When a Chronicler Falls Silent, an Industry Remembers Its Own

Indian fashion’s modern history has been shaped as much by its chroniclers as its creators. Among them, Meher Castelino occupied a distinctive place, combining reportage with long institutional memory. Her writing, consulting, and editorial contributions tracked the industry’s growth from its early professionalisation to its global presence. Her death signals the loss of a voice that understood fashion as labour, culture, and record.

Richa Bansal

18 December 2025

5 minutes

Long Story, Cut Short

A personal remembrance traces the professional life and enduring influence of a journalist who documented Indian fashion’s evolution across decades.
From early fashion weeks to trade journalism, her work connected design, retail, and cultural shifts with clarity and institutional memory.
The piece reflects on mentorship, friendship, and the quieter labour of chronicling an industry as it took shape.

Meher Castelino is no more. Tough to process this. In fact, I never thought the heart would feel so broken when I first heard the news. I am clairvoyant. Quite. But like always, when that message seeps into my subconscious, I remain disengaged, and then suddenly wham… I get it, actually witness it, some hours, a day or even a year later... goosebumps or a scream within, and an increasingly quiet acceptance, like now. As I write, I think I am beginning to embrace this hushed awakening (!?)

Meher had, sometime during Covid, handknitted a pair of coasters and a hairband and couriered the surprise. This November as I packed up from Jaipur, I specially looked for it and late Tuesday, I went ferreting for the bandana and wore it the whole evening. All of this as she breathed her last in her sleep. I was of course oblivious to her final cadence.

It was not like we were on the phone every other day. I must have met her several years back. We exchanged our “recentest pictures” and we’d catch up every 6-8 months and for a good hour and more, and in between call drops regale each other with the ‘stories’ we’d been witness to, and oh, all the goss too! She had been on my mind this week, especially because she was neither sharing nor responding much to the messages.

Grace, elegance, poise, diligence — Meher epitomised it all. My earliest memory goes back to the buzz and excitement when the Indian fashion week made its debut in New Delhi in 2000. The first ever Miss India, having clinched the crown in 1964, she was a ‘story’ for the microsite on the week that we had created for Indiatimes.com. Duties of the crown done, she had worked her way into export houses and brands, doing “just about everything from designing to people management” as she once told me, and this included trend forecasts, mood boards and more when these were not the givens of today.

Meher Castelino stepped into fashion journalism “by chance” when she was asked to do a piece for Eve’s Weekly, and thereafter there was no looking back. This was the early Seventies, and her easy style ensured she soon emerged as a chronicler, capturing the zeitgeist of her time, from the ramp to trade events, fashion weeks, jury member at renowned fashion and industry institutes, a consultant on the board of many a brand, inspiring, guiding, mentoring and writing.

She was Lakme Fashion Week’s official writer, an A-lister scribbling away with her stamp of authority on the trends she decoded, be it fabric or silhouette. She was an encyclopedia on the business of fashion, knew the newbies and I would like to think, the heartthrob of generations. Soon her oeuvre expanded from fashion to beauty, travel, lifestyle, sometimes an “undercover” agony aunt too! Her experiences, insights, the evolution of the fashion industry in the country have found voice in the books she authored — Fashion Kaleidoscope, Manstyle, and the last Fashion Musings.

She was also a “mystery shopper” for many a brand and retail house and the fervour with which she did a cover story (I hope I can recall right) for IMAGES Business of Fashion when I was its editor was contagious. “We had fun doing that story”, we recounted, again, just a couple of months back. Typically Meher, she crisscrossed Mumbai to ‘mystery shop’ at the biggest to the smallest of brands. She even mailed me the interview she had done of Darshan Mehta for the iconic India edition of Sportswear International. We were discussing and mourning his sudden demise.

Getting Darshan to talk was forever tough, although I could persuade him to do a piece or two, a persistent Meher ensured she got the interviews. Any “brand” or “retail” story that had to be done, was done by Meher. A questionnaire would be in my mail-box within hours once a story idea was thrashed out. The last two conversations that we had were a sign I missed. We looked back at so many of the stories we had worked on for all the publications that I have edited this far. It was a bye-bye of sorts, I realise now.

Soar on, Meher. I will miss the ready wit, the laughter, the reels we reeled over, the memes we ‘grinned’ at or ‘laughed out loud’. I’m gonna miss you. Just how much it hasn’t sunk in yet.