The moral of that story: our nation needs the powerful hands of women to get moving at a faster pace. And we need more advertising that celebrates those hands and minds.
SECTION TWO
PRODUCTS
Only Vimal
IT WAS THE summer of 1973 and I was on a holiday break after a year at IIT Madras with its gruelling workshop sessions, two periodical tests per week and the stress of matching wits with really bright guys around me who seemed to know so much more than I did. It was now my time to shine and to show the Chennai Mylapore community that I had arrived. What better way than to walk into the citadel of Tam Bram society at Luz Mylapore, the Mylapore Club? I thought I should show off my new-found style quotient. In I walked wearing a pair of jeans and a kurta. I thought this was the latest thing that a cool chap – ‘dude’ was yet to be part of my lexicon – would wear on a lazy Saturday afternoon.
The older guys who were in the motorbike parking lot found my new attire rather odd. I heard some snide comments passed around: Where did this guy learn how to dress? It spoils the jeans … no, no, it spoils the kurta.
I learnt my lesson quickly. The next day, I walked in clad in a pair of jeans and a shirt – no comments were passed.
Interestingly, most top clubs across India have a ‘no collar – no entry’ rule for men. My kurta would have failed that rule, but I wonder if that rule will stay forever.
Wearing a pair of jeans in the ’70s was a sign of style. A kurta on top and a pair of chappals to go with it was probably invented in the IITs as a statement of cool.
The ultimate style icon in the ’70s was indeed Levi’s jeans, and there was only one guy in IIT who owned a pair of genuine Levi’s.
Joe Marie Swamy was my neighbour at IIT for four years; of which during the last three years, he was in room number 223 and I was in 224 at Godavari hostel. He had a huge drawing of the Mobius strip on his wall and we spent many hours staring at it wondering if it was two-dimensional or three-dimensional. Joe had a set of cousins in France and through them he got the album Dark Side of the Moon by the band Pink Floyd. The album released in March 1973 and found its way to Godavari hostel in July. For the next one year, it was played every evening, without fail for an ever-increasing breed of Pink Floyd fans. But Joe was also famous for another reason: he possessed a pair of genuine Levi’s jeans! While the plebeians at IIT were stitching their own pair of jeans with locally available denim cloth, he had the real thing. I would imagine he wore his Levi’s pretty much right through his stay at IIT. Joe went on to join BARC, Babha Atomic Research Centre, after completing his BTech. We lost him to cancer in the early ’90s.
What is it with jeans and the young? In the US, blue jeans had initially stood for the Wild West and the adventurous spirit. In India, jeans used to connote a rich uncle in the US in addition to American culture, Coca-Cola and McDonalds.
No wonder the Hyderabad headquartered cigarette company, Vazir Sultan Tobacco, launched a cigarette in a package reminiscent of faded blue denims. They also decided to leverage the pulling power of their iconic cigarette brand, Charminar and rebrand it as, Charms. The company latched on to a popular phenomenon in colleges where students were reffering to Charminar as Charms, making it sound cool, unlike the auto-rickshawala’s Charminar plain cigarettes. The new package became an instant success across the colleges of India. Prof. Ramanuj Majumdar of IIMC has observed how the brand, which was launched in 1981-82, used its positioning and tag line – ‘Charms is the spirit of freedom, Charms is the way you are!’ – to become a brand success among the youth, possibly the biggest success in the cigarette market of that time1. The copywriter adman, Mohammad Khan, became a legend himself pretty much after that campaign!
Young Indian men were dressing differently and brands were latching on to this trend. If advertisers have it figured, can Bollywood be far behind?
Maine Pyar Kiya, the film which launched superstar Salman Khan’s career in 1989 also had a role to play in the rise of the humble jeans. It was the first mainstream Hindi movie where the hero, Salman Khan, appeared almost throughout in a pair of blue jeans. Till then, jeans were a fringe phenomenon restricted to the EMT – English Medium Type: kids educated in English medium schools – youth in the big cities. With the endorsement of the hit Hindi film, jeans became a staple for every young Indian.
The American hat industry pretty much died in the late ’60s. Between 1964 and 1970, the men’s hat industry declined so rapidly that two of the leading hat manufacturers shut shop. According to the industry, it was a change in fashion precipitated by President John F Kennedy’s hatless style2. Even the all American denim faced a challenge in the US after the release of the film Rebel Without a Cause, 1955, starring James Dean. Schools in some of the US states decided to ban jeans, fearing that their students too may start rebelling without a cause.
In India, around the time jeans were rising, the biggest male apparel brands to be advertised on television and cinema were Raymond, Bombay Dyeing, Gwalior, Dinesh and Digjam. Gwalior suitings had cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan, the Nawab of Pataudi, starring in their ads – his son, Saif Ali Khan, seems to have continued the Nawabi tradition by modelling for Siyaram in 2015. Dinesh had Sunil Gavaskar and Digjam for a period had actor-director Shekhar Kapur. Vimal from Reliance Industries entered the fray in the 1980s after the launch of Vimal sarees. Vimal suitings too used a whole gamut of stars including Ravi Shastri, Viv Richards etc. Vimal in many ways revolutionized fabric marketing not just with heavy decibel advertising. As AG Krishnamurthy recalls, Vimal took the concept of fashion shows to the length and breadth of India3. They opened large fabric showrooms and each showroom inauguration was with a huge fashion show, starring the top models of India. In 2014, this is being repeated by jewellery brands, many from Kerala, who are opening large showrooms and using Bollywood and Kerala film stars to gain attention during the inauguration. Not to be left behind, Bombay Dyeing too abandoned its long term model, Ardhendu Bose who had starred in the Bond-like magnum opus made in 1979, to use Karan Kapoor, film star Shashi Kapoor’s son.
All the brands used to advertise suitings and showed models and stars in formal wear. While doing research for a suiting brand I was tasked to handle in the ’80s – a brand called Caliber which is no more – I was piqued to know why brands touted ‘suitings’ when almost 80 per cent of the sale of fabric was to stitch trousers. Why not position a brand exclusively for ‘trousers’, even call it ‘Trousering’. When speaking with consumers, it was found that a ‘suit’ was the pinnacle of good dressing. So if a brand was claiming it sold good suit material, it obviously included good trouser material. But the argument does not work the other way around. Something good enough for trousers may not cut the mustard or cloth, when it comes to a suit. So for decades, brands continued to spin the suitings story fully aware that consumers were only buying trouser length material.
GREEN SCREEN: Ever wondered how a film shows the hero in multiple locations, if all the time given by the actor is just eight hours. This is the magic of the green screen. Actors are shot against a green screen. The background scene, Goa or Kerala or Delhi, is then superimposed. All in a day’s work, as they say.
In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, men’s suitings were a very large advertising category. They used to battle for the limited colour ads that magazines offered. Amidst all the suiting advertising, there were a few shirt brands too that were thriving.
Legend has it that the brand Zodiac was born because the company was stuck with surplus tie material that an importer in Europe did not take up. The founder’s son, AY Noorani, had recounted how the business of launching silk neckties in a hot country like India was indeed serendipitious. The brand name Zodiac was selected from a set of computer-generated names simply because the name had so many possible linkages. What started as a necktie brand soon transformed into a shirt brand and, in fact, created its own long running brand mascot, in the form of the bearded Zodiac man. Kushwant Singh is said to have once obse
rved that the Zodiac man is possibly the most recognized male model in India after the famous Air India Maharaja4.
The Zodiac man was, in fact, the creative director at Ulka Kolkata, Dhanji Rana – the company had out of its graciousness provided Mr Rana with clothes and ties for his entire life.
In many ways, as veteran adman and market researcher Subhas Chakravarty observed, Zodiac created the tie culture in this hot and humid country.
Zodiac entered readymade shirts business soon after launching ties and they were joined by several other brands like Liberty, Park Avenue and, later, international brands like Van Heusen and Arrow. While many of the suiting brands have faded away, Raymond has continued to hold its sway on Indian suiting consumers. From the legendary advertising done in the ’70s which positioned Raymond as the ‘Guide to the well-dressed man’ written by Frank Simoes, the brand moved its positioning, along with the times in the ’90s, to reflect the new ethos of the ‘Complete Man’. Frank Simoes had a worthy rival in Kersy Katrak.
Mass Communication and Marketing, MCM for short, was a trailblazer agency. Set up in 1965 by Kersy Katrak and a team of professionals, it blew through the Indian advertising landscape like a tornado. The agency was a fountainhead of talent where many an Indian advertising star was born: Arun Kolatkar, Kiran Nagarkar, Mohammed Khan, Panna Jain, Ravi Gupta, Arun Nanda, Anil Kapoor, Ajit Balakrishnan, Arun Kale, Sudarshan Dheer, Avinash Godbole, Uma da Cunha to name a few. MCM created some landmark campaigns for clients including Swish Blades, WIMCO, IBM, Gold Spot, DCM, Ciba etc. Interestingly, one ad that they created gained notoriety even beyond the advertising world. This was an ad campaign done for DCM towels. The headline said, ‘Towels so good you want to wear them’. The model was Maneka (Anand) Gandhi. Veteran journalist Vinod Mehta has observed that this was possibly Meneka Gandhi’s first brush with fame: As an aspiring model, she had signed up with DCM to model for their entire campaign of towels that were launched in 1973. But her success on the modelling scene was short-lived. When she became engaged to Sanjay, MCM was summarily commanded to withdraw the campaign and clam up all possible remaining records of it5. The ad treated the big towel as a sari with great style.
In fact, sari advertising defined women dressing in the ‘suitings’ era. Legendary brands like Khatau got new wings with the growth of television in the ’80s. Their advertising tag line, ‘Some of the most beautiful moments in a woman’s life are shared by Khatau’, was well remembered though today it may be seen as not very popular. Vimal used a tag line which was also very popular, ‘A woman expresses herself in many languages. Vimal is one of them’ – again, written by the late Frank Simoes, one of the most respected admen of his time. While working on the Khatau campaign, the ad agency Rediffusion, which in those days was rather full of men, was at a loss to understand what could be ‘beautiful moments’ in a woman’s life. Using qualitative research techniques, the research agency unearthed several moments recalled by women. One of them was immortalized into an ad; the ad showed a woman dressed in a bright yellow sari, heavily pregnant, relaxing in a rocking chair, bathed in the morning sunlight.
If Khatau, Vimal and Bombay Dyeing dominated the magazine and television advertising space, it was a relatively small brand from Surat that dominated the mind space of consumers. The brand Garden redefined saris by making it a fashion statement. The exquisite advertising, created by Arun Kale at Rediffusion, was the inspiration for many a sari campaign, including the ones by Vimal. To combat copycat brands, Garden changed its brand identity to Garden Vareli and the agency, Ambience and its creative director, Elsie Nanji, continued to create some memorable advertising in the 2000s.
The sari was what Indian women wore in advertisements right till the ’90s. To prove or disprove this, I undertook an analysis of television advertising depicting women over the last thirty years.
For each decade, thirty consumer goods advertising was randomly selected. The ads covered a range of products such as soaps, detergents, milk food drinks, tea etc. Analysis revealed that in the mid-’80s and ’90s, women were shown dressed in a sari more often than not, but the numbers dropped dramatically in the late 2000s – from over 65 per cent, the fall has been to 30 per cent. It is not as if Indian women are no longer wearing saris, just that advertising is no longer seeing a sari as an aspirational dressing style. As Time magazine reports in the article ‘The Dying Art of the Sari’, 25 June 2009: ‘There is a general perception that you would consider a woman in Western formal wear more empowered than her more traditional counterparts’.6 Even Shashi Tharoor, a most observant and articulate global citizen, has commented about the demise of the sari, ‘Today’s younger generation of Indian women seem to associate the garment with an earlier era, a more traditional time when women did not compete on equal terms in a man’s world. Putting on pants, or a western woman’s suit, or even desi leggings in the form of a salwar, strikes them as more modern. Freeing their legs to move more briskly than the sari permits is, it seems, a form of liberation; it removes a self-imposed handicap, releasing the wearer from all the cultural assumptions associated with the traditional attire’.7
There is possibly one other explanation behind why the sari has stopped occupying centre stage in advertising. In the ’70s and ’80s, sari was the one common form of dressing that cut across the whole country, north to south, east to west. The ways in which it was worn may have been somewhat different, but it was a sari all the same. But in the ’90s and more so in the 2000s the salwar kameez has pushed the saree out of the ring and has become the dress the whole country wears. Go to any women’s college anywhere in India, big to small town, you will rarely see a girl dressed in a sari. Even the ‘half-sari’ which used to be popular in some parts of South India has all but vanished and the salwar kameez has moved in. Interestingly, in some of the girls colleges in Tamil Nadu, students are advised to avoid jeans and T-shirt. I wonder how long that ban will last.
Advertising today celebrates the myriad styles in which men and women dress up. Suiting advertising is today restricted to a handful of brands like Raymond. The legendary brands like Bombay Dyeing, Binny, Vimal, Mafatlal, Digjam and Dinesh have all but disappeared. In their place have come readymade brands like Arrow, Zodiac – a true survivor if there is one – Louis Philippe, Peter England, Wills Lifestyle, John Player. All of them offer shirts, trousers and suits. In the casual wear space have come international brands like Lacoste, Benetton, Levis, Wrangler, Pepe etc. As you can see, there are really very few Indian brands in the list presented above.
While all companies were trying to ape the West, in came a brand that captured the imagination of the new-age male of India. A man who is western in outlook but Indian at heart. This brand, Manyavar, rode on the bandwagon of traditional wear for men, the sherwani and the kurta, to create a huge fan following. They took an industry which was retailer and tailor-driven, and made it into a branded game. Other brands like Raymond have followed but Manyawar has built a great momentum. So when you enter a formal party, you are bound to see men dressed in a formal suit, but you are also bound to see men dressed in a sherwani or a Nehru-style bandhgala. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, too has set the style quotient high with his Modi kurtas, all reportedly custom-made exclusively by retailer Jade Blue in Ahmedabad. I won’t be surprised if Jade Blue becomes a worthy rival to Manyavar pretty soon. Fabindia is yet another brand that seems to have been able to understand the ethos of the modern Indian man. Their range of cotton and silk kurtas can be seen at literature festivals and art shows as well as business school campuses around India.
So the Indian male has traversed the whole journey from the kurta-dhoti to the formal suit to the jeans and back to kurta; the Indian woman too has moved from the sari to the salwar kameez to trousers and jeans. Advertising has often captured this change and at times has facilitated the change.
Suitings and saris which were once very large advertisers are no longer such big spenders on television, though on print they do spend a
significant amount. Even other categories of clothing, the jeans, shirts, etc are not big advertisers. So how do they build their brands?
The answer probably lies in how Raymond managed to survive, while others failed in the men’s suitings business. Raymond’s hidden weapon is its retail network. The Raymond Shop network started with a small corner shop in Ballard Estate, Mumbai around five decades ago. It has grown multifold with a dedicated team making it the largest retail store in the country having over 700 stores in prime locations, in over 200 cities in India. Their overseas network spans thirty-nine stores in fifteen-plus cities across the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The Raymond Shop retail chain occupies a space of more than 1.8 million square feet built-up area. None of the other suiting brands managed to build a retail network of the magnitude of Raymond. And this network became Raymond’s captive media source, to attract and retain consumers.
With the rise of the department-store concept and shopping malls, apparel brands are spending enormous amounts of money building their presence in these locations. In a sense, what was spent on mass media advertising is now being spent on setting up and maintaining these high-street locations. It is true that even in the year 2014, more than 60 per cent of apparel sales come from small multi-brand outlets, but brands have realized that they need to invest in exclusive outlets as brand-building vehicles. International brands like Zara or Marks & Spencer do very little advertising; instead they use their stores as the medium of advertising.
Women across India have adopted the salwar kameez as their regular wear. In the years to come, the shirt-trouser ensemble too will grow in size and stature. It is, therefore, nice to see how in mid-2015 two women in Bangalore, Ahalya Mathan and Anju Maudgal Kadam, have launched the #100sareepact where they encourage women to wear saris for 100 days of the year and share the pictures on social media along with the hashtag and a note. The allure of easy-to-wear trousers is difficult to break, even with a buzzworthy sari pact, I think. In keeping with this trend, brands are becoming unisex. The biggest brands in men’s ready-to-wear today also offer women’s apparel. In addition, we are seeing the rise of designer brands such as Ritu Kumar and Anita Dongre who are going from prestige to masstige – a combination of mass appeal and prestige. These brands too are using retail presence to tom-tom their brand.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 8