'What Can Brown Do for You?': Indo Chic and the Fashionability of South Asian Inspired Styles (original) (raw)

'What can brown do for you?': Indo Chic and the fashionability of South Asian styles

Since the late 1990s, fashions, yoga and other trends that feel uncannily 'Indian' have become ubiquitous in popular media. Through a multi-sited analysis of advertisements and fashion spreads, we examine how Indiannness becomes a fashionable mode of representing exoticized cool and commodifiable difference at the same time that South Asian bodies are increasingly rendered suspect by the mechanisms of xenophobic nationalism, specifically targeted against South Asians. We examine fashion spreads in popular fashion magazines like Glamour, advertising campaigns for OPI and Cover Girl cosmetics against cultural production including Monica Ali's Brick Lane, thus suggesting the legacy of Indo Chic has been reworked by South Asian diasporic cultural producers to present an alternative vision of capital, kinship and diasporized identity.

fashioning diaspora: beauty, femininity, and South Asian American culture

Feminist Review

Vanita Reddy assembles and analyses a multi-format archive in Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture. Employing examples from South Asian, especially Indian, and South Asian diasporic literary texts, movies and live performances, Reddy provides insights on how beauty and fashion make space for new racialised subject formations, feminist and queer femininities in particular. Resonating with queer South Asian diaspora studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath's work, these racialised subject formations are embodied subjectivities that create diasporic non-hegemonic sensibilities, desires, pleasures and affects. Reddy deploys beauty and fashion as analytics, showing how discourses of beauty and its meanings operate as technologies of governance and animate and perform social relations. The author deploys affect as a tool to speak about epistemologies of beauty and what they do rather than referring us to what beauty isaesthetic or sexual capital, commodities, style, aesthetic judgment or pleasure, etc.-as is often the case in sociological studies of beauty. And what beauty does, as affect, as discourse and as epistemology, Reddy argues, is to recall material histories and ontologies of migration. Reddy explains that both beauty and fashion often seem to be ideal technologies of the neoliberal market, where individualism, self-care and fitness, and consumer citizenship reign. However, one of her major moves in Fashioning Diaspora is to reveal the power of the beauty and fashion economies, that is, economies naturalised as feminine and too often rendered apolitical or, at best, in her words, 'juxtapolitical'. Beauty and fashion, although marked as frivolous by normative, hegemonic discourses, in fact have strong and enduring consequences. In Chapter 1, for example, Reddy uses the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee as a case study to show how beauty functions as an assemblage, 'an aggregation marked by the radical difference, and even seeming incommensurability, of its components' (p. 19). Beauty in this case is seen as both a promise and a limit for the protagonist, who aims at self-fashioning a notion of belonging in the diaspora as an undocumented immigrant in the United States; beauty serves as an agent and tool for recognition and inclusion in a manner that state-sanctioned citizenry does not grant undocumented people. Jasmine's interactions with the underground Indian hair market in New York provide the novel's reader a glimpse into a global market of Indian female beauty. It becomes clear that in order for beauty to operate effectively, that is, in order for it to be legible and eligible for trade, it has to remain plain, as unmarked as possible, far from the fetish that commonly accompanies feminine, racialised beauty. If the processes of racialisation, gender exploitation, labour and migration become transparent for consumers, then beauty ceases to be profitable, and the immigrant's access to belonging in the diaspora likewise evanesces. Similarly, feminist review 116 2017

Book Review: Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture

Feminist Review, 2017

Vanita Reddy assembles and analyses a multi-format archive in Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture. Employing examples from South Asian, especially Indian, and South Asian diasporic literary texts, movies and live performances, Reddy provides insights on how beauty and fashion make space for new racialised subject formations, feminist and queer femininities in particular. Resonating with queer South Asian diaspora studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath's work, these racialised subject formations are embodied subjectivities that create diasporic non-hegemonic sensibilities, desires, pleasures and affects. Reddy deploys beauty and fashion as analytics, showing how discourses of beauty and its meanings operate as technologies of governance and animate and perform social relations. The author deploys affect as a tool to speak about epistemologies of beauty and what they do rather than referring us to what beauty isaesthetic or sexual capital, commodities, style, aesthetic judgment or pleasure, etc.-as is often the case in sociological studies of beauty. And what beauty does, as affect, as discourse and as epistemology, Reddy argues, is to recall material histories and ontologies of migration. Reddy explains that both beauty and fashion often seem to be ideal technologies of the neoliberal market, where individualism, self-care and fitness, and consumer citizenship reign. However, one of her major moves in Fashioning Diaspora is to reveal the power of the beauty and fashion economies, that is, economies naturalised as feminine and too often rendered apolitical or, at best, in her words, 'juxtapolitical'. Beauty and fashion, although marked as frivolous by normative, hegemonic discourses, in fact have strong and enduring consequences. In Chapter 1, for example, Reddy uses the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee as a case study to show how beauty functions as an assemblage, 'an aggregation marked by the radical difference, and even seeming incommensurability, of its components' (p. 19). Beauty in this case is seen as both a promise and a limit for the protagonist, who aims at self-fashioning a notion of belonging in the diaspora as an undocumented immigrant in the United States; beauty serves as an agent and tool for recognition and inclusion in a manner that state-sanctioned citizenry does not grant undocumented people. Jasmine's interactions with the underground Indian hair market in New York provide the novel's reader a glimpse into a global market of Indian female beauty. It becomes clear that in order for beauty to operate effectively, that is, in order for it to be legible and eligible for trade, it has to remain plain, as unmarked as possible, far from the fetish that commonly accompanies feminine, racialised beauty. If the processes of racialisation, gender exploitation, labour and migration become transparent for consumers, then beauty ceases to be profitable, and the immigrant's access to belonging in the diaspora likewise evanesces. Similarly, feminist review 116 2017

Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India

The recent commercial boom in women's skin-lightening or “fairness” cosmetics in India is part of the larger context of escalating lifestyle consumerism in Asia's emerging market nations. This monograph examines the cultural politics of gender, nation, beauty and skin color in the persuasive narratives of Indian magazine advertisements and television commercials for fairness cosmetics and personal care products. We situate advertising's compact stories of ideal femininity within the sociology of colorism's transnational links to hierarchies of race, gender, caste, ethnicity and class and the rapid economic growth in the skin-lightening cosmetics sector in India over the past decade. Deconstructing advertising's visual and linguistic fields of meaning, our analysis dissects the rhetorical themes of bodily and personal transformation, modern and traditional science, and heterosexual romance that operate together to inflate the currency of light-skinned beauty. In conclusion, we outline recent challenges to the hegemony of colorism in India and suggest directions for future research that can build on this monograph's scrutiny of advertising's regulatory regimes of beauty.

Fashion and Beautification in India: Expression of Individuality

Fashion is a phenomenon of communication, social development and a reflection of aesthetic values. These aesthetic values are constantly addressed through our body as we seek to define ways to present ourselves. Our bodies are not just the place from which we come to experience the world, but it is through our bodies that we come to be seen in the world. The tendency to beautify the body through self-fashioning and presenting it aesthetically has remained a constant across cultures and time. The quest for beauty is culturally rooted and acts as a means to mark identity, express individuality, and create personal allure. While the contexts and practices of beautification change with time, deliberate attempts to beautify the body do not; in fact they have become more prevalent. Today, the use of medical technology like plastic surgery, diet alterations, body building, etc. to reshape body parts has become a trend among Indian fashion icons. The periphery of fashion has impregnated a radical shift in aesthetic preferences and an extreme quest for beautification and individuality. Body alteration has evolved as a status symbol, and as means of individual expression to make a statement in the world of fashion. Thus, being obsessed with fashions in beauty is defining and redefining Indian beauty culture. Today beauty culture in India is becoming more open-ended and multicultural, and this chapter examines the role played by body alterations and self-fashioning to establish individuality and to create distinctive niche fashion statements. It further focuses on Indian fashion and on beauty icons that have westernized their appearance and sometimes fused it with traditional Indian practices, and their position as role models for Indian youth.

Indian Fashion System with emphasis on womens occasionwear 29 June 2016

The versatile draped silhouettes & heritage craft traditions redefined for contemporary connoisseurs; have further led to the rising acceptance of Indian ethnic/ fusion fashion as a paradigm shift for India to discern and emphasize local inimitability, to create a sense of belonging and stimulate consumption of a culturally promoted " Global-Desi " fashion dictum across cultures. This paper presents the study of major factors contributing to the Indian fashion system interpreting its engagement with the Indian society and also the world. This research highlights impact of the Indian Fashion system on the Indian society and its meaning. There is continued interest for classical Indian dress silhouettes, heritage textile crafts, accessories; this study concentrates on outcomes through the lens of history, culture, and sociology of fashion. The neue urban tribes and fashion social movements in the post-modern era led emergence of the apparel category-occasion wear; reserved for weddings, festivals, formal evening wear for parties. There is opportunity for exploring the hyperreality through the represented garment simulation in the occasion wear category. The Neue urban tribe creates lasting footprints through interpretation of the Indian Fashion System enroute popular culture; Bollywood and the satellite television. The semiotic approach to decode the nuance of the Indian fashion system embedded in popular culture through visual media like, family albums, films, magazine articles, red carpets appearance etc. across the 80's, 90's and 2000 onwards. The neue Indian women perceive the sari, salwarkameez, bandgala jackets, as