VOGUE India March 2022

I REMEMBER WHEN I FIRST SAW Lakshmi Menon. It was around 2007, in an ad campaign (for Hermès, I think) in a magazine I was thumbing through. I was 15 and I was floored by her. I had never seen an Indian beauty like her reflected in the fashion imagery I had grown up consuming. Even the Indian publications I would comb through on our yearly visits with family seemed to favour Bollywood starlets exclusively. After a hiatus from modelling and becoming a mother, I’m so thrilled Menon agreed to return to Vogue India as our March cover star. Her lithe elegance and Keralan beauty is the perfect pairing for the homage we make to the sari in ‘Shapes and drapes’, photographed by Ashish Shah. We’ve all been thinking a lot about…

ASHISH SHAH Born in the Himalayan foothills, Shah is a photographer and filmmaker known for his bold and evocative imagery of a new India. He draws inspiration from the people, culture and traditions around him, and trains his lens on the intricacies of his subjects’ natural form and posture. In ‘Shapes and drapes’, he captures ’90s supermodel Lakshmi Menon wrapped in the languid drape of the sari. Page 68 ILYES GRIYEB A self-taught photographer living between Paris and Meknès, Griyeb’s oeuvre straddles the worlds of documentary, fashion and photography, and has appeared in publications like i-D, Anothermag and Vanity Fair, among others. His work is not only about creating beautiful images, but also about spotlighting cultures and voices that have often been exploited by the white gaze. In ‘Now you see me’, he…

FEW THINGS WE WEAR become as one with our skin as the jewels we carefully put on every day as a ritual of dress. To then think of jewellery merely as a superficial form of adornment is one-dimensional, a disservice to the multilayered ways in which it can touch our lives, both literally and metaphorically. The presence of a piece can reassure us through the day, like when gently touching your necklace when someone compliments it or lacing the edge of your wedding band when deep in thought. Over time, these pieces become extensions of our bodies and their absence can often make us feel incomplete. Even more so when everyday trinkets are supercharged with powerful, potent spiritual energies and positive intentions to create talismanic keepsakes. Blame it on the turbulence unleashed…

THE FIRST TIME I MET Bulgari’s creative director Lucia Silvestri was almost a decade ago, on a rainy morning at the Rome headquarters overlooking the Tiber. I watched Silvestri rearranging a table set with gigantic gemstones, a rainbow of carats catching the morning light. But it was her wrist that really caught my attention: a spectacularly sculpted gold snake watch coiled perfectly around her shirt cuff. Like second skin, it gleamed with every gesture, and boy, was it was hard to look away. This was the spell of the ‘Serpenti’. A few months ago, Bulgari’s brand ambassador Priyanka Chopra sat at the very same table with Silvestri to discuss the mangalsutra. Once again, I thought back to Silvestri’s watch—how so many years later it still left an impression, how it…

“A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I started paying gratitude to my body for the different functions it does that we simply don’t appreciate. To me, the body is a spiritual medium. It’s where intuition and gut feeling have a way of telling you what’s happening around you. I read a quote somewhere that really resonated with me: “Your mind can trick you, rationalising with the situation you are in, but your body, your body will never lie.” I truly believe that our bodies communicate with us. We just have to listen. “Growing up as a big girl, I was teased—in school, by my relatives, by friends and family members. There were always comments about how I will be single, fat and lonely when I am old, how modelling would be a…

WHEN THE WORLD initially adjusted to life in lockdown, it seemed there were many fashion and beauty essentials we would no longer require on a daily basis: heels, handbags and statement jewellery, for starters. The adoption of face masks caused lipstick to be redundant, so one could have assumed that wearing fragrance on a daily basis, too, was no longer a must. On the contrary, online fragrance purchases and an interest in learning more about the world of perfume increased substantially during the pandemic, according to industry experts. “As access to a host of international and home-grown brands increased in the country, experimentation with fragrances saw a rise,” says Anchit Nayar, CEO of e-commerce beauty at Nykaa, noting that the preference for fragrances which offered calming and soothing benefits saw an…