ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I describe a duo of fashion entrepreneurs based in Southall, west London: Komal Singh of Bombay Connections who has always been a wholesaler of suits, and Mala Rastogi of Creations Boutique, who transformed a ‘suitcase suits’ enterprise, selling from home, into both retailing and wholesaling through her current shop. Like Daminis, the redistributive, selling functions of these two enterprises are more central to their businesses than design functions. Their design interventions are implicit in their role as London-based importers, locals in their local markets, but with enormous access to multiple sites of production and design in the subcontinent. They are, in a way, ‘organic marketers’, who are located and raised within the communities they sell, the equivalent of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971). 1 Like these intellectuals who have a grounded aesthetic which is encoded in their intellectual pursuits, being close to the communities that have produced them, these marketers live amid and understand intimately the markets in which they sell. These entrepreneurs are products of locations in which they initiate and maintain their markets. This local residence and knowledge gives them commercial durability as suit marketers. They are also racialized as British Asians and use these experiences implicitly, not explicitly as does Bubby. Their paramount agenda is the marketing and selling of ready-made suits, mass-produced suits.
