What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “Fashion”? Well, for most, it’s an image of an ultra-skinny model who has gone through months of starvation and endless beauty treatments to fit into a very uncomfortable piece of fabric, which makes her look like she’s exclusive, different and unattainable.
Fashion, used to be a way of expression, a way people showed their authenticity, a way for them to bring out their creativity and feel comfortable and confident in how they present themselves to the world. The flood of trends that has hit every part of the world, which starts from various fashions epicentres of the world, the New York City, Paris, Mumbai and Seoul to name a few, brings with it a series of unattainable standards of beauty, influenced by the happenings in the West, which ends up making the lives of young girls, even boys, unhealthy and miserable. The meaning of Fashion has changed, how we visualise and accept what’s fashionable has changed, the essence of the word has changed. Fashion went from being something personal to a symbol of wealth and social status.
Every Fashion or Hollywood enthusiast remembers the hype behind Marilyn Monroe, the epitome of style in the 1950s and 60s. The definition of beauty back then was not starved women but women who had the confidence to flaunt their curves, flirt with men and dress in an unorthodox but bold manner. The sense of appeal that the dressing brought stuck, but the natural shape of a woman’s body, which was then considered beautiful, changed forever. Even in India, women with curves have ruled since ages, with Bollywood falling in love with Helen. The evolution of Fashion, driven by anything and everything adapted by the west, even if it is a toxic work environment. It is no news that the conditions most of the fashion industries exist in, for the people in it, are nothing but miserable. The focus of fashion designers and production houses has also shifted from producing pieces that make the public feel exclusive to the pieces being exclusive, hard to find, hard to fit into, hard to breathe in and every woman’s nightmare, hard to eat in.
Who would have thought that we would go from exploring the softest, most comfortable, vibrant fabrics, to straight up wearing metal and latex? Latex? Seriously? Keeping up with trends has become such a priority that these brands have lost the essence of what they originally represented. All because of the monetisation of outreach and content engagement. The more something is discussed, the more valuable it becomes. We went from shows being organised to display a designer’s hard work and art-form, to shows being organised to advertise and sell ad spaces and have established brands take and give away partnerships. Even words like ‘A Manish Malhotra creation’ have changed the subconscious image it brought to people’s minds. The imagination of an exquisite, unique and breathtakingly beautiful design has now been replaced with a heart attack inducing price tag. Again, monetisation of literally everything, at its play. The desire for a Sabyasachi lehenga or a Manish Malhotra dress was earlier the urge to own something so gorgeous that it becomes a personal identity for someone, but now on the contrary, is to mimic what the influencers and celebrities endorse and wear. This constant need to upgrade social status has pushed people into compromising their standards of living in exchange fleeting moments of social acceptance.
I recently walked into an outlet of a well renowned clothing brand, looking for a quality pair of non-de-stressed denim pants, which, as I now realise, are harder to find than your lost sibling, came across one that checked all the boxes of my required-from-my-denim-list except one, my size. Now, intuition tells you that I was too thick for the pants, but on the contrary and to your disappointment, I was too small for the pants, not because I am a petite human, but because the pants were from a separate “Plus Size” section of the store. A SEPARATE plus size section!? What a wonderful display of inclusiveness. This is similar to giving someone a single separate bedroom when they demanded for a seat at the dining table. My issue then, was no longer about not finding my size, but with the absurdity of the solution that the store, and many more like it, have come up with. The entire point of inclusivity in Fashion, was to cater to a larger section of the audience, a greater proportion of the women, a more diversely sized group of women. Women are expected to fit in this window of XS to XL (In India) or from 2 to 14 (in the US) when the average size of an American woman is 16(Robison, n.d.). This translates to a clothing store, on an average, not having the size of the woman walking into the store. Even when it does have the size to fit the woman, each fragment of the “look” is enough to burn a hole in the pockets of people, who lose purchasing power with every passing day. Trends featuring brands like LV, Prada and designers like Manish Malhotra and Versace, just to name a few, set a standard that is beyond impossible to keep up with for majority of the population. This creates an effect of exclusion for people who don’t fit into these standards of the beauty industry. The motive of these brands, as stated by them, is to be aspirational, but on the contrary, they end up being exclusive. The question we are left with is if we wish to see Fashion as a tool of expression and art for the masses, or let it fall prey to the monopolistic mindset of making everything symbolic of “aspiration”, “niche”, “exclusivity” and ultimately become a gauge of social status and wealth, ostracising most of the world.
References and Inspirations:
Robison, M. (Director). (n.d.). Romance in Style. Netflix.
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