Excerpts from my diary...2007..alwayz been 'bere paka!'... :P
''FOR most of us fashion has always taken top priority on the “to do” list. As soon as you turned 15, you borrowed the fashion dictionary from your cousins and friends and mugged it all up, right from A for Anna Wintour all the way to Z for Zara. And then you made the grand entry.
Your hair streaked in mad colours, your skirt made with as much fabric as a sock requires, your face so stiff with makeup that your dog can’t recognise you… you look just perfect. And just as you are about to step out of your house there is the senior NIFT designing student neighbour walking up.
“Do I look ok?” you ask, faltering at her wrinkled nose.
“Sure… if you are following Flinstone Fashion” she sniggers.
“What? I saw this very same outfit on the catwalk last Tuesday,” you defend yourself.
“Well, hello… it’s Friday today, isn’t it? Three days is three decades in the industry,” says your neighbour with utmost disdain and shuts the door on you.
Of course you are not the one to blame. Fashion changes faster than Britney changes her boyfriends.
Yesterday it was cool to look like gunny bags with carefully-carelessly ripped jeans, shapeless tops and lurid flipflops. Today, it is correct to be feminine with frilly cuts, pastel floral, silky hair and pink handbags.
Tomorrow, maybe the “sensuous-not-sexy” look will be the right thing to follow with graceful flowing silhouettes in georgette and chiffon and sky high stilettos (though I fail to understand what’s so sensuous about such suicidal tendencies).
And as the designers put it, “You must have these few items in your closet if you don’t want to be considered a fashion pariah.” And so off we go shopping, wishing that our dads were Laxmi Mittal equivalents (to afford the daintily priced Rs 1200 bubble skirt), our moms were severely near-sighted (to actually see those skirts), our figures were like Katrina Kaif’s (to be able to carry that outfit) and our days consisted of 48 hours (to go shopping even after the endless series of ghastly tuitions).
And by the time we reach the mall the trends have obviously changed so we end up ‘all the wrong stuff’ as the neighbour puts it with a pitying face.
So a blue-eyed Brit says that orange is the new black, and a blonde from LA says that emerald green is the new orange. Stuck between the ever-changing and ever “depreciating” cycle of fashion, a girl from India (that wannabe fashion capital third world country of Asia) tries to choose between pret and couture.
In the highly overpopulated, poverty stricken, ever disturbed, misgoverned Bengal, the teenager celebrates the opening of a Max parlour and the discounts that they are offering on their entire range of make up (just Rs 1450 per eyeliner!! how WOWWWWW!!).
Of course you can hold on rigidly to your principles and say cliched stuff like “Fashion is just a mask. What lies beneath is style and that is what is important”. Well, you are welcome to wear the WWF panda embellished T-shirt that turned heads in the Nandan Wildlife Film Festival to LIFW. Just don’t be surprised when seats around you are suddenly vacant and fashion moghuls cry wolf.
You can always say “I don’t care”. But don’t you? Isn’t there a narcissus inside every soul that wants to look absolutely stunning all the time? Tell me truly, have you never ever imagined it would be cool to sit and chat on Koffee With Karan getting famous, all the while being snooty and looking gorgeous with every drape and every strand of hair exuding eloquence at the right places. Isn’t the thought of being that admired and celebrated (however foolishly) quite driving?
And what wouldn’t people do for that? Not only do you let yourself be tossed about in the sea of brands and remodelled every day as fashion demands, but you keep destroying your true personality on purpose… hanging out with cool people (a bunch of known hypocrites), laughing about the guys who can solve entire exercises of HC Verma in minutes, and pretending to go gaga over Garfield-eyed drug addicts who are so pally with your adopted against-your-heart set of friends. And if your friends mistake the author of Satanic Verses for the admirable guy who shot black bucks (so heroic, na?), then that’s all your fault. You were talking about books... ugh!
So even at the cost of all this, do you become fashionable? It’s obvious you won’t be able to answer that question and surprisingly none of your friends will be able to either.
Everyone it seems is equally puzzled with the ‘What’s hot, what’s not’ routine laid down by teen magazines and fashion columns with vague and conflicting views. Irritated by it all, if you turn to the gurus of the fashion industry it’s pretty much the same. Possibly they will go one step further and tell you that if guys wear pink paisley prints on mauve shirts and girls go for green and red sequinned lehengas to wear to college… you are fashionable.
All the while they themselves don Rs 50 T-shirts from local bazaars and smirk behind your back as their sales and bank balances grow and grow and grow some more.
Who are they trying to kid? Anyone with a single brain cell can sense all the confusion and insanity underneath the smart exteriors of the fashion scenario.
Moral: Walk the plank into the sea of fashion. Don’t be afraid. Hardly matters what you wear. Just be high browed, act like one if you really are not unfortunate enough to be one, be insufferably knowledgeable, speak on fashion with authority, call yourself something ridiculous (Falguni Armani… whatever) and you are bound to impress some if not all of the fashion aficionados.
For the less adventurous, remember if the runway gurus say it is in to drape Christmas lighting around your head and shoulders, Christmas lighting it’s gonna be.
And keep the cliched ‘Fashion is falsehood’ quotes to yourself. You see the situation has gone way beyond the place where fashion is anything you can comment negatively upon. Today fashion just is!''
