Stories We Wear: Do appearances, outfits carry texture, history, politics?

This book unravels the layers behind what may seem like mere Instagram aesthetics or airport looks

Stories We Wear: Status, Spectacle and the Politics of Appearance 

by Shefalee Vasudev 

Published by Westland Non-Fiction 

288 pages  ₹699

  To understand humanity, one must understand masks. Masks conceal and announce, protect and perform. In the end, they are all we have, and perhaps all we are. In Stories We Wear: Status, Spectacle and the Politics of Appearance by Shefalee Vasudev, each chapter peels back a distinct mask of Indian society, and beneath each mask lies yet another. “Appearance,” she writes, “is simply the way reality announces itself.”

 

What may appear to be a mere outfit or an Instagram aesthetic carries within itself the syntax of power, the sediments of history. Who controls how you are seen? Who decides what is tasteful? Can a hemline be political? Can your coffee preferences hide your caste anxieties? “How a story is told—its headline, tone, blurbs and framing—matters so deeply,” she points out in one place. “In fashion and beauty journalism, language is a moral site.”

 

Consider the archetypal neta in khadi. It is one of modern India’s most distinct images, embodied by thousands every day. The fabric of Gandhi’s anti-colonial defiance has since been laundered through decades of power, today becoming a costume of governance, worn as naturally by the corrupt as by the conscientious. Ms Vasudev writes, “The enduring image of the neta in khadi, even when it is tailored from expensive, mill-produced cotton, carries such symbolic significance that myth and reality collapse into a single, uncontested visual.”

 

But khadi has its own saga: “It has a texture and temperament of its own; it resists styling for styling’s sake.” In India, how you dress is always, inescapably, a position. The distance between what is worn and what is meant is constantly analysed, from Mamata’s sari to Mahua’s Louis Vuitton, from Mayawati’s pink to Kangana’s glamorous looks. Each fashion statement is also a political one, containing both text and subtext.

 

Aspiration, too, has a costume, and its runway is the airport, that in-between space mirroring India’s desires. A theatre of the upwardly mobile, it’s the place to be seen arriving and departing (or a place to be seen “existing”). “The airport, a liminal space, became a photo pit for paps, a billboard for brands and a masterclass in styling for fans and wannabes,” Ms Vasudev notes.

 

At a lower altitude, the coffee shop tells the same story. A particular cup from a particular chain is always more than “just” a beverage; it’s an invisible map of class and ambition. Order a black filter coffee, and you signal one thing; order an oat milk cortado, and you signal another. These spaces may feel like progress and modernity, but beneath the surface, the same anxieties remain, rebranded.

 

Climb even higher, and aspiration finds the costume of virtue in the organic cotton tote, the earthy-toned, linen-textured, farmers’-market-fonted aesthetic. In personal branding exercises, even the planet has become a prop. The market for ethical appearance still runs on the same engine of being seen, except now the currency is guilt. The environment, then, has become something to wear, too.

 

Therefore, each appearance is a mini-autobiography. Through each appearance, a life can be mapped, from subculture and class to choices and proclamations. “She was tall, with raven-black hair, silver rings on her little fingers, black nail polish and a crescent moon ear cuff. She was dressed in a long white Lucknawi mulmul kurta with silver gota work. A lacy slip peeked from beneath the hem.” Each component of appearance tells a story. Through such vivid descriptions Ms Vasudev also charts the astrology of her characters’ universes: Where they’re coming from and what they’re reaching for.

 

But not everyone gets to curate their appearance. Some bodies are made so invisible by caste that even their deaths go unrecorded. Some lives are so thoroughly unseen that the only memory of their existence is a silence.  The manual scavenger carries someone else’s waste their whole lives, but is denied the dignity of being seen as a worker, a citizen, a fellow human being, a body that matters.

 

One chapter follows burn and acid attack survivors, asking what it means to reconstruct an appearance that was abruptly and violently taken away. Rehabilitation here is not just medical, but the unending task of reclaiming the right to be looked at without flinching.

 

Stories We Wear is, in the end, a mirror, for mirrors, held at the right angle, are the most radical things in the world. The book asks you to look, really look, at what you wear, what you consume, what you perform, and what it costs someone else. When does appearance become complicity? When does the mirror stop reflecting and start accusing?

 

After all, the most dangerous mask is the one that feels like a face.

The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world.

Instagram/X: @aroomofwords