Naam ke waaste

Context is everything, particularly in fashion.
Take this blouse, for instance. Some advertising house will put it on a white girl, pull up a pencil skirt, tie up her hair, put on glasses and make her follow a pimple-y boy who sprayed a deo named after a tool.
In India, it’s synonymous with christians or pao-wallahs. It makes most of us think of the Ravan and Eddie parallel. Educated but humble folks living in chawls or villages of Bandra, Mazgaon, Byculla, Borivli or Kalina, wearing synthetic clothes from the ’70s, imported by a neighborly smuggler or sent by an uncle or brother from the Gulf.
Lavender (never purple) or mauve is the sophisticated name of the colour and the blouse is probably worn only to church. The wearer is a company secretary or gives English tuitions.
There’s a reversal when NRIs wear Indian clothes. Most of them choose costume-y clothes far from what we wear here every day — inspiration coming from movies. The materials differ; they prefer synthetics, when in India, synthetics are only worn by the daily wages class or those with no sweat glands. There is little identification of motifs or handiwork. The difference — textural, technical and aesthetic — between bandhej and a bandhini print.