The devil wears thin! Why has fashion become such a bore?

A decade ago, it seemed as though fashion and feminism were cautiously coming closer, or at least no longer placed on opposite sides of a public boxing ring. What women wore was becoming more and more contentious. If fashion was becoming more feminist in its explicit messaging, feminists, too, of a new generation were choosing to use fashion to rip out of straitjackets.

Today is another story: both feminism and fashion are hostages (in differing degrees) to groupthink and the elephant in the room, late-stage capitalism.

An evening spent at a luxury mall in Mumbai last week, having turned up too early for a show, revealed an empty grand mall, barring a few stragglers and employees hanging about. Not a single fancy shop from Gucci to Tiffany to Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla had a customer. Their stiff facade and storefronts, ornate and bejewelled with the occasional uniformed staff peeping out with a bored gaze, did not encourage me to enter for a light browse. The only shop that was more accessible was the new giant Muji store, now resembling an IKEA without the meatballs or children’s play area.

Despite zero footfall, new shops were opening relentlessly, more designer stores hidden away behind grand declamations on draped canvas, announcing they were Coming Soon! Sitting in front of one such canvas sparked a rumination on fashion’s regrettable turn to luxury.
Who was shopping here? What was the brand’s logic? Was the business model such that even one or two luxury sales a week could support this infrastructure? I once delighted in thinking about the sociology of fashion and costume every month. Yet fashion, as it presents itself today, is of little interest to me now. I could say: it’s not you (fashion), it’s me. But the more I think of it, I feel that yes, it is fashion to blame.

Please tell me a genuine fashion influencer who is really thinking about fashion in a way that blows our minds. Not people selling brands, teaching middle India how to pronounce names of foreign luxury brands, or servicing MNCs dumping neutral crap in Indian markets. With stylists dressing celebrities young and old (often in the same way), it is hard to tell who has any real style anymore. Everyone looks the same. There is a lot of tiresome template cosplaying. Then there is the mad pricing of clothes, from the handloom chains to designers. Nothing makes sense anymore.

Fashion’s story in the last few years has been complex: a rise in Indian designers presenting at global fashion weeks, massive corporate investments in designer brands that enable them to scale, having to contend with the explosion of the beauty industry and having to compete with global luxury design houses for the $$$. Noticeably, the fashion industry, which once enthusiastically embraced body positivity, DEI and Black Lives Matter, is rescinding on its inclusive, progressive mandate of the last decade and quietly retreating to its thin, Caucasian antecedents. Case in point: the American Eagle jeans advertisement with a Caucasian actress and the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. ‘Jeans’ sounding just like ‘genes’ is not a coincidence, most people opined. It was deliberately inflected with a sly, supremacist, sexist tone – a reflection of fashion blowing with the political wind of the times.

Alongside are the peripheral trends struggling to counter this overproduction, alienation, and conflict between price and value. The rising hum of sustainable fashion. The magpie joys of thrifting. The faint rumblings of demanding accountability from fashion houses. In the last two years, we’ve seen consumers boycotting fast fashion brands with connections to Israel, as part of global solidarity with Palestine. Last June, Prada showcased Kolhapuri chappals as ‘leather sandals’ in their menswear show in Milan, leading to outrage around cultural appropriation without credit. After the backlash, which included official complaints, Prada acknowledged the ‘Indian inspiration’ and initiated local partnerships. The sandals were still priced at Rs 85,000 a pair. Who creates the value, and who monetises it?

The Devil Wears Prada 2 has come to the screens. Except now, in a sense, The Devil is Prada. Maybe the fact that they had to resurrect this film is an indication of how dire things are in the global luxury market.

Fashion’s central creative motor seems to have been replaced by an aggressive business one. Everything seems overwhelmingly engineered to produce good consumers, rather than expressive individuals. The minutes were ticking, and it was finally time to get off the soft pink velvet couch in the mall under the gargantuan chandelier and head towards the theatre for the show.

One left with some final thoughts: What was the real cost of this turn? Would fashion be able to keep its unique and special ability to convert the ephemeral, the intangible mood of a time, into material things? Would it tell us fifty years later of this time, this moment? Would it tell the story of people, cultures and experiments with modernity? I suppose only time will tell.

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