The sudden and tragic passing of a much loved cultural icon Rohit Bal las week should serve as a sign for desi fashion industry leaders to wake up and smell the ittar! If indian fashion is to move forward in a more meaningfullway, the current crop of talented (but often misguided) designers need to look back at India's magnificent textile and craft traditions for their own relevance in the future. Here's why I believe Rohit Bal mattered to India's schizo fashion world. in which today's fashion world. In which today fashion designers with inflated egos have lost the plot something Bal never did. Most successful fashion labels in India invest all their creativity and talent designing bridal wear coma and that's it. they have become nothing more than glorified lehenga makers for super rich. Having been a part of country nascent fashion story back in the 70s as a successful ramp and print model, one has a pretty good perspective on how the fashion graph has evolved over three decades. Back then, as we were clumsily taking baby step on improvised ramps, wearing garments and sarees provided by the prodigiously successful textile mill's owners who clothed India, little could we have envisioned the gigantic leap taken by independent designers in the heady 90's when most of the mills had closed down. Suddenly, there was was big money and immeasurable glamour in local fashion, dominating what used to be an amateurish enterprise run by rich housewives employing neighbourhood darzis to create ensembles for raw, untrained models like myself, who could barely walk without tripping over hemlines. We did our own makeup and hair and got paid a pittance for our efforts. There were no stylists. No event managers. And no frills. Rohit Bal arrived dancing uninhibitedly in a blaze of exuberant colour, injecting flamboyance, gender fluidity and style into a fatigued world of fashion enthusiasts scrambling for funds to keep going. He was definitely the next big thing, with his daring and gumption to go against the tide and stick to an original vision for his label. A vision he adhered to till the end.