I Couldn't Help But Wonder: Who Curates the Curator?

Somewhere between the second course and the third laugh, I looked around a table in Mumbai and realised I was the youngest person at it. Which is a thrilling thing to be. Right up until someone hands you the microphone.

On the 15th of July, 31 Labels hosted The Curators' Table. Technically, a brunch. Practically, a room where fashion, retail, business and culture sat down together over stemware to talk about consumer behaviour, innovation, and where this industry thinks it's going. Look down the table and you'd find Rhea Kapoor, Akansha Ranjan Kapoor, Malvika Raaj. Look a little further and you'd find Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Hello, Lifestyle Asia, with a wider gathering of insiders and cultural tastemakers around them. Look at the head of it and you'd find me, holding a place card and my nerve, in roughly equal measure.

A University Lecture & An Uninvited Idea

Here's the thing about ideas: they arrive uninvited, at inconvenient hours, usually while you are meant to be doing something else entirely. Mine turned up in a university lecture I was not entirely paying attention to. The observation was almost embarrassingly simple, there were too many brands. Every scroll produced another one. And I, nineteen, attempting to choose one outfit for one night out with the girls, had somehow turned a Friday into a research project.

Which is when it occurred to me that abundance had become the problem. Choice was no longer the luxury. Choice was the labour.

And that, really, is all curation is. Not gatekeeping. Not exclusivity. Simply someone doing the deciding for you, so that getting dressed can go back to being the fun part. Because a hundred good options isn't generosity, it's homework. Thirty right ones is a wardrobe. The moment everything becomes available, curation becomes necessary — a sentence I have said in pitch meetings, and also at 2am, alone, to a rail.

Glitches, Forums, and Unforgiving Heels

Back to the table. There were glitches. There are always glitches; anyone whose first event ran clean either wasn't there or isn't telling you the truth. Ten minutes before, I was in full-blown panic. Then I stood up to welcome the room, took a breath, and thought about the girl who wanted to build something for women and had absolutely no idea how. She would have found this impossibly glamorous. She would have been right.

The afternoon was wonderful. People ate, drank, laughed. Nobody networked and Everybody talked. Which is, I've decided, the difference between an event and a forum and The Curators' Table is very much meant to be the latter. A standing room for dialogue and collaboration in a fashion ecosystem currently moving faster than anyone's presentation can keep up with.

A footnote, offered in the spirit of public service: break in your heels. Three hours upright in a new pair is not an outfit, it's a hostage situation, and you are not the one holding the leverage.

And then, weeks later seeing The Curators' Table in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Surreal is the only honest word for it. Four years ago it was a thought I had in a lecture. Now it is a room people want to be written about being in. It seems we made something rather large without entirely noticing, and this is only chapter one.

So, limping gracefully toward the car with my shoes in my hand and my company's future in my head, I couldn't help but wonder, whether every founder's origin story ends the same way — barefoot, holding her shoes, absolutely certain it was worth it.

See you at the next table.