Where I come from, fashion was, well, not in fashion.

 

As a child, I enjoyed with amusement Bollywood songs that went like: “Fashion ki diwani, yeh gudiye hain Japaani, kaun kahega bolo inko ladki Hindustani”

 

And then, there were more ethnic celebrations in songs like this, when the churidar-wave swept the spirit of the sixties: “Pajama thang hai kurta-dheela/phir usme hai dupatta neela”

 

If one song marked the angst of a nation coming out of its colonial clutches and seeking its identity, the other celebrated the dash of modernity that a rich heritage could do with.

 

This was an India still innocent. Despite Rita Faria carrying the Miss World’s title on her largely uncelebrated shoulders, and despite a Wilson Jones becoming the world’s billiards (or was it snooker?) champion, this was an India still rooted in tradition, cultural assertion, and yes, lots of poverty.

 

Colonial rule gave modern medicine that made more people stay alive, while not giving them enough food and clothing. Cotton was for exports to western markets so that their people could wear in their  relatively cool summers our fine tropical yarns, while we waited for the licence-permitted polyester boom of the 1970s to clothe us at more affordable rates.

 

Dhirubhai Ambani was yet to become the Prince of Polyester.

The National Institute of Fashion Technology, if conceived then, would have been shouted down as an abominable act of decadence in the Land of Gandhi.

Clothes, then, were about covering nakedness for poor millions and politics was still about wearing khadi, though, as we began to see during the Emergency, there were Dunhill and 555 cigarette packets jutting out of the large-sized pockets of Youth Congress leaders sporting starch-white homespun kurtas.

 

I remember joining a music competition at Rajghat, where the Father of the Nation rested in peace and my father had suggested the following song to sing: “Charkha chala chalake, lenge swaraj lenge.”

 

Swaraj was now a reality,  and fashion was certainly frowned upon, as it stood for opulence, lack of social responsibility, and decadence.

 

But unknown to us, fashion was creeping up like a flood.

“Love in Simla” gave us the Sadhna Cut hairstyle (Interestingly, Shimla symbolised fashion for the Punjabi elite, and that pajama song was from a movie called “Simla Road”). 

The Sixties blazed a new politics of fashion which would become the leitmotif of commercial plans three decades later.

 

If churidars that the Sixties “heroine” wore was Indian, the sleeveless kameez marked a new trend. The window cuts to the kameez, the fixed “zulf” on the side, the big-bun hairstyles and high-heel slippers surrounded a bodyscape struggling between ethnic assertion and the incredible charms of the Wealthy West.

 

Fashion was not yet an industry but the word had come into the day-to-day vocabulary of middle class India.

 

When discussing sarees, fashion was not a derisive or scandalous word. I remember my mother speaking of sarees whose designs were blazed by Tamil movies. Words like “latest” and “fashion” seemed to sit easier on sarees. Mother-in-laws would still approve. 

Yet, while the ethnic weavers of Pochampalli and Kanchipuram struggled with silk,  the Japanese began to make a Trojan Horse infiltration into sarees.

Radio Ceylon, later called Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, was one of the vehicles, carrying  intricately smuggled advertisements with Hindi film songs in Binaca Geetmala. Of products not sold in India but greatly admired and sought in a nation where the word “phoren” was beginning to catch on.

Dubai, that new oil centre, and Singapore, suddenly famous for toys, were places were you could buy sarees that had titles like “Nylex 644”. Uncles on tours were asked to buy them. Aunties who could not get dollar-denominated husbands or relatives must have felt left out.

 

The Japanese were now making sarees.

 

In softer textures, mass produced, from yarns made from chemicals, not plants (“Just like silk, madam”).

 

 

Sarees were changing. They now had wavy patterns, squares, triangles. Less complicated, more energetic, they belonged to mindsets derived from a mathematical linearity of the Cartesian variety.

 

But the charms must have been alluring.

Borderless sarees, cheaper sarees,  softer sarees, new sarees. Sarees you could discuss with neighbours. Sarees you could wear to office if you were a “working woman”, with buttoned-up full-sleeve jackets in winters.

 

Other things were changing, too.

 

In the streets of Delhi, you could now afford to buy a new kind of cotton clothes. Export seconds, export rejects, export surplus: New terms for a new society. There were crumpled skirts, navy-blue denims, frilly blouses. The kids had not heard of Multi-Fibre Agreements or Most-Favoured-Nations or General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.  They were unaware of the quotas which had been set by Europe for Indian-made cotton clothes. And unless you had a papa who was in “export-import business” you had no way of knowing.

 

The kids understood price and fashion and what Zeenat Aman wore in Dev Anand movies.

Hipster sarees, worn vengefully below the navel, had given rise to bell-bottom pants, and somewhere along the way, the churidar disappeared temporarily. But the Sixties had also spawned the born-again kurta, now available with the West’s approval.

George Harrison wore it. The Beatles had, for a while, hung out with Mahesh Yogi. You could buy hashish in Kathmandu.

 

Indira Gandhi wore elegant sarees crafted by handloom weavers whose praises were sung by her ageing friend Pupul Jayakar. The better bureaucrats wore khadi bush-shirts (they were not called half-sleeves in those days). Jawahar jackets were still in vogue.

 But somewhere, something had changed.

 

Cotton clashed with polyester. Imports with exports. Jagjivan Ram with Indira Gandhi. Society magazines with boring newspapers. Old with the new. Ideas with reality. Aspirations with the status-quo.

 

Public sector officers made foreign trips so they could sign up foreign collaborators to make Made-in-India items. With the money they saved from foreign exchange allocations, and supplemented by working in supermarkets on the sly, they bought imported goods their Indian-made wives would approve of.

 

Textiles were now an export item. Not Patola sarees or Sanganeri prints but flowered skirts and lacy blouses worn with pajama trousers and jeans by sunbathing bikini women in their after-hours.

Foreign exchange was scarce. The public sector had begun to bleed. Politicians had docile wives and trendy mistresses. The sons of bureaucrats went to IITs and IIMs, not IAS. Dev Anand began to shoot movies not in Darjeeling or Kathmandu but Europe. Television had gone colour.

 

Mumtaz had left Bollywood for London after marrying a Sindhi multi-millionaire from somewhere in Africa. Stardust had a London edition. There were new guys who actually wore those Charagh Din shirts.

 

When does fashion become corruption? When does a challenge become an opportunity? When does a compelling necessity become a thriving business?

 

NIFT was born in the 1980s, with the blessings of the Government of India, Ministry of Commerce, Udyog Bhavan, New Delhi-110011.

There it was, first situated symbolically in the basement of the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium erected for the colour-TV-giving Asian Games of 1982. It had students who spoke eagerly of a career unimaginable a decade earlier.

 

You mean people actually get paid  to do this kind of stuff?

 

Indira Gandhi was dead. Rajiv (they said)  got bread from Italy and wore T-shirts at jogging-runs to promote “Mera Bharat Mahan”. He had an Italian wife who wore sarees but walked with the same uncertain briskness of her mother-in-law who had thrown out her Sikh-born second daughter-in-law.

 

Sonia spoke Hindi, with an Italian accent.

Rajiv, speaking from the Red Fort on August 15, repeatedly said this was the day when India got its republic (ganatantra) when he actually meant to say independence (swatantrata).

Rajiv spoke softly, listened to friends,  did not fancy veterans, smiled handsomely, sent troops to a friendly neighbour, lost elections and got killed.

 

Oh, well!

 

India flew out a planeload of gold in 1991 to borrow a few dollars.  Textiles, the mantra of the 1980s, seemed less exciting. The Chinese were making it cheaper. The Taiwanese wee making electronic stuff. The Japanese were making cars in Malaysia.

 

Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao sent us press guys a greeting card which quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “The only constant in the world is change.”

 

Fashion is change.

There was an increasingly new vocabulary. Decontrol had given way to de-licensing, then liberalisation, and  globalisation.

 

Globalisation  was, well,  in fashion.

 

Arvind Mills said it would become one of the top five denim-makers in the world. It borrowed a lot and screwed up its share price and bankers, not necessarily in that order.

An unknown company with a funny name, Infosys, did not find enough takers for its share issue in 1993. The issue went to underwriters, the company later went to Nasdaq, and its car drivers became millionaires.

 

There were new jokes. A lingerie-maker’s shares went up because it made softwear, which people confused with software.

 

The board members of Infosys learned to pose with golf clubs. Family-controlled companies learned about stock options for employees.

 

A new class of people called designers emerged. They were not in the main sections of the papers, but in the colourful pullouts. Not on page one, but Page Three. And more often than not, did not graduate from NIFT.

 

But Ritu Beri went to Paris, though we are not sure what she did there.

 

Designers spoke a lot, usually about themselves. No one knew how they made their money, whether they did, and how much.  Well, not even what they really did.

Beauty queens came faster than regional parties. Mayawati clutched her handbag under her armpit, like maharanis did before 1947, when they wore chiffon sarees with heads covered to watch jodhpur-clad players at polo matches.

 

Much had come, much had gone, much had returned, much remained the same. Plaits, shampooed hair, bellbottoms, capris, pedal pushers, zardozis, designer bindis, dotbusters, Odissi snatches in Michael Jackson videos, fashion shows for AIDS victims, opposition to child labour, admiration for Britney Spears.