One must admire the sheer, unblushing audacity of it. While the rest of us were busy worrying about carbon footprints and overtourism, a quiet conspiracy was being stitched together in the far northeast of India. Manipur, a name previously more likely to appear in a geopolitical footnote than a *Vogue

• spread, has been anointed. The word comes down from the oracles of trend: it is, we are told with solemn certainty, the "next big fashion hotspot." The global gaze, a fickle and hungry thing, has swivelled away from the exhausted beaches of Bali and the polite ruin of Lisbon, and settled, with the intensity of a spotlight, on this misty, mountainous state. The local airlines, bless them, are reportedly in a state of "overwhelming" capacity. One pictures harried officials, more accustomed to scheduling flights for civil servants and visiting botanists, now fielding frantic calls from Milan and Mayfair, their manifests suddenly a chaos of fabric swatches, mood boards, and monogrammed luggage.

It is a narrative so perfectly of our moment that it almost feels scripted. We have developed a voracious appetite for the "undiscovered," a term we apply with colonial nostalgia to any place not yet thoroughly Instagrammed. The cycle is now drearily familiar: a whisper of "authenticity," a flicker of "craftsmanship," a photograph of a strikingly beautiful local in traditional dress (always described as "textile-rich"), and the machinery of hotspot-ification grinds into motion. We saw it in Oaxaca, now drowning in mezcal tours and artisan looms. We witnessed it in Tbilisi, its melancholic Soviet grandeur swiftly repackaged as a backdrop for minimalist street style. The world, it seems, is a catwalk waiting to be walked, its cultures reduced to a seasonal palette, its people to incidental extras in a vast, open-air editorial.

Manipur, of course, is no mere blank canvas. It is a place of profound and complex beauty, of ancient kingdoms, swirling polo games (which it claims to have invented), and the serene expanse of Loktak Lake with its floating islands. Its weavers, particularly of the famed *phanek

• and sham, have practised an art form of breathtaking intricacy for centuries. Herein lies the exquisite irony, the scalpel’s first precise incision: its genuine, deep-rooted sartorial heritage is precisely what makes it vulnerable to the flattening gaze of fashion. The global industry does not seek complexity; it seeks inspiration. It will extract a motif, a colour gradient, a silhouette, and call it a "collaboration," while the context—the history, the meaning, the life—is left behind like discarded thread. The melancholic clarity is this: the very act of being "discovered" often necessitates a kind of erasure.

The reports of overwhelmed airline capacity are the most deliciously visceral image in this whole affair. It speaks not of a gentle, curious trickle of travellers, but of an invasion—efficient, logistical, and utterly impersonal. It is the sound of the future landing on the tarmac, in the form of buyers, influencers, photographers, and the dreadfully earnest "experience curators." They will come with excellent intentions and devastating effect. The quiet lanes of Imphal will echo with the click of camera shutters and the hum of drone propellers. The local market, once a symphony of mundane haggling, will become a "must-visit sourcing destination." One can already write the copy: "Where timeless tradition meets avant-garde aesthetic." The prose writes itself, doesn't it? It’s all so terribly now.

And what of the Manipuri themselves, watching this peculiar circus roll into town? They will be cast in a role they never auditioned for: the serene, stylish natives, the keepers of a chic secret. Their reality—with all its political nuances, its everyday struggles, its rich, unperformative life—will be politely airbrushed from the frame. They will become both central to the narrative and profoundly outside of it, the sourced rather than the source. This is the modern anxiety, dissected with elegant detachment: in our interconnected world, to be seen is often to be consumed. Your culture becomes content; your home becomes a backdrop; your identity becomes a trend.

So, as you read the glowing reports and consider booking one of those suddenly scarce seats to this newfound paradise, pause for a moment. Consider the trajectory. The hotspot blazes, attracts the moths, and is often left slightly scorched. Perhaps the most fashionable act of all, the most radical in its quiet defiance, would be to admire Manipur from a distance. To let its weavers weave their stories without demanding they stitch them into our seasonal narrative. To understand that some gems are hidden not for us to find, but for them to simply be.

The runway, after all, is everywhere and nowhere. And the most stylish statement one can make is sometimes to simply decline the invitation to the show.