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Strangely, it's empowerment
ANIL DHARKER
PTI
The fashion week in Mumbai ... no perspective in coverage.
THE Fashion Week held in Mumbai recently, was quite an event. In fact, if you believed the media, it was the event, not just of the week, but the year. On the first day, for example, this writer (who is as much an expert about fashion as, say Sonia Gandhi is about public speaking) was accosted by 15 news channels, radio stations and newspapers for a sound byte. There was certainly more newsprint used on the subject than the clothing material used on the ramp by all the designers combined.
All of us, of course, laughed at this lack of perspective. We also noted, with some disdain, that the spectators made as much news as the designers: which industrialist and which CEO tore himself away from Absolutely Essential work to spend time at this Absolutely Inessential event. How was it that that prominent socialite got to sit only in row four and not in row one (and how could she then face her peers)? How many changes of clothes did the former beauty queen in seat 30 row one go through today and who were the designers she was wearing? And did you notice that there were some celebs who could actually carry out the intellectually challenging task of gossiping, taking the clothes in and chewing gum, all at one time? Yes, the fashion "industry" (strictly in quotes), is an easy target, especially when you consider the disparity between its (small ) size and the (maximum) hoopla which surrounds it. It may be an activity with a future, but it's a future that's a long, long away.
But because of our sniggers and our sneers, we overlooked two rather surprising corollaries to this glamour business.
Earlier, glamour meant cinema, and only cinema. And since films have room only for a handful of stars but can accommodate a whole lot of extras, cinema was a very limited avenue for the star-struck. It became, as a direct consequence, a field where limited opportunities gave plenty of scope for those who were established to exploit those who were eager aspirants. The casting couch was a common feature in every two-bit producer's office.
But the widening of the glamour business to include modelling, fashion designing and its associated catwalk, beauty contests, television acting and veejaying, suddenly reversed the demand-supply ratio. The casting couch may not have become absolute, but it was no longer absolute: you could now walk vertically through the door.
The far-fetched has thus become fact: this widened glamour field is the panacea of the small-town, middle-classes, a route to reach hitherto unattainable aspirations. Young women and young men happily find that a combination of a bit of luck and a bit of looks; a bit of work and a bit of talent, can now take them to the dizzying heights they could once only dream about.
There is an even more far-fetched by-product of the burgeoning fashion industry: it has become the unlikely vehicle for the empowerment of women.
If you look at movements like Afghanistan's Taliban, their general thrust may have been against modernity, but their particular target was always the liberated woman: the Taliban attacked women who didn't cover themselves fully in a burkha; they closed down girls schools and any other source of education for women; they also prohibited women from working careers (thus creating the analogy of fully-covered women having to be put through intimate examination by men gynaecologists).
Our own version of the Taliban tried the same tactics: in Kashmir a militant group imposed its own "Burkha Rule", and attempts (fortunately unsuccessful) were made to stop girls from going to school. The Hindu versions of the Taliban did the same: although their attacks were ostensibly against obscenity, the targets were always women: in Kanpur there was a campaign against women in Western dress (ironically carried out by men wearing shirts and trousers); in other parts of Utttar Pradesh, college fashion shows were stopped for being against "our culture"; in Mumbai, when the Shiv Sena activists tore down a poster advertising jeans, they tore down the one showing women but didn't touch the one with men, although both were equally "revealing".
The glamour industry's rather meagre pieces of cloth have thus become the flag for women's empowerment. Beauty contests have been derided in the West as being exploitative of women; here they have become an expression of women's rebellion, their right to flaunt their bodies if they wanted to. The fashion show model in her often outrageously skimpy clothes earns a decent living, thus also asserting her ability to achieve economic independence. The Taliban burkha which was, in fact, a prison for women, is thus being thrown away at every fashion show, at every VJ hunt, at every TV audition. Not bad, eh, for a business considered to be completely frivolous!
Anil Dharker is a journalist, media critic and writer.
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