Fashion Foul

Afterward, Brianna stumbled to the bathroom, where she rinsed and rinsed with mouthwash. When she returned to the room, Anand said, "Well, I guess we're done."

"He wanted to make an appearance from behind a curtain and all this smoke would go up," Brenda says. "He said, 'I'm a dog-and-pony show. Let's just make some money.'"

The light went on in her head, she says. Anand Jon wasn't in the business of selling fashion. He was selling himself.

Brenda realized that each time Anand came to Dallas, he brought the same garments. A graphic artist who had moved from Dallas to work with Anand came back with the news that most of the clothing the designer presented as his was purchased in India by Anand's sister.

The attention of the press and the power he wielded over eager models had created a monster. Jesse says that Anand and Sanjana, who had started her own line of clothing, verbally abused models and interns, who stuffed envelopes, sewed in labels and schlepped clothes all over the city for them—usually on foot, always with no pay. They'd reduce girls to tears with vicious criticism. Their failure to pay invoices for New York models had gotten them blacklisted on one model Web site.

By late 2004, Jesse was exhausted. "I'm doing all this shooting, setting up flights and it was insane," he says. No money-making projects ever materialized.

Brenda finally had enough. After the "meet the designer" event, Anand had the nerve to ask the McLeans for a share of the bar sales. His assistant also had been extracting contact info from their models. Then Anand presented Brenda with a contract giving him ownership in Girlco Modeling, which he had started including on the Anand Jon Web site as if it were his agency.

She declined to sign the contract. Not long afterward, the mother of a Texas Girlco model called Jesse to say her daughter was taking a year off from college to move to Los Angeles to work with Anand; she planned to live at his studio, sharing the rent with two other girls. Jesse told the mother she should have nothing to do with such an arrangement.

The next day Anand called McLean to say there was a misunderstanding. The girls would be living at the apartment of his assistant, not in his studio. But the assistant denied any such arrangement. "I pretty much ended a dialogue with him," Jesse says. "I wanted to disassociate myself from him and where he was going."

In reality, Anand Jon and sister Sanjana grew up in a well-to-do family. His mother owned a chain of beauty parlors called My Fair Lady. Anand did graduate from Parsons, but many other details are shrouded in mystery. For example, he often tells models he's in his early 20s and Sanjana is his younger sister. But official records give his age as 33 and his sister's as 39.

After his arrest, stories about Anand Jon's past circulated on the Internet, including the allegation that he had to flee his home country after messing with a girl from a higher-caste family. There's no way to confirm that. But an Indian freelance writer named Manu Joseph wrote in The Times of India about his brief exposure to Anand at a Jesuit college for boys in June 1991, when girls were admitted for the first time.

The eight girls were a distraction, Joseph writes, "but what would make the entire college stand still was...the lonely walk of a boy with long hair. He had a pretty face and his head was held high. His jeans were almost always torn around the knees...He wore chains around his wrist and many rings...When he did not walk alone he was surrounded by beautiful girls...They twittered around him. No one knew where he found them. They were not from the college."

Joseph described Anand Jon as the son of a privileged home who spent lots of time in the company of women, straightening his hair at his mother's salon or sticking close to a grandmother who enjoyed his "audacious" ways. He drew accomplished sketches and "even more astonishing nudes."