When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else
Iris Apfel
The season is back! And I don’t mean the one of watery eyes, runny noses and hacking coughs (though that is back too, having broken the confines of the Delhi Municipal Corporation). Safe under a warm duvet, I am peering blearily at the ‘fashion season.’ Bewildered at the bits and baubles on display. And slightly unhinged by the necessary appendage, the phone, awash with advertisements. I mean, when you are trying to pay the humongous bill of Mahanagar Gas Limited (MGL) and are suddenly flooded with pictures of flimsy net dupattas, three for the price of two, you tend to wonder whether the good folk of MGL, are riled enough to want you to go up in flames! But no, nothing personal about it. MGL folk are still out and about in their trusty blue and white kit to take a meter- reading, or in bright yellow if they are the hazard response team. This is their limit of high fashion.
With the festive season half way through and the wedding season taking its first steps of the year towards center stage, you know you are caught fast in the silky-but-super-strong strands of the fashion web. Sales, new trends, and the ‘must-haves’ peer from everywhere: glitzy and not-so-glitzy stores, mega-malls, and the depths of the internet. As I try to stroll along, clad in a comfy pair of jeans and a fleecy T-Shirt or a beautifully soft and worn salwar-kurta, I am accosted at every turn by bling and backless which threaten to leave my eyebrows permanently somewhere in the region of my hair and my mouth, sagging in wonder, somewhere at the level of my knees.
With a slightly ‘ignorant’ background, coupled with a real indifference to what is trending and hot, and what is not, I think I have earned my place as the fashionista’s nightmare. Luckily, the spouse is even more clueless. If I cannot tie a saree properly without the help of an army of minions and pins, then his clever and competent fingers which can deftly tie intricate knots deep in an abdominal cavity awash with blood suddenly tie themselves into knots when it comes to dealing with a tiresome neck-tie or pesky dhoti. When I was growing up, through the eighties and the early nineties, small town India was where avant-garde came to meet oblivion and the oblivion had lasting impression. The textile industry featuring natural fibers like cotton and silk was on its last legs, thanks to the apathetic polity. Bhanu Athaiyya may well have won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, but a decade would pass before we could lay our hands on similar fabrics.
Most people of my generation hate to be confronted by pictures of their school going- selves. The real reason is the ghastly clothes we were stuffed into by doting parents, for want of better ones. Nylon, shiny polyester, ruffles, and ‘frocks’ which would have fitted right in among the condemned of the Russian Revolution, or those bound for Nazi concentration camps. The less said about the ‘pedal -pushers,’ slacks, and shiny salwar -kameez a la Bhagyashree Patwardhan in an equally ghastly movie ‘Maine Pyar Kiya,’ the better. Everywhere you looked, there was a vast sea of gaudy glitz, puerile prints, ribbons, ricrac, and ruin. The more artificial, the better thanks to the up and coming ‘Only Vimal,’ the brain-child of Dhiru Bhai Ambani. I think his daughter-in-law, the current queen bee of Indian fashion, Nita Ambani, tries to disown those photographs which picture her clad in the material on which the family fortune was founded.
Besides, there was paucity of not just the material but also clothing styles. There was the frock, skirt, and salwar kameez for girls, with a seamless transition to the sari, no sooner matrimony was mentioned. The boys had even less of a choice, limited to short pants and long pants which then diversified into suits, long shirts, or bush-shirts. There was also something called the ‘safari suit’ in more than fifty shades of particularly shady grey, with the pants and shirt perfectly coordinated by the same material. Normally, the realm of the Sarkari Babu, or the bureaucracy, it meant fat contracts, with grey bridging the black and white money. Only traditional wear remained what it was, timeless, elegant, changing with the regions and crafted out of the memories and love of generations.
With the opening of the markets to global trade in the nineties brought in a whiff of fresh air into this jaded scene. With Ms. Sen and Ms. Rai becoming the faces of the Universe and the World respectively, the world was suddenly interested in what the well -dressed Indian was wearing. With the local bazaar now flooded with ‘imported’ or ‘export quality’ material and corresponding styles to match, the whiff of fresh air has taken on the proportions of a Cyclone Michaung and is blowing everything from Bhatinda to Bengaluru and Gandhinagar to Guwahati hither, tither, and yon before it, not just Chennai.
And this is what people like me stare at in unabashed, open-mouthed admiration. The effortless pairing of backless blouses with staid silk sarees, chiffony numbers which stop anywhere from mid- thigh to mid- pavement, skirts so tight that the people in them look like sausages ready for the grill, or so wide that three or four toddlers could be safely hidden in the capacious folds (a good dress for would-be kidnappers) or the good old kurta snipped and embellished into Alia, Kareena, Pakeezah, Sadhana, and God alone knows how many cuts and styles.
Visit any mall or even a good old-fashioned market and it is heaving with pretty young things carrying bags filled to overflowing with the best and the brightest. The fashion changes every few months (or is it weeks?) and is followed by a major overhaul of the wardrobe, whose shelves creak and doors refuse to close on all the wondrous goodies stuffed inside. Big- brands, flea markets and everything in between jostles for space to the universal slogan of “I have nothing to wear!”
But the best jaw-droppers in my book are the modern emperor’s and empress’s new clothes, made sans cloth! Ripped jeans top the list because I refuse to see the logic of buying an expensive pair of jeans, with the sole intention of taking a razor blade to them and cutting away the major part. I think it would be far simpler to exchange them with some unfortunate street dweller who would be more than happy to score some nice, new, and WHOLE clothes instead of HOLE clothes. The next off are those clothes which have unnecessary holes cut into them, masquerading as the dubious ‘design which the designer has on a clueless wearer. Blouses with holes in the back or an entire back swallowed by a hole, kurta and cholis which migrate south wards and look as if they are held up magically by invisible straps, gowns with disappearing sleeves or sleeves with disappearing gowns, and those dresses which are mostly slits and no substance. And those who roam the streets in ‘co-ord’ sets should be sent off to bed as they are nothing but hapless sleep walkers living in LaLa land.
The land of fashion is the garden of Eden to those happy souls who revel in the season’s best with unfailing regularity. For others like yours truly, who are still followers of the ‘buy only if necessary’ and ‘buy two give away four’ schools of thought, it is a mine field which needs careful negotiation. But you know you are a true novice when your maid knows more about the latest colors and ‘matrials’ of the season than you ever will, and you secretly nickname her Naira Banu when she flaunts her latest ‘Naira Cut’ dress at work, age and figure be damned. Or when you spend more time staring in owlish fascination at what your class mates are wearing during a recent reunion, instead of out to sea, which should draw all you attention since said reunion is aboard a cruise!
With several textile parks mushrooming all around the country, Khadi and indigenous textiles being promoted like never before and the ‘Made in India’ brands literally zooming off the shelf to far-away foreign lands, we have never had it better when it comes to clothes. As I put a wobbly foot forward in Fashion land, while choosing the same tried and trusted outfits which I hope befit my age and all the saggy, baggy bits, and which do not have the family putting their hands over their eyes in horror, I decide I prefer Behenji to Bomb.
Besides, I am supported by Coco Chanel, who famously said “I don’t do fashion, I AM fashion!”