Shelf Life: Stitching the Past into the Future

 My Shelf Life column for November 2020:

What wartime women's fashion can tell us about the world

 

                  Christian Dior's 'New Look' was a massive departure from the clothes women wore in war-torn Europe
 

Elizabeth Gilbert's chatty doorstopper of a novel, City of Girls (2019), begins in the summer of 1940, when the narrator arrives in New York, “nineteen years old and an idiot”. Vivian Morris has just dropped out of Vassar College, judging as dull both the revolutionary young women in “serious black trousers” and the academic girls in shapeless wool skirts “that looked as if they had been constructed out of old sweaters”. While she knows nothing about the world, she knows clothes. And what makes the fashionable teenaged protagonist of 1940 different from one in 2020 is this: Vivian doesn't only wear cool clothes, she can make them.

Trained to sew by an exacting grandmother, Gilbert’s excitable heroine soon finds herself designing costumes the doddering theatre owned by her aunt Peg. It is wartime, and the Lily Playhouse is barely kept afloat by formulaic musicals: there’s really no budget for clothes. But the actors constantly need new outfits, so Vivian learns to improvise. She scours New York's cheaper garment districts and discovers the used clothes shops on Ninth Avenue, becoming a regular at a grand old shop called Lowtsky’s, owned by a Jewish family ejected from eastern Europe.

Vivian becomes adept at digging ancient dresses out of discount bins and transforming them into spectacular customised creations. From showgirls like her friend Celia, she moves on to designing for Edna Parker Watson, grand dame of British theatre stranded in New York by the war. 

 

Gilbert's narratorial preferences can try one’s patience, like addressing her novel to a young woman whose connection to Vivian is kept deliberately mysterious, to anticlimactic effect. But I enjoyed Gilbert’s enjoyment of fashion, a topic she addresses first with girly excitement and then subversive pleasure. The subversion begins with Edna who, though on first names with French couturier Coco Chanel, is no handmaiden to fashion. Her advice on how to dress—“if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person”, or “I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don't want the dress to be the star of the show”—is really advice on how to live.

 

But the book’s real subversion of fashion comes in 1950, when Vivian’s friend Marjorie Lowtksy, sharp young heir to the Lowtsky Emporium, comes up with a plan to cater to the post-war marriage boom. “[We] both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that's being imported...” says Marjorie. “I can find old silk and satin all over town–hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France, they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there–and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller.” 

 

The USP? Their dresses “wouldn't be industry; they would be custom tailored”.

Vivian and Marjorie's business makes them rich.

The same era seen from across the Atlantic, in Eric Newby's drily hilarious memoir Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (1962) reveals a much more damaged continent. The family firm of Lane and Newby, begun by the writer’s father in the 1890s, is somehow carrying on against a backdrop of bombed-out cities and drastic rationing. Even the upper workrooms of its grand old London offices, writes Newby with brilliant British understatement, “went up in smoke in 1944”.

In some deep metaphorical way, the firm’s continuance into a post-war world now rests increasingly on an army of “outworkers”, elderly women in the suburbs. Meanwhile, their buyers still make orders conditional on unprofitable “Specials”: customised versions for women too misshapen or too snooty to wear the standard designs.

Like Europe itself, the continent's fashion business feels like a creaky old warhorse that can't figure out the new world. “Evening dresses, like the gatherings at which they were intended to be worn, were dispirited”, writes Newby. “[T]he world of fashion had ground to a standstill”. Young Newby tries to come up with new designs on his own. But just after he places his orders, in March 1947, the French designer Christian Dior shows the insanely feminine excesses of his new collection: what would make history as the New Look.

But at that moment, Newby’s creaking world isn’t quite ready. “It was thought to be absurd... a last despairing death-kick by Paris which was no longer to be the centre of the fashion world.” British wholesaler manufacturers, “[h]alf-throttled by clothes rationing”, and too afraid to implement Dior’s radical changes, just make what they have been making for seven years “with a slightly longer skirt”. Of course, nothing sells. The glossies for 1947 are filled with suggestions for women readers with wartime budget constraints, on how to drastically cut and reshape their old clothes.

European fashion, led by Dior’s bold move, slowly begins to recover. But where Europe can only move on by cutting away from its past, America—at least in Gilbert's telling—is already making money off it: repackaging the dead European past as nostalgia. The difference between alteration tailor and vintage couture is writ large onto the history of the world.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 19 Nov 2020.

Shelf Life: Do Clothes Make the Woman?

The August edition of my column for The Voice of Fashion, on clothes seen through the prism of literature:

A story from Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories casts clothes as signifiers of selfhood

All the world's a stage, but not all men and women are players. Meena, Annie and Nayantara – the self-declared “goddesses” of Nisha Susan's story 'The Trinity' – clearly are. Susan's deftly-drawn Kochi undergrads are all crackling confidence, their position atop the social pyramid propped up by each other's presence. Even before their 'fusion dance' choreographies start to win gold medals and glory, the trio is already living out their lives before an imagined applauding public. “In college, when the three of us walked in, I used to feel like we were in those campus film-like slow motion scenes,” says the story's narrator Nayantara. “Not like the fat twenty-five year-old heroines in Malayalam campus films, but Hindi film heroines.”

Costuming, of course, is crucial to a successful performance – and the trinity is always ahead of the curve, not part of the herd: “We were thin and tall before anyone else was thin and tall... We had good sunglasses, not those big, ugly Gulf-return ones. We wore ghagras at weddings before anyone else did. We draped dupattas over our elbows casually, even though our arms ached by the end of the day.” Sometimes their clothes stage liberatory forms of public disguise. On a trip to Thiruvananthapuram, they walk around “pretending to be NRI Malayalis who did not understand Malayalam”, their tight jeans and sunglasses a license to do things that local girls might attract censure for, like inspecting the city's famously naked giant mermaid statue. At other times, they design costumes for an actual stage – on the same Thiruvananthapuram trip, their combining of sleeveless sari blouses and salwars with tightly draped dupattas electrifies and scandalises the Malayali youth fest audience. (“Malayalis have this thing about 'sleeveless'. Sleeveless means bad girl. Usha Uthup-voice bad girl. Never mind that stomach and back and breasts are showing when you wear a regular sari blouse.”)

'The Trinity' is part of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories (Westland, 2020), Susan's debut collection. The book's unifying thematic premise is India's digital landscape: it couldn't be more contemporary. But reading it made me think of a story from 132 years ago: Rudyard Kipling's 'A Second-Rate Woman', first published in 1888, and reissued most recently in a selection of Kipling stories named for a recurring character, Lessons for Mrs. Hauksbee (Speaking Tiger, 2017). Mrs. Hauksbee is the toast of colonial Simla (or Shimla), her very name a suggestive nod to her eagle eye and her queen-bee-like talent for gathering the young and bright around her. 

In this particular story, Mrs. Hauksbee is preoccupied with a recently-arrived Mrs. Delville, who is drawing disproportionate male attention in Simla society. This is grossly unfair, says Mrs. H, because Mrs D always looks like she “stood in middle of the room while her ayah – no, her husband – it must have been a man – threw her clothes at her”. “To dress as an example and stumbling block for half Simla... and then to find this Person... draws the eyes of men,” she rages, “It's almost enough to make one discard clothing.” So “disgustingly badly dressed” is Mrs. D, that Mrs. H labels her the Dowd – and the man paying court to her the Dancing Master. Back to Susan's opening paragraph: “We used to have names for everyone, and everyone had names for us.”

That bitchily competitive fashion-first vibe, the ruthless gaze the cool girls turn upon uncool ones, has apparently been around forever – and isn't going anywhere. Mrs. D's bonnet is terrible, her Terai sunhat has elastic under her chin, and “if she ever darkened these doors, I should put on this robe... to show her what a morning wrapper ought to be,” says Mrs. H to her friend Mrs. Mallowe. Whether the stage is the stiflingly small British circuit of 1880s Simla – the Mall, Library, horse rides to Jakko (Jhakhoo), dances at the Viceregal Lodge – or the equally tiny Indian college fest scene circa 2000, it seems that clothes remain our top signifiers of selfhood. When Mrs. M ventures timidly, “Do you suppose that the Delville woman has humour?”, Mrs. H scoffs at the possibility: “Her dress betrays her. How can a Thing who wears her supplément under her left arm have any notion of the fitness of things – much less their folly?” I thought of the goddesses with dupattas over their aching arms.

A vintage image of Lower Bazaar, Simla (Shimla).

When persona is crafted from clothes, getting them wrong makes one non grata. In both stories, though, it is the sharp dressers that get it wrong. The Dowd turns out far stauncher than Mrs. Hauksbee imagines, telling men off and saving babies, provoking Mrs. H to declare, “I love that woman in-spite of her clothes.” Meanwhile the goddesses conducting feisty sex lives on the internet – without getting caught on camera like their silly college-mates – abruptly become arranged-marriage wives. Perhaps clothes can only tell you so much. 

And yet sometimes they catch up with our inner selves, when we are not looking. We used to call girls with white lace hankies Kerchief Kumaris, says Nayantara at the start of 'The Trinity'. When, she wonders, did she start carrying one?

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 27 Aug 2020

Heritage, after a fashion

Relative Value: The youngest of the Kotwara royalty weaves her way into the family business. 

(My first-ever 'fashion' story, and one that allowed me to meet a director whose work I have admired: Muzaffar Ali. Published in the Mumbai Mirror's 'Relative Value' slot last Sunday.)

The home shared by Muzaffar Ali, his wife Meera and their daughter Sama is very much a reflection of them. Kotwara Farm lies at the end of Rumi Lane, just off the Gurgaon-Faridabad Road, a graceful amalgam of the contemporary and traditional — much like the clothes that emerge from the Kotwara fashion label that Muzaffar and Meera created in 1990, with Sama joining in 2014. Their latest collection at the recently concluded Lakme Fashion Week (Aditi Rao Hydari walked for them) was well received by critics and fashionistas alike. The line was what some described as “Indian with modern touches”.

We meet the family in their plush but comfortable drawing room, off an arched courtyard that would be stately if it weren’t for a slender stone frog that rises, as if to welcome you, one leg raised off the ground. Muzaffar’s quirky artistic touch (paintbrushes embedded in glass doors, leftover tiles crafted into a striking floor) combines with a studied elegance — yet the farm is a relaxed domestic space, with space for a cow called Gomti and Rough Collies called Drogo and Sansa (Sama is a Game of Thrones fan). The house was designed by Meera, who trained as an architect before she accepted a small role in a film Muzaffar was making — and ended up marrying him, six weeks after they met. Muzaffar, a painter, poet and acclaimed director of films such as Gaman, Umrao Jaan and Anjuman, had been married twice already: to art historian Geeti Sen, and then to CPM politician Subhashini Ali (director Shaad Ali, of Bunty Aur Babli and OK Jaanu fame, is their son.)

“My parents had no formal training in fashion. But I guess destiny finds you,” says Sama. In 1989-90, dealing with the setback of an aborted film project in Kashmir (the unreleased 1989 Zooni), Muzaffar moved back to his ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh with Meera. Even as a filmmaker, Muzaffar had been fascinated by how clothes and textiles can constitute a milieu, whether it was the khaki he foisted upon Farooq Sheikh’s taxi driver in Gaman, or the attention he lavished on Rekha’s clothes in Umrao Jaan. “For me, soft furnishings were a tactile experience, a layer which preceded the making of any film. Costume was the outer expression of a character, a situation, a mood,” says Muzaffar.

That interest, honed by his work with American couturier Mary Mcfadden exploring Kashmiri craft traditions during Zooni, now combined with his desire to give something back to the place his ancestors had ruled for centuries. Meera and he decided to develop Kotwara as a centre for handicraft. Since 1990, they have been training local artisans under their Dwar pe Rozi (‘employment at your doorstep’) initiative. Producing jobs for people where they are, the foundation ties into Muzaffar’s early concern with the travails of migration (think Gaman), producing exceptionally skilled embroiderers who give Kotwara clothes their distinctive quality.

“A mechanisation process had set into zardozi and chikan after 1947: cheap patterns, cheap markets, saris with big-big bootas, being sold in Punjab and Delhi,” says Muzaffar. “When we started, in 1990, chikan was at its lowest ebb in workmanship and aesthetics,” Meera agrees. “It took us 7-8 years to improve the quality of work, and to bring the buyer back.” The Alis are in agreement that the contemporary rich need to be educated into being patrons who recognise quality and are willing to pay for it. “Historically, art has always bloomed under the patronage of rulers,” says Sama.

Meera points out that Kotwara has been a trendsetter with silhouettes and reviving South Asian fashions. “In 1990, we brought in angarakhas and peshwas, which people now call anarkalis. When people only wore churidars and salwars, we brought back the chauda pyjama, the wide loose pants which everyone now wears as palazzos. Culottes have come back to India, where it is now called the Pakistani pyjama. But it were the Awadh Nawabs who took the Mughal style of dressing to the highest level: the gharara, sharara, big farshi pyjamas,” she says. Kotwara ventured into zardozi with thread work, creating “evening wear that’s elegant but not blingy”. “How chikan and zardozi have come together through us is itself a new form: let’s call it Kotwara craft,” smiles Muzaffar. “When you’re working with artisans with a regional legacy, your innovations become organic.”

The Alis are justifiably confident of the quality of their work, and between their aristocratic past (Meera just published a coffee-table book called Dining with the Nawabs) and Muzaffar’s association with Bollywood, Kotwara lacks neither for glamour nor cultural capital. The UP Tourism Department is co-sponsoring Muzaffar’s current pet project — reviving Lucknawi thumri and kathak as part of his Wajid Ali Shah festival, whose fourth edition opens on 14 February in Lucknow.

But they seem concerned about not being cutthroat enough for the present. “I’m hoping that Sama can learn the business end of things, because we get taken for a ride very easily,” Meera smiles ruefully. “My mother didn’t want me to get into this. She said, ‘fashion is beautiful, everything around it is ugly’,” laughs Sama.

“I want to add my own touch to their brand. Right now my focus is making Kotwara more contemporary, [to cater to] the many independent young people with well-paying jobs, who can buy a 30,000 rupee item without asking mothers or mothers-in-law. Papa’s too nice. I’m very open. But being nice doesn’t mean being stepped over,” says Sama resolutely. Muzaffar is accepting of his daughter’s vision for their brand and changing times. “Today’s reality is very harsh,” he agrees. “But we agree on being exacting and being human.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Feb 2017.

Post Facto: Tied up in knots -- the many meanings of the dupatta

My Sunday Guardian column, from early 2013:

A few weeks ago, a teacher called Snehlata Gupta wrote a piece on Kafila describing an incident that took place in her classroom of a co-ed school in Delhi. One of her students, a 17-year-old boy, came up to her outside the classroom with a problem. "In a quiet, hushed, almost embarrassed tone he said he felt I should wear a dupatta in class", an appalled Gupta writes "because it embarrassed him to see me without one." Gupta managed to control her rage. She told the boy, that he could shut his eyes or stay out of class—and henceforth refused "even more determinedly" to wear a dupatta to class. "Maybe a rather childish reaction but it made me feel good", she writes.

The wearing of a dupatta is perhaps the most carefully calibrated act of everyday dressing in contemporary North India. Also called chunni, chunari, or odhni, the dupatta is understood to be a necessary accessory to the salwar-kameez, churidar-kurta, or ghaghra-choli. So much so that the coordinated salwar-kameez sets that are probably the most ubiquitous women's wear in urban North India – 'suits', in Delhi lingo – come with matching dupattas. The dupatta quietly inserts itself into one's idea of the outfit—if you wear a 'suit', you automatically wear the dupatta that came with it. It's not wearing a dupatta that is then marked out as an act of choice.

Even when a dupatta is worn, though, there's always the complicated question of how. The dupatta is, of course, a remnant of the veil—as revealed most clearly in the word odhni: 'that which covers'. In more orthodox households, women still drape their dupattas (or sari pallus) to cover their heads and faces before men other than their husbands. But while the practice of purdah is probably growing less common (with the complicated exception of the newly burqa-wearing Muslim woman), the dupatta doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon.

A schoolgirl might wear hers starched and pinned to the shoulders of her white kurta uniform. The neighbourhood aunty with child and shopping bag might wear hers like a scarf, with both ends hanging down the front. The chic young woman on her two-wheeler might wear hers as protection against sun and dust and wind: wrapped tight around the head, but flying out behind her in the wind, in lieu of her tied-up hair. However it's draped, though, the primary purpose of this unstitched length of fabric appears to be to cover up anything a woman's stitched garments may inadvertently (or advertently) reveal — the possibility of cleavage, yes, but also just the possibility of breasts.

That was what Snehlata Gupta's student meant — that it was her job as a woman to keep her breasts out of his line of thought. The same boy, during an earlier class discussion, had declared that "if girls dress so provocatively boys can't help themselves". Since South Asian men can't be trusted to control their thoughts — or their actions, goes the dire, threatening logic—the dupatta must be worn: women must police their own bodies.

Sometimes it feels like necessary pragmatism: who hasn't carried a dupatta as strategic shield: to cover over a figure-hugging top, and be put away when one reaches the perceived cocoon of one's office, classroom or party?

Yet, over the last two decades, there has been something of a revolution in women's clothing in Delhi. And I'm not talking only about the upper middle class set that pair their kurtas with patiala salwars, jeans or tights, more often than not abandoning dupattas altogether. I'm talking about young women at Delhi bus stops, who in the 1990s invariably wore salwar-kameezes with dupattas. Young women at Delhi bus stops in 2013 are as likely to be wearing jeans and a T-shirt or shirt, without dupattas. Though still a massive cause of friction — witness the khap judgements, institutional dress codes and general pronouncements about shameless tight clothes — the rising acceptability of Western wear is a steady demotion of the dupatta. Another form of subversion is the increasingly common sheer fabric compressed into near-nothingness: a thin band round the neck rather than a loose loop across the shoulders, joyfully refusing to fulfil its unspoken duty as invisibiliser-of-breasts.

Like everything in the North Indian universe, the dupatta's symbolic status is perhaps best explicated by the Hindi film song. From the plaintiveness of Laaga chunari mein daag, mitaaun kaise, ghar jaaun kaise? to the tragic accusation of Pakeezah's Inhi logon ne le leena dupatta mera, all the way to the explicitly sexual address of Aaja na chhu le meri chunari sanam of Biwi No. 1, it is as if the chunari stands in for sex itself. But thankfully, dupatta songs are not all about shame and metaphorical virginity — a loss of modesty is often about deliberate abandon. The dupatta that lehraos in the wind is nothing short of a metaphor for freedom. As the Teen Deviyan song goes, Jab meri chunariya malmal ki, phir kyon na phiroon jhalki-jhalki.

To not wear a dupatta is certainly one kind of freedom. To insist on revelling in its flowing pleasures while refusing to be bound by it, is another.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, here.

Bhanu Athaiya Interview

‘Before My Designs for Waqt, Women Wore Dumpy Salwars’ 

Bhanu Athaiya, 83, was born Bhanumati Annasaheb Rajopadhye in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, the third of seven children. After graduating from the JJ School of Art, she found her niche as a costume designer in Hindi cinema, and has never looked back, winning India’s first Oscar in 1982 for her costumes in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. She spoke to TRISHA GUPTA on the eve of launching her memoir, The Art of Costume Design, describing her five decades in the Mumbai film industry. Excerpts:

How did you end up working as a costume designer in Mumbai films?

I had a two-page spread in the popular magazine Eve’s Weekly where my brief was to draw inspiration from Indian heritage. My fashion illustrations were noted by directors and film stars. They asked my editor to set up a boutique, where I started to design dresses. That boutique was visited by everyone from Kamini Kaushal and Nargis to Ramanand Sagar. It was Kamini Kaushal who gave me my first assignment. I started by designing her personal wardrobe, and soon went on to design her costumes in films like Shahenshah and Chalis Baba Aur Ek Chor

How did you meet Guru Dutt?

Guru Dutt’s sister was studying with me in JJ School. My illustrations had made me famous. I had also presented my paintings at the Kala Ghoda Artists’ Centre alongside MF Husain and Krishen Khanna. Guru Dutt asked me to design costumes for CID.

How did costume design in cinema work when you started?

The director had a clear idea of what he wanted, and the art director and he would brief the tailors. Actors would also join in. I became a bridge between director and actor.

Who were the directors you particularly enjoyed working with?

Guru Dutt had the sensitivity to do what was needed. Like during Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, he felt I should make a trip to Calcutta. So I visited the old mansions, and met people, and shopped. The films I did for Guru Dutt were based on reality. Raj Kapoor, in contrast, demanded something unique. One had to be more creative: Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the Prem Rog dream sequence, which was an Arabian Nights fantasy. Or Henna’s Pakistani gypsy. Hindi cinema makes all kinds of demands. Songs, dream sequences, rain sequences — all these give scope to a costume designer.

Any clothes or ‘look’ that you created that became particularly popular?

Waqt (1965) brought in the form-fitting salwar kameez and made it the rage. Before that, women had been wearing broad kurtas and dumpy salwars. Then Mumtaz’s sari in Brahmachari (1968) — the orange stitched sari that was wound round her body so that every twist revealed something — that was copied even by designers. In Nikaah, I gave the nawabi look a contemporary spin, focussing not on embroidery but on Hyderabadi pearl jewellery.

Has Hindi cinema’s approach to costume design changed?

The costume designer should design the whole look of a film. Like in Lagaan, I created the costumes across the board, from the villagers to the British elite. In the Oscars, that is a rule – that all costumes must have been designed by one person. But in most films here, even to - day, actors’ clothes are taken care of by costume designers and someone else fills the gaps. Stars come and say, ‘Get my dresses designed by so-and-so’. The 1980s brought in a lot of fashion designers into cinema. But designing for a star and designing for a character – that is a different cup of tea.

Published in Tehelka magazine, 2010.