Spare a thought for the world's glossy magazine editors. It's not easy trying to make an honest living by commissioning mind-bogglingly tasteless fashion shoots that will guarantee media coverage and therefore boost sales figures.

Because when it comes to tastelessness in fashion the bar, my friends, is very high. Think of Steven Meisel's Make Love Not War story in last September's Italian Vogue, "inspired" by the war in Iraq and set in a military camp. This featured models wearing tiny, revealing dresses and dazed expressions being felt up in the mud by groups of tattooed soldiers in combat trousers. Sort of like a rape camp, girls, but you get to wear Roberto Cavalli.

So respect to Priya Tanna, editor of Vogue India, who has created a new gold-standard for controversial images in the August issue. The season's flashiest accessories are modelled by ordinary Indians, so a toothless grandmother carries a little boy sporting a $100 Fendi bib; a barefoot man holds aloft a $200 Burberry umbrella, and a family of three squeeze onto a motorbike, with the wife holding the $10,000 Hermès Birkin handbag.

Remember Derelicte, the fictional fashion label in Zoolander? ("Inspired by the homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city so unique.") I thought that was a joke. Not, clearly, in Vogue India, which brings the spirit of Derelicte to life, and adds a little of the colonial-minded condescension that crops up in Vogues everywhere (see Keira Knightley in the June issue of American Vogue, posing amongst African tribespeople and befriending a baby elephant modelling a Louis Vuitton blanket.)

"Lighten up," Tanna instructed the New York Times when challenged about the pictures, the message of which she says is that "fashion is no longer a rich man's privilege". Now, that's a beautiful sentiment, Priya, but for the 456 million people in India who, it is estimated, live on less than $1.25 a day, would you mind just talking us through the arithmetic of how a $10,000 bag is for them?

· View a selection of the controversial pictures on the New York Times website