Salman Rushdie recently jawboned a NYT reporter for calling his wife a common hustler. Today, that same reporter wrote about India Fashion Week. The good news: Delhi is in the NYT. The bad: Guy Trebay sounds like the condescending love child of Lord Macaulay and Rudyard Kipling:

On one hand there are the neo-minimalists, deploying traditional handicrafts with restraint and confidence. On the other are designers whose response, when presented with a blank slate and access to those same crafts traditions, takes the form of horror vacui. More is more, in other words, with a dollop of too much. For every even marginally subtle designer like Mr. Varma, there are five others whose work looks as if it is destined for a camel fair in Rajasthan…

Earth to Trebay: it’s an ornamented culture. You don’t see people dinging the Chinese for silk mandarin jackets. And when Tamarind goes with an all-beige, Ralph Lauren-meets-Sears comforter theme, some of us see that as a downgrade.

Trebay expands:

“I’m here to see clothes that speak to a larger, more global vision,” said Michael Fink, a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue. “I keep saying to people: ‘Designers come from abroad, take your fabrics and crafts and present extraordinary clothes. What’s wrong? Why aren’t you doing that here?’ ” Mr. Fink was not alone among those hopefuls who made the trek from the United States or Europe only to find disappointment in collections not yet likely to translate for foreign markets…

Translation: we do Indian clothes better than the Indians. Yes, people, why can’t you rip off your shit for Kmart like we do? You water down your milk, we water down your yoga. You dilute your petrol, we dilute your tunics. By the time we’re done, nobody’ll remember they were ever called anything else. What’s a little bastardized fashion between friends?

But wait, he’s not done yet:

Ms. Jain seemed stalled in aesthetic limbo, caught between cultures, a condition that seems to afflict much current Indian fashion design…

You see, that ‘fusion,’ that innovative ‘diasporic dialogue’ that you people have been banging on about? You’re all misinformed, it’s just aesthetic limbo.

Yet Indian fashion inexplicably continues to drift along lazily, as if the vital subcontinent that made a gift to the world of calico, madras, chintz, tie-dye, crewelwork and virtually the entire technique of hand block printing was somehow not motivated to propel itself out of the backwaters of design.

Because if you can’t make it look good on a Midwesterner, it ain’t worth anything at all. (Here’s a snapshot of those backwaters. If they get any more traditional, I’ll just kill myself.) At least we lured Trebay into spending a week stranded between Delhi and Gurgaon:

All of them converged on the Grand… a hotel that rises like a bleak mirage in an enclave of South Delhi, on the road to Gurgaon… “It was in the exact same condition last year,” said Fern Mallis, a vice president of IMG, the global sports marketing company that owns Fashion Week in New York and that produced its offshoot here. “If this were China, they would have had a parking lot full of cars by now…”

Put down that bat, Salman. We’ve inflicted revenge enough.

Runway model and poster child for starving people Ujjwala Raut married her Scottish boyfriend mid-last year. There’s a Zoolander sequel begging to be made about the guests at this wedding:

The venue of the wedding was the posh New York penthouse of musician David Bowie and his supermodel wife, Iman. Bowie is a friend of Craig, and Iman and Ujjwala are very close buddies so they decided to have the wedding at Bowie and Iman’s place.

And survey says:

Ujjwala’s Maharashtrian family could not join the couple due to the short notice…

Oh, snap.