I once wore a salwar kameez to a first date, only to learn that it would be used to write off my personality. My date surmised that I was the shaadi type. I don’t remember if there was a second date but I remember thinking that that was quite a lot to conclude from an outfit.
As someone who works in fashion, this incident got me thinking about the curious business of dressing oneself. I have spent years working with clothes—looking at them, sketching them, dressing people in them—you get the gist. When it comes to my own clothes, I use them to dress my two entirely different personalities.
On the one hand, we have the rather sombre Western dresser with black, grey, navy blue and occasionally even olive green dominating the wardrobe; a woman of few accessories and even less interest in making a fuss. On the other is her excitable counterpart; someone who loves wearing silks in rani pink, bandhej in purple, red-coloured kalamkaris, and is unafraid to wear colour on colour or print on print with a trunkful of dupattas, a cupboard filled with juttis, cherished boxes full of bangles and jhumkas and many packets of micro bindis. I go out of my way to avoid accessorising (or even ironing) a shirt, only to spend twenty minutes deciding the perfect pair of earrings to complement a kurta. Make it make sense.
The Indian half of my wardrobe is also considerably more sentimental. It features items purchased from artisans, small bazaars and little shops from across the country. Each piece comes with a story attached. There is a pair of silver jhumkas, bought from a Sikh gentleman’s shop near Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, after he lent me a pin from his turban and rescued me from a clothing malfunction; juttis that caught my eye on a particularly cold evening in Amritsar while waiting in a queue outside the city’s most famous eatery, Kesar Da Dhaba; an ajrakh kurta from Zaid Khatri in Ajrakhpur, Kutch. They are, in many ways, a travel diary.
My salwar kameezes have had several careers. They went from serving as a uniform in my Bharatanatyam classes to an oppressive dress code in my pre-university years. Later, as a young, single woman travelling through rural India, they became something of a travelling companion. Practical on unreserved trains, comfortable in remote villages and an easy way to feel put together without feeling particularly exposed. I could navigate an unfamiliar place and still feel like myself.
The thing is, I have never had any reservations about wearing a salwar kameez in my personal life. But when high stakes scenarios enter the picture—a first date, a client meeting, an interview, a room full of people in the fashion industry—I become guarded. Suddenly, I found myself relegating ethnic wear to the godforsaken term “Aunty”.
Not that people have stopped wearing them. There is the SoBo matriarch in her carefully curated designer ensemble, the Dilli Haat handloom advocate, the NID student in her artfully dishevelled versions, and a whole country of women who haven’t made an existential crisis out of getting dressed in the morning. But in my head, at least, the salwar had acquired a rather unfortunate casting.
