Indian Fashion Show in Buenos Aires

The first-ever Indian Fashion Show we organized on 24 March at Hotel Sheraton in Buenos Aires, was a spectacular success. It was attended by almost 1000 invitees including fashion designers, importers, textile industry representatives and media. The Indian designs, colours and creativity floored the Argentines and has opened the doors to the high-end textile market of Argentina. Since Buenos Aires is the fashion capital of Latin America, the impact of the show will be felt in the whole region.


Two Indian designers Nachiket Barve and Anita Dongre came from Mumbai for the show. We combined them with two Argentine designers Monica Socolovsky and Fabian Zita who use Indian materials and accessories. Monica has travelled to India 96 times and is an ardent devotee of Sai Baba. Her company is called “Satya Fashion”. Her clothes are sold in nearly 200 stores in the country and she also exports to Europe, USA and rest of Latin America.

Following the show, we organized a reception for 200 VIPs. The Show was telecast by Fashion TV and a number of local TV channels. Fashion magazines and newspapers have given wide coverage.
Bandana Tiwari, Editor of the Vogue magazine of India had come specially from Mumbai for our show. Her passage and local hospitality were given by the Argentine government export promotion agency. This was organized by Monica Socolosvky.

Our show was part of the week-long Buenos Aires ‘Alta Moda Fashion Week´ (22-28 March), which featured Argentine and foreign fashion designers. Since we plugged our show into this, we were able to reduce the expenditure on publicity and infrastructure as well as on the Argentine models who were hired for the Fashion Week.

Monica Socolovsky (in the picture baove) has popularized and enhanced the profile of Indian textiles for the last thirty years in Argentina through her “Satya Fashion” stores and franchise. She was the one behind the organization and success of our Fashion Show. She had taken the trouble of visiting our designers in India and coordinating the preparations.

We hope to repeat the Indian Fashion Show next year and the coming years too.. We are also planning to invite a delegation of six to ten Argentine designers for our Fashion shows in India and expose them to our traditions and variety and colours of our materials, embroideries and designs.

Fernandez - Argentine novel

The author of this novel is Jorge Fernandez Diaz, the same who wrote La segunda vida de las Flores.

This is the story of Fernandez, the journalist and his exposure to political and social issues of Argentina. One day, Fernandez in his middle age, is at the waiting room of a dentist in Palermo in Buenos Aires. There appears Lili, his ex-girl friend from the school days. The unexpected meeting of the two after thirty years sets off both of them on a memory trip going over what happened in their lives in this period. They recall their friends and acquaintances, adventures and misadventures as well as amores y desamores.

Fernandez became a journalist and got a rich experience of dealing with political leaders and social issues. He was lured by the governor of a Patagonian province to edit a local newspaper. The governor used the newspaper to manipulate news and opinion in the region. Fernandez was unable to take beyond a point and returned to Buenos Aires. After his return, Fernandez started working in a magazine. Here he got a different experience of political manipulation by the media. Delia, the owner of the magazine used and misused political leaders for her profit. She tried to make Fernando write her biography with falsified information. During this period, he went to Punta del Este, where the rich and famous Argentines do wheeling and dealing while partying and vacationing.

Lili had her own adventures of romance and marriage. She was married to a rich man but it did not work out. Both Fernandez and Lili, in their formative years were influenced by Marxism and other leftist ideologies, as was fashionable in those days. But they moved on.

Ideas of love and romance are reawakened in the hearts of Fernandez and Lili in this meeting after such a long time. She looks radiant and well operated …from top to bottom !! He looks like he carried the wounds of a hundred battles of life. But as typical Porteños, they analyse and reanalyse every word and every gesture of each other… and walk away from the Second Opportunity life presented to them.

Jorge Fernandez Diaz, who is also a journalist, has given a vivid account of what goes on behind the news coverage and commentaries. He has brought out the nexus between political leaders and journalists and how the two try to take advantage of each other using their political and journalistic power. Diaz takes the readers around the cafes and bars of the neighbourhood of Palermo, as he had done in his previous novel. The middle age crisis of Fernandez and Lili has been used by Diaz for psychoanalysis, which is a trade mark of the Argentine authors. Diaz has cleverly woven the political crisis of the country with the middle age crisis of the two individuals.

I agree with Diaz´s political comment that Argentines sought Truth in the eighties but Truth did not matter in the nineties ¨. Now Argentina seems to have entered a post-truth era….