When I was a teenager in India, buying fashion magazines was not just a luxury, it was an almost unjustifiable act of decadence. In the early 1990s, before international publications like Elle and Harper's Bazaar came to India, fashion magazines were imported: a single issue of British or American Vogue would set you back at least INR 500, or the amount a distant aunt may have spent on your birthday present. Often caked in a patina of import-duty dust, the pleasure of wiping the cover clean to see the bright orange tags with exorbitant prices – in both pounds and rupees – would result in inexplicable, albeit fleeting, delight. Khan Market magazine shops would often keep these publications sealed in plastic covers, ensuring that the distance between you and Kate Moss in an all-white bikini somewhere in St Tropez was as far as that between first world and third.
I eventually took to renting these magazines overnight, from a little video rental shop called 3L. That wasn't cheap either (about 70 rupees daily) but my mother would give in from time to time, especially if I had just had a painful orthodontic treatment. The pleasure of renting foreign Elle was satisfactory but subdued, much like the experience of opening the Giorgio Armani ad perfume strip to discover that the scent had already dissipated: too many noses and too many wrists had diluted the sandy, sexy beach smell in their own private seventy rupee per night fantasies.