What does the appointment of Megha Kapoor at the helm of Vogue India imply for the journal and this business?
“The January 2022 issue of Vogue India ushers in a new era, a new chapter,” begins Megha Kapoor in her first editor’s letter, as she publicizes a “Vogue Reset’ and plans to steer the journal in a brand new route. Kapoor is the new Head of Editorial Content at the journal and her appointment to this position has sparked many conversations on the evolution of fashion journalism in the nation.
Already on shaky floor after many years of being relegated to the leisure and celebration pages, Indian fashion writing, protection, and reporting didn’t actually have a lot time to develop to its fullest even with the coming of overseas legacy titles in the first decade of the 2000s. Advertisers rapidly owned the pages, and month-to-month magazines hardly ever, if ever, critiqued collections of merchandise. Then got here the droop of the mid-2010s, adopted intently by the social media onslaught, and then the Covid pandemic. Not good.
It is into this sorry state for print media that Kapoor, 35, steps as much as the prime job at Vogue India, designations however. Before shifting to Mumbai a number of weeks in the past, Sydney-based Kapoor’s solely connections to India gave the impression to be an internship at Vogue India over a decade in the past, and that she is of Indian descent. A graduate of the University of Melbourne, it was her time at Vogue India that landed her a stint at Vogue Australia’s fashion division. Since then, she has labored as fashion director at the indie Australian publication Oyster Magazine, and based Inprint, her personal luxurious fashion shiny, in 2015.
Six years later, Kapoor is able to take cost of one of the youngest Vogues in the world — launched in October 2007, Vogue India is nearly a yr shy of its 15th anniversary. “It is sort of magical for me to have the ability to interact with India by this chance,” she says. “I think one has to be humble enough to [know] what one does and doesn’t understand, and I’m not going to pretend that I get every nuance. That said, there are over 36 million of us who have had the immigrant experience, and that does not make us any less Indian. I have a lot to learn, and I’m excited.”
Meeting newer calls for
Her appointment follows Vogue’s mother or father organisation’s world shakeup—Conde Nast’s reorganisation of the firm’s content technique, management groups, and construction. An identical train had taken place at The New York Times and Wall Street Journal only a few years in the past. Gone are the highly effective Editors-in-Chief of previous; enter the Content Head, a hybrid entity who’s higher positioned to answer newer calls for from customers in addition to advertisers.
Spreads from the January 2022 version
The future, says Kapoor, lies in hanging a steadiness between native and world content. “To me, it’s not a dichotomy. With every project I do, I want to ask myself who the audience is, and if we’re reflecting India’s modern and diverse voices.” She mentions the works of fashionable Indians like photographers Ashish Shah and Bharat Sikka, and provides that whereas she is loath to criticise what got here earlier than, she seems ahead to evolving native content, expertise, and picture making for a platform that’s extra 360-degrees in its outlook, and places India on the world map. “I’m already working to get Indian designers on Vogue Runway [the title’s free app that covers global fashion] to ensure worldwide recognition.”
No city bias?
When I ask what she thinks of exploring regional Indian languages, she says she is able to tackle each alternative to attach with a various viewers. And whereas it might take a while earlier than we see fashion magazines provided in Punjabi, Bengali, or Tamil, it’s not as far-fetched a notion as it could have been even a number of years in the past. She needs to characterize all of India, not simply Delhi and Mumbai, which is encouraging in its intent.
What can be really fascinating to see, although, is how properly such creating editorial insurance policies will work in the case of advertisers, particularly luxurious manufacturers, who’ve come to all however personal the pages of Indian fashion magazines over the previous decade. “There is definitely going to be a shift,” says Kapoor. “There will be more editorial solutions, and we are perhaps not going to be as dictated by brands.” Given Conde Nast’s affect over the journal market, it’s solely doable that her outlook is rapidly adopted throughout titles—people who nonetheless exist, of course.
The creator is a fashion commentator and inventive director primarily based in New Delhi.
