A fat lie

Indian fashion must embrace a new female aesthetic.

The dates for Wills India Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2010 have been announced. And this week model auditions were held to select those who will walk the ramp during the Week. The fashion capitals of the world — Milan, New York, Paris — have, in the last couple of years, attracted bad press for putting anorexic models on its ramps. Though the fashion week hosted in Delhi hasn’t seen anything as bad as what has horrified critics in the West, there is no doubt that anorexia afflicts Indian models as well. The Kate Moss-popularised model diet of coffee, cigarettes and champagne is as much a reality backstage at the fashion week here as it is anywhere in the world.

Over the years, models on the ramp have only become thinner and even older, more established models have felt the pressure to be as skinny as their younger counterparts. In the West, meanwhile, the tide finally seems to be turning with the so-called plus-size (UK size 12 and more) models finding stardom and work in abundance. Simultaneously, fashion blogs by plus-size women posing in fashionable attire are creating waves. There is a belief now that not everyone need be a size zero to be considered a style icon. Real women and real bodies is the slogan that has caught the fancy of the Western world, fed up with images of skeletal frames of pre-pubescent girls that everyone was meant to emulate.

Both these trends are significant because for a very long time, the international fashion industry has tried to dictate unrealistic ideals to consumers. Those that did not fit in were marginalised. The pressure to be a size zero voluntarily (in the past, this was an outcome of living in a drought prone or famine struck region) has never been greater than it was in the last decade. When fashion historians will record this decade, this will be the ugliest part of a business whose promise is to make us all look good.

In India, we are always a couple of seasons behind the rest of the world when it comes to trends. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this pleasing change of accepting women of all shapes and sizes, that has taken the West by storm, takes some time to become visible on the ramps here. One reason for this delay is that the fashion press here is reactive rather than pro-active. The second reason for this is that fashion blogs haven’t really taken off here the way they have abroad. And finally, the blame for the rise of anorexic models on the Indian ramp must be laid at the door of our fashion designers who could have, but haven’t done anything to promote a new female aesthetic. Instead they were happy to borrow a flawed idiom and pass if off as something to aspire to for the new urban Indian woman.

Now that we know that we have been told a big fat lie by the fashion industry, can we hope that the community here celebrates the diversity of shapes and sizes of the Indian female?

[archana.jahagirdar@bsmail.in]