Wear your attitude

And anything you damn well please…that’s the whole point of personal style

When I was growing up, there was an infallible way to tell when a woman had gotten married. She gave up on childish things like frocks and dresses, put away her jeans and skirts, and adopted the salwar-kameez or the sari as her uniform of choice. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t always by choice. Sometimes it was dictated by conservative in-laws, on occasion it was the husband who didn’t want her to dress ‘Western’ now that she was married, and at times it was just unspoken societal pressure. That was how married women were supposed to look: all wrapped up decorously in a sari, or a salwar-kameez at a push. And most married women complied, no matter what their private feelings on the matter.

I am happy to report, however, that this is no longer the case. Marriage no longer spells the end of edgy or even sexy dressing. Women, or at least urban women of a certain class, can continue to wear what they like even after they have that ring on that finger (or the mangalsutra around the neck). Nobody looks on with shock/horror if a married woman accessorizes her chuda with tight jeans or a short skirt. In fact, nobody so much as bats an eyelid.

Never was this brought home to me more forcibly than when my newly-wedded niece was taken shopping by her mother-in-law. My niece gravitated towards the churidar-kurtas, thinking this was an appropriate choice given that mum-in-law was paying. But even as she was riffling through them, she felt an urgent tug on her shoulder. It was her mother-in-law, who had found an outfit she thought would look amazing on her new daughter-in-law. It was a short, sleeveless, patterned dress with a halter neck. 

But it’s not just young, newly-married women who are dressing differently these days, eschewing conservative choices for more modern ones. It is women of all ages, all social classes, all shapes and sizes, and from all over the country. It is no longer unusual to see a young mother in a short dress or even a grandmother in trousers. Jeans have become a great equalizer, being worn by women young and old, with every body type, from all income brackets, and from every region. 

In my case, I have made quite the opposite journey. In my teenage years, I could not wait to get into the sari. Even the act of draping it in front of a full-length mirror made me feel ineffably grown-up. As a young professional in my first job, the sari’s natural grace and elegance helped me negotiate the new and tricky world of the workplace from within the security of its folds. It made me look like and act like a responsible adult even when deep down inside I didn’t really feel like one. The perfect camouflage, in fact, for faking it until I finally made it.

Now that I can class myself as a ‘woman of a certain age’, I still wear the sari. But now it is when I want to have fun and play dress-up, having tired of my everyday uniform of jeans and shirts. And sometimes I treat the sari like a secret weapon in the armoury of my wardrobe, to be deployed when I particularly want to impress. It is pulled out on special occasions, like formal dinners, weddings, or at important professional engagements when I want to feel the same security I felt as a young journalist starting out.

But for the rest of the time, my wardrobe has actually gotten younger as I have gotten older. These days I live in fuss-free, knee-length, crush-proof dresses that I can pull out of my closet (or increasingly, my suitcase) and step into without all that starching and ironing that cotton saris, or even churidar kurtas, require. There is none of the palaver of figuring out what goes with what, none of that nightmare called colour coordination. It’s simplified dressing at its best: pull on a dress, slip on a pair of flats, stick on the sunglasses, a slash of eyeliner, a dab of lipstick, and you are good to go.

Did I hear you mention the words ‘mutton dressed as lamb’? Ah yes, I thought so. But you know what, the best part of growing older and becoming comfortable in my skin (not to mention my dress) is that I no longer care what you think of me, my clothes, my sense of style, or for that matter, my bare arms. I will wear what I like, thank you very much. And in the famous words of Rhett Butler, I really don’t give a damn (what you think about it).

And I am rapidly coming around to the view that, no matter what your age, this is the key to personal style: it has to be a personal choice (not made on the basis of the diktats of some fashion magazine); and you have to own it, no matter what other people may think (or say) about it. Feel like wearing a sari? Do it. Want the comfort of a pair of lived-in jeans? Knock yourself out. You’d rather live in a dress? Go right ahead. 

There is no one you need to please but yourself. Tell yourself that the next time you go shopping. It will make things so much simpler.

The Dress Code

It really doesn’t matter what you wear; you can be a feminist in both a sari and a skirt

Women and clothes. It really doesn’t get more complicated than that. There’s conflicting advice coming from every corner. Everyone has an opinion on what you should or should not wear (and where you should or should not wear it). There are people who seem to believe that your choice of outfit has a direct connection with your personal safety. But no matter how much care you take to dress every morning – or evening – you can rest assured that there will always be someone out there who believes that in those clothes, you are simply asking for it.

As for me, all through my life, I have tended to take the path of least resistance when it came to clothes. Growing up in Calcutta, where I went to a school and college run by nuns, there was a certain assumption that ‘good girls’ always dressed conservatively. And quite frankly, I never had a problem with that. I wore salwar kameezes and churidar kurtas routinely and felt incredibly grown-up whenever I wore a sari on special occasions.

Looking back, I often wonder why more of us Loreto girls didn’t rebel against the unspoken dress code that even outlawed something as tame as pedal-pushers (if you have no idea what these are, consider yourself lucky). My guess is that it was mostly because we never really paid that much attention to what we wore. We didn’t see clothes as a means to making some sort of political statement. And I most certainly didn’t think that they defined who I was in any manner.

Clothes definitely did not make this woman, I would have said if I had given any thought to the matter. But quite honestly, I never did. I had more important things to think about (like when I would finally get through the interminable James Joyce opus; and why I could never keep all the characters in War and Peace straight in my head).

After college, I began working at the ABP group, which – in those days at least – was a bastion of orthodoxy. All the women wore saris to work (only one lady with a particularly racy reputation would wear tight kurtas with trousers, which was regarded as the height of daring) and I duly took my cue from them before relaxing into the odd salwar-kameez and finally graduating to that old journo standby, blue jeans.

However I may have dressed on my time off, at work I always veered towards the line of sartorial safety. I would no more have worn jeans and a T-shirt to cover an election rally in a rural area than I would have worn a bikini to an official banquet at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The idea was always to blend in, to seem non-threatening. If I was going to be the proverbial fly on the wall, then I had to be a cipher, nondescript enough to disappear into the background. I couldn’t be that girl in a Bermuda shorts, who thought she was striking a blow against patriarchy by showing off her legs.

But then, these are choices that most women of my generation made, because we wanted to be taken seriously – and we had bigger battles to fight. So, we wanted attention to be focussed on our brains rather than our bodies. And we wanted the conversation to be about our talent and professional abilities rather than our clothes.

I guess we’ve come a long way from that (er, baby, as the sexist Sixties line would have it). And in a way it is comforting that we now take enough of our freedoms for granted to finally be able to have that conversation about clothes. At some level, I suppose it must be seen as a sign of progress that women are all charged up to fight for their right to wear a mini-skirt and not be leered at.

But speaking for myself, I still find the idea of a Slut Walk risible in the Indian context, when women in rural areas who are wrapped up in six yards of fabric get sexually molested, assaulted and raped every day. And call me sexist if you will, but I find it hard to sympathise when women complain of being leered at after putting their breasts out on display in their latest push-up bras. Hell, there are times when even I gawp in horrified fascination at those acres of cleavage on display, so I’m not one to point fingers.

When it comes to clothes, though, I think the common-sense argument is the most compelling one. Of course, you can wear what you like. Of course, you can go where you like while you’re wearing it. And of course, nobody has the right to molest or rape you because of the way you’re dressed. But there is such a thing as ‘appropriate dressing’, and we would be fools to deny it just to sound politically correct. For instance, I still wouldn’t wear a short skirt to a political press conference. And I certainly wouldn’t wear a skimpy top while reporting from a rural area.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that clothes are really not that important. Because what you wear is not who you are. So, let’s not make the mistake of believing that our identity is wrapped up in our clothes. It is possible to be a feminist in a sari as well as a skirt – and we should never forget that.