The hourglass figure In Mumbai recently for Lakme India Fashion Week, I was as fascinated by the models as I was by the clothes. Svelte, sleek and commanding, they looked totally in charge on the catwalk, even though, like models everywhere, they were clearly only in their early twenties. It took me some time to realise what it was that gave them the air of authority that has been almost totally lost by their western counterparts. It was their figures. The figures of women, like that shown in this late-18th-century Rajasthani watercolour, not girls. Tall, slim yet voluptuous, they had rounded breasts and small waists, but what gave the Indian models a powerful sexual charge was their hips — again, something almost extinct on western runways, where shapeless girls rule.

It made me think of the 1980s, when supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington were at their peak. They had the same sexily curvaceous figures as the Indian models, traditional hourglass shapes that always made clothes look alluring and showed other women how fashion could actually make them more attractive.

Paintings of Minoan women show the earliest recorded examples of the hourglass figure. But for the archetype of the women I saw on the Indian catwalks, we must go back to Edwardian times, when professional beauties, actresses andgrandes horizontaleswere all setting the standard with figures that carried real flesh. We have only to see images of that time to appreciate how desirable they looked. And isn’t that one of the objects of dressing fashionably?

Modern women could learn a lot by looking to the Indian catwalks. Certainly, like most men, I wonder just why childbearing hips and full breasts have been banned from western fashion.

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