New Delhi, April 3 -- It wasn't an April Fool's Day joke after all. As soon as the invite to Vivienne Westwood's 1 April show in Mumbai landed as a WhatsApp text, many thought it was a prank. It was going to be the first-ever India show by the British brand, which doesn't have a store in the country as yet. It was going to be a collection with Khadi as a highlight-experimentations with one Indian fabric on a global stage are unheard of. It was going to be traditional meets ready-to-wear meets couture meets punk, an extraordinary marriage the fashion world hadn't seen in years.

It was all of this minus the extraordinary-ness. On Tuesday, while hundreds of attendees sat through an hour of summer heat and rain, with the front-row occupied b...