Archives: '19 Issue 07

The menswear retail sector has undergone a visible evolution as it moved from offering just boring basics or expensive designer garments to including multi-designer men’s stores and Instagram brands that are eco-friendly and influenced by street style. Verve gives you an overview of the ready-to-wear market while highlighting a mix of well-established and under-the-radar labels

Two breakout books of 2019, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion are lessons in what the internet generation was promised, what it got, and where to go from here

Faced with hashtag challenges and people who seem to have discovered extra hours in the day to optimise even their leisure time, Zaral Shah tries to figure out whether this non-stop hustle mode is truly worth it

Friends and colleagues remember a pioneering designer of Indian fashion.

The development of the gig economy has caused a deviation in the usually straightforward career graphs of the urban professionals. An example of the outliers, Pooja Sinha Roy freelances full-time as a French tour guide, content creator and animal rescuer. At the other end, there is the up-and-coming actor Zoya Hussain who, while also in a relatively non-traditional field, has single-mindedly stayed on the path she mapped out for herself. Verve marks the personal pay-off in both women’s approaches

Dhinchak Pooja’s eventual fall from the stratosphere of the inexplicably internet famous into the mass grave of fleeting pop culture phenomena is a case study in what happens when self-promotion has no limits. Verve goes over the cringe pop singer’s brief oeuvre to pinpoint the reasons her 15 minutes ended almost as soon as they began

Days away from competing against three other designers in Lakmé Fashion Week's Circular Design Challenge, Gauri Agrawal and Varsha Solanki make strong cases for why their brands deserve to win.

From 1993 to 1997, Tara crystallised the many dimensions of contemporary urban womanhood on our television screens with a never-before-seen realness. While revisiting the agelessly feminist show’s talking points, Megha Shah is driven to consider the misguided handling of female agency in the current Indian entertainment landscape

Mountaineer Priyanka Mohite, triathlete Solonie Singh Pathania and ultrarunner Anjali Saraogi use their day jobs to sustain second careers as part-time semi-professional athletes. Verve comes away inspired by the women’s impressive stamina to push their bodies for high-intensity outdoor sports while maintaining a regular 9-to-5 schedule

Breaking down the complex production of the socially relevant Autoportrait, Indo-American artist Tara Kelton – part of the upcoming group show Games of Chance at Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts – interprets how the human workforce is being sidelined by automation, digital mediation and AI