ‘Make in India’. Once we were the world’s largest cotton producer, now we are its largest “apparel failure”.
I visited a popular export surplus shop in Mumbai recently and bought myself a Banana Republic dress and a J Crew shirt (these are still available in the high-street brands’ American stores). They were rejects thanks to poor quality and sold here for a few hundred rupees. I expect more such delights to flood our shopping streets. So, a full-price high-street store in India will probably be running on empty.
It is a question I am asked by every foreigner friend: if China is slowing down, why has India not automatically replaced it? I don’t know. And we will never know unless we take a long and critical look at how our industries and governments function.
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