Sari History

I am doing a series of posts on sari fashions 1870s onwards. Its taking a long time but you can follow the link for updates.

Tumblring

Blogging after awhile.

Partly because of tumblr where I have been blogging a fair bit. It started because tumblr is an easy platform to catalogue interests and allows a bit more text than the purely visual pinterest.  On the other hand you can't have a lot of text like blogger - its a sign of the times that blogger now seems text heavy! Though my blog started as a catalogue of blouses in various decades, the material I found turned out to be an interesting insight into the early decades of the 20th century in India and its proving enjoyable thus far.

And then there's tumblr itself.  It's ruled by young people (the average age on the site is 24, most American) and gifs, as a result it is filled with youthful angst, silly things and the kind of trite sayings that are lent profundity only because it comes from young people experiencing life.  Consequently, its a place where a simple thing may get reblogged many times over while interesting pieces get little love. Nevertheless there are a lot of niche sites that cover everything from literature to science to art and its a bit like rummaging through an attic unsure of what one may find. Naturally in the context of my own blog I visit a lot of vintage fashion and history blogs and most are beautifully curated and informative.

On the whole tumblr is divided between fandom (of these the Sherlockians specifically Cumberbitches, Hiddlestoners and Whovians seem to be prolific and witty) and creatives-there are a good deal of illustrations and the like on the site, perhaps obvious given tumblr is such a visual platform. More well established folk like the New Yorker, Atlantic, Paris Review et al also post often and in some ways its easier to follow than visiting individual sites. Searching is easy because you can follow tags in a way that is hard with blogger and overwhelming with twitter.

Its a little hard to use facebook after tumblr, partly because tumblr has a more laid back vibe and there aren't the constant changes and privacy concerns of facebook. Except of course that tumblr is more a community of strangers than your friends or family. And tumblr is its own sealed world - almost no one I know uses it.

How long it will last I cannot say.  There is only so much cataloguing or curating one can do. Maybe next stop vimeo.....except I don't make movies:-)

PS: Of course the Tam in me has noticed that there is a davara-tumbler.tumblr.com :-) And the most popular Indian movie blog around seems to be dhrupad - interesting to see a lot of old movies finding new life on the Net but expect a lot of gifs. 

My Mother's Clothes

I don't think I know anyone as particular about clothes as my mother.

Not though in terms of dressing au courant or fashionably.  More that she had a very defined aesthetic and anyone straying from this would arouse a great deal of irritation in her.  

If I had to label her style, it would be simple, modern and classic. This was however compromised by her fear of her mother and the desire to please her. Consequently there are few occasions when my mother pretty much abandoned the South Indian look or indeed wore much make-up. When she did, she shone because it felt true.

These pictures taken in 1969 or so in Chandigarh are one of few times which are definitely her own aesthetic.  I particularly like the one below, which looks like Bombay Dyeing ads of the time. 

Our styles differed a lot and though once in awhile my mother would appreciate my sense of colour and bohemianism, many a time I have had to return things that didn't meet with her approval.  It wasn't that she wanted to control my tastes as much as it disturbed her sense of harmony. 

Rightly or wrongly, I have retained my own tastes.

But I like to look at her pictures now and then and think of her elegance and grace. I remember all her sarees and its nice to recall their look and feel, her own thoughts about them.

Good taste endures. 

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For my mother (1944-1993).

French Clothing/Indian Film

Rather unusually for me, disinterest has resulted in the lack of a clothes post in a while. Internally I have been grappling with the oh so important problem of transitioning my wardrobe to something more mature but it hardly feels pressing or interesting so I have done little apart from a burst of auditing this month. Selvedge, a textile magazine I subscribe to, however still offers many pleasures (some day I hope to do an article for them on the itinerant sari sellers of India – surely a dying breed – some day….) and I have been savouring the latest issue in bits and pieces. One of the pieces in the magazine was on the new movement towards modesty in clothing, perhaps in reaction to a decade of body con dresses, lycra and the like. Embodying this modesty is Le Vestiaire De Jeanne, a fashion line started by its designer for her younger sister. Germaine Greer once wrote that the French were one of few people who knew how to dress their young appropriately. And this line does steer clear of frills, pink and Disney pop-tart fashion. It’s a bit like a marriage between convent girl attire and Japanese minimalism and it mostly works though it could do with introducing some colour.

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I finally got around to watching a few Satyajit Ray movies I had picked up in India but after all that anticipation, they were slightly disappointing. Disappointing when compared to other Ray films i.e., they are head and shoulders above the fare I have been reviewing. Devi - in which an old man sees the Goddess in his young daughter-in-law- is about the suffocating, hallucinatory nature of superstition. Though beautifully shot and performed, it was ultimately a bit of a let down because it is a tad didactic – especially in the conversations between the young husband and his professor, representing of course the forces of reason. Without in any way endorsing superstition, there is also a hint of the smug, bourgeois sensibility endemic to such films.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi was one of Ray’s few Hindi film outings and is based on a Premchand story set in the dying days of Awadh as a princely state. It’s effete elites are part of the high culture of Lucknow and are devoted to poetry (the Nawab, played by Amjad Khan) or to chess (the players of the title). Meanwhile the British, robust and vulgar, have taken steps towards annexation – an event that would lead to the Mutiny and eventually the removal of the Company Bahadur. There are a lot of things to like in this movie and it works perfectly well when the focus is on the chess players, Mirza and Mir (Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey). Unfortunately there is a heavy handed voiceover explaining the events of the time (by Mr Bachchan), long dialogues on the underlying politics both in the Nawab’s court and in the British camp and though all this is meant as a compare and contrast with Mir and Mirza's chess game, it feels both lifeless and superfluous. Here and there it works, e.g. Wajid Ali Shah’s dance, the Prime Minister's (Victor Banerjee) recognition that nothing can save Awadh but for the most part it doesn’t. There is a comparison of text and film here, whatever Premchand’s intentions were it appears to have been modified for 1970s audiences and not for the better. The movie looks at 1856 through the telescope of later events but would have been much better had it let the audience connect the dots. It is hard to believe that Awadh’s rulers or the British were being little other than politically expedient and myopic, as people usually are when events are unfurling in real time. And perhaps Ray doesn’t entirely get Premchand, his Sadgati from memory also had mixed reviews.

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No Stiff Upper Lips or Trousers for Awadhi Toffs

Back to frivolity and let’s end with clothes. Apparently the fashions of 1856 dictated wide pantaloons, a long tunic and gossamer thin shawls for men and women. Unfortunately, given India is still giddy with being in the body con era, I don’t think we will be seeing an immediate revival :-)

You can see more of the clothes - and an excellent song n dance - here.  Shortly after the Prime Minister informs the Nawab that he has little choice but to sign the new treaty and quit town. 

And on the pain of quitting, a Wajid Ali Shah thumri here. As he says to his distraught Prime Minister on the verge of losing Oudh, "only poetry and music can bring tears to a man's eyes."

Beau Travail*

Tender Co Denim

Clothes for men often tend to be boring. There is the suit but let’s not forget that it’s easy to make jokes about suits, it is after all shorthand for the salaried worker tied to the office and a palette of grey, grey and more grey. Sure there are all kinds of suits and perhaps some men dream of being kitted out in a bespoke one from Saville Row or whatever it is that is considered the epitome of tailoring. Still, even the exquisitely tailored suit is like an exceedingly rich Kanchipuram saree. You admire the workmanship, you understand the underlying science of structure and weave but it is also so good an indicator of dull, stultifying status that once worn it is immediately uninteresting. That is the garment itself is a thing of beauty but on a person it moves beyond this and is both exquisite yet supremely dead.

The choices for men wanting to do things a little differently are limited. Most creatives end up in a uniform of their own; the tee and jeans and casual footwear. But each of these items is of course an equally good indicator of conspicuous consumerism. In fact at no time in history has a man so literally spelled out his state of mind as on the contemporary T-shirt. Irony prevails and its not too hard to see that this is the uniform for any number of professionals in the media and tech industries. There is a certain charm to its slackness and it has a good deal of indie cred but it’s not a garment for grownups. You do see 40 year olds in it but something is lost in translation.

Here and there you might see a man who is the new hipster in more relaxed linen and a scarf but it’s a rare sighting, regrettable because it’s a far more elegant and grown-up look than the guy aiming to look like an Apple employee.

Of course there are a whole lot of men who fall into unnameable categories and don't particularly care about clothes. Take scientists who wear the cheapest jeans around and the T-shirt from the last conference attended (Big Bang Theory’s clothing department has it all wrong). And there are people who do a lot of physical or menial work and require workwear, which is often a polyester uniform with a fluorescent vest often added on. It is unfortunate that polyester has become the fabric for the masses. It is convenient but can never achieve the purity and beauty of workwear of yore. I might be romanticising here a bit but the rough cottons, hemps and flaxes that were used even in the last century have a sense of being of the earth, a sense of honesty. They may be roughly made, patched and used throughout a lifetime but they are imbued with the Japanese sense of wabi-sabi, a worn beauty that is enhanced with incessant use. As an example, my teenage counterpart to the boyfriend shirt was a much used dad shirt and I still remember my disappointment when my father’s uniform was no longer an open weave OG (olive green) of natural fibre but made of polyester. Likewise my great grandfather had a couple of veshtis that he hand washed and maintained impeccably; though they were clean and white they were never, even remotely, the over treated brilliant white cotton of today which is loud in its whiteness. But times have changed and so the ordinary, workaday world belongs to polyester and the like.

Somewhere on the margins of men’s fashion, things can be a bit more interesting. Interpretations of workwear is an ongoing theme – I had blogged on this last year. The rustic workwear of yore is now an affectation and has little to do with adapatibility to the nature of work, nevertheless to my mind it is far more aesthetic than anything that I have discussed before. Though tailored, there is an ease to the garments, this no doubt stems from its workwear inspiration-there is not the straitjacketing , the fitting that office work implies. Plus the natural fibres suggest breathability, the natural dyes impart a more soothing look. My recent copy of Selvedge (which inspired this post) features clothing by Tender Co., though inspired by British workwear there seems to be a degree of Japanese inspiration too. It is of course contemporary featuring as it does a lot of denim and yes, the printed T-shirt. Plus it ties in with the recent handmade movement which is smaller, more intimate, more organic and also makes visible the process by which clothes are made. It is also more expensive of course. Like khadi or pure cotton, workwear has lost its roots and is now meant for the urban aesthete. Yet it has not lost its innate beauty.

Can you work in a namoto?

While many workwear inspired pieces are formal and classic, occasionally you will also find something much more on the edges like lastwear. To quote them: “We make strange, wonderful and durable clothing and accessories. We weave stories, fight corporate colonialism and believe that sustainability is the new grand narrative.” This with their steampunk and gothic inspirations puts it in the realm of the political and anarchic - albeit in line with 21st century norms, it is more through clothes than incendiary pamphlets. The picture with this paragraph has its roots in workwear, inspired as it is by the hakama, supposedly as adapted by the shipbuilders of Empire. It is a voluminous trouser kind of garment with deep side pockets. So workwear and Japan again. Not a look for the workaday life of today but interesting in its origins.

The philosophy of workwear is that it be comfortable, durable and one not think too much about it. Much of the workwear inspired clothes today are a result of conscious thought on what one chooses to wear. and how they represent our selves The argument may be made that it is for pretentious tossers searching for authenticity, that polyester is a more honest and accurate reflection of our work world. Still, once in a while you look at a piece and it is truly sublime and intimately connected to history. And you see a sudden transcendental beauty to it you will not find elsewhere.

*French for good work, beauiful work and the like.

On The Street

When my cousin was here on a visit I took a number of pictures of her along the lines of "spotted on the street" fashion blogs. This one remains my favourite for its casually put together ensemble and the cousin's fetching smile.

The Collared Shirt

One of my favourite pictures from the Sartorialist site is the one below shot in Delhi.

I think it's the shirt that does it for me for it reminds me of young Indian girls a few decades back who wore the buttoned up collared shirt with a skirt and preferably pigtails done up with ribbons. Why this is on the Sartorialist is of course because along with the rest of the outfit it is a contemporary interpretation of the shirt-and one that is very well done.

Judging by the pictures on flickr few girls wear the skirt-blouse these days though I did spot this charming picture (also below) on the site.

And here is another one that incorporates the shirt into a dress inspired by Kahlo. Here simply because all things Kahlo are generally aesthetic.

Workwear and More

Another blog on design for men, A Continuous Lean (previous post here). This one is an interesting potpourri of styles, history, people and more. And just like Engineered Garments, Workers seems to be a Japanese take on retro American workwear.

Coninuing on the workwear theme, the Guardian once had an article on Old Town which draws its influence from British workwear amongst other things; the clothes and the site have more than a hint of nostalgia.

On Smalls and Sarees

The boutique lingerie shop – the one that falls somewhere between the fetish shops and the department stores and appears to be aimed at the new bride or date night for the marrieds or the improper rendezvous – has been hitherto foreign territory. Last week, in search of a gift, I ventured into one and was immediately plunged into a scarlet, pink, black, white, lace and satin world of flimsy smalls. All that fragile fabric was held in place by bits of metal and plastic – in some cases a lot of it. For the most part they were innocently naughty and to underline this a few sported the Playboy bunny. But most of all they looked uncomfortable, especially the corsets which looked suitable for spanking Swinburne or to be more current, Max Moseley, thus contributing to masochism all around.

I bought the gift and walked away a little contemplative. After six years here, I can say with some authority that in these most liberated of times (every woman can wear a trouser, every woman can wear shorts!), the clothing choices for Western women remains a fraught territory. The magazines are clogged with women writers bemoaning the perils of the change room mirror, addressing the question of “does my bottom look big in this”, the lack of age appropriate clothing, deciding on “what do I wear today” and offering tips to be beach ready. Immensely irritating as all this, the truth is the sartorial choices of women here, particularly once they start working, are boring (the professional dress must hew as close as possible to what men wear), functional (sportswear or the jeans and T) and inappropriate (where everyone upward of 25 wears variants of clothes aimed at teens). Add to this the tyranny of the dress size (now almost an identity marker; some women will only shop at stores where they are a "size 8"), the unforgiving and uncomfortable materials du jour (lycra), the fashion for near bare shoulders and tailoring itself which makes the proper fit all important and necessitates many trips to the change room and the task of dressing oneself becomes an unpleasant, time consuming task.

Even if the days of corsetry seem long past, much Western clothing is still meant to truss you up and keep things “in place”. People no longer wear pantyhose and with good reason. The alternative, however, cannot be unfashionable woollen socks so many a girl will be caught shivering in the night air and claiming she is not cold. Eventually you mutate the pantyhose into tight body stockings and dispense with any outerwear (see Lady Gaga, Duffy). Ditto “body shapers” to keep bits and pieces firmly tucked in. Both shirts and trousers must be adapted to varying feminine forms and they do this with varying degrees of success, which inevitably leads to the boredom and – if the writers are to be believed - the terror of the change room. Skirts are fitting and tight, not easy to walk in. And last but not the least the crown jewel of uncomfortable fashion, the tapered toe and the high heel. So essential is this deemed for the professional heterosexual woman that I was a little surprised to find my modest and plain shoes being deemed “butch”. Add to this the whole weekly beauty regimen of removing body hair, getting your hair set and the like and it becomes that whatever you do, you must be in a stage of discomfort or at least arrive at it by way of discomfort.

And therein lies the nub – you can submit yourself to this refashioning and mutilation of the self or you can settle for the no fuss, ordinary. There is no middle ground. But it is fertile ground for public humiliation, albeit light hearted, of sites like Go Fug because a million things can and do go wrong.

In India of course, smalls of any sort are comparatively recent. To the best of my knowledge my great-grandmother never wore any underwear (a point of view I might add that found much favour with my hostel mates who wished to be “boyfriend ready”). Ditto stitched clothing - in Tagore’s Farewell my Friend, the fashionable girls wear blouses with their sarees, in some of Kerala’s temples, stitched clothing is still banned. Indian garments therefore tend to be fluid with little that is constricting. The modern saree, an uncomfortable if elegant marriage between Victorian dress and the yardage of draped cloth that is the basic saree, is still simple to wear once you know the basics. The word tailoring may only be loosely applied to the salwar kameez. Add to this the bewildering array of prints and colours in India which makes regimentation impossible and the task of dressing up in India is relatively painless even if this seems contradictory to the cumbersome “look” of our garments. Like in Herrick’s poem, sweetly flows the liquefaction of the Indian garment (bar the fussiness). And you can arrive at it in a matter of minutes.

Gibbous Fashion

I have been a little besotted with Gibbous Fashion the past year.

It’s kind of hard to describe their aesthetic without sounding over the top so I feel some hyperbole coming on. It’s sort of a frayed Neo-Victorian/Dickensian/fairy tale/Gothic world and therefore perhaps a derelict, romantic Tim Burtonian world. It makes the every day world theatrical. It is decidedly fey and the name itself conjures up the enchantment of the light of the night. So...I am more than a little in love with it.

More mundanely, I guess I like the way the scraps of clothes are carefully chosen to come together to form something so vivid and distinctive. And the sense that the evolution of the garments is organic and doesn't stem from a pattern.

Last words from the daily poetics blog which used a Robert Browning quote for the Gibbous post:

I would have rummaged, ransacked at the word; Those old odd corners of an empty heart; For remnants of dim love the long disused, And dusty crumbling of romance!

Makool

I found Anisa Makhoul’s store and blog via etsy. We had a subsequent exchange of emails thanks to a mention in Frankie of Anisa's work; thanks to Anisa for sending me Boho and ReadyMade and also some of her totally sweet cards and the like :-) And of course I love her clothes and wish I was a decade younger to wear them.


As Frankie noted about makoollovesyou, is Portland shorthand for everything quirky chic?

Above pic from Anisa's website.

Menswear

The web is cluttered with blogs relating to women's fashion so it was interesting to find a men's fashion blog - which also hosts links to other sites. It lacks colour and shoes/boots seem to turn up an inordinate number of times but it is nevertheless an interesting browse, particularly if you know men devoted to dressing well.

And via SMH and the blog, a menswear company, Engineered Garments, that specialises in reconstructing and adapting classic American workwear to modern times. I kind of like the loosely fitting fluid nature of the garments. It does seem to have a bit of a Japanese sensibility - or am I reading too much into it given the designer is Japanese-American?

This Life: Clothes

An old piece & one I like. I don't possess that many clothes these days :-)
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1. When I moved to Sydney, in spite of several wardrobe culls, I travelled like a Victorian, albeit on an airship and without a hatbox. Accompanying me were two outsized suitcases of Indian dresses and what I then thought was Western attire suitable to my new life. Most lie unused in the upper recesses of my cupboards; astonishingly the lower recesses have quickly filled with Australian purchases. I suppose this is because fashion and buying clothes is a feminine preoccupation I am not always immune to.


2. The nature of the clothes I buy here are very different. For one, I finally succumbed to the ghastly charcoal grey suit/white shirt de rigueur for city offices. More pleasantly, it is a chance to explore the whimsical, the eccentric and the urban peasant in you. Not possible in India, which I think of as an affluent society. For the Indian middle classes, the very newness of clothes, bright, crisp colours, neat ironing and gold jewellery are all social markers of wealth and respectability. We are conformists; our clothes mark us out for social approval. Class, if not caste, is still important in India, not wanting to be mistaken for the domestic help we dress accordingly. Sydney in contrast, in spite of its obsession with labels, celebrities and designers, has a more egalitarian ethos. For example it's perfectly respectable to forage through hand me downs and your next-door millionaire is as likely to wear a frayed T as a surfing kid.

3. Indian fashion works within narrow confines, it is beautiful, the craftsmanship exquisite but its not what can be called astonishing or eccentric. A lot here falls into the same category and much of it is sourced from India. Every once in a while though the mould is broken. Fashion here is not all form and style; it is also whimsy, oddities,and curiosities. Garments with unfinished hems and seams, slashed and distressed clothing, enormous leather flowers in neckpieces, Edwardian frock coats over jeans, faded frocks, old buttons worked into chains, faded bleached colours (all seen by me here and all invested with an intrinsic beauty) are not the stuff of Indian fashion. On the fringes Gothic fashion with its pale look and fascination for black and metal is so extreme that even mainstream fashion here has had a difficult time co-opting the look. We could never wear any of this or its Indian equivalent without an inherent discomfort, without a fear of being mocked.

4. Because fashion is seen as a feminine preoccupation, it is often looked down upon. But clothes and accessories are nothing but objects – their use as instructive as that of any of the "things" of life. For example Native American jewellery of turquoise, coral and silver pops up often in stores here and encapsulates the absurdity of human experience where entire cultures get forgotten but their cultural objects get co-opted into our momentary yet persistent desire for pleasure. Even more tellingly, the turquoise and coral are faux, plastic beads assembled together in a factory in China. The significance of the stones to American tribes is lost; what remains is tawdry artifice, mere simulation. We still respond to the aesthetic experience of the silver, blue and orange but have no sense of its history. Likewise handlooms in India have lost their regional differences. Indeed so much is the cross fertilization of designs, so much the gradual shift from weaving to printing, from cotton to polyester that we are no longer aware of the significance of region,colour, weave or pattern.

5. Precisely after six months of my life when I feel a little drunk with the thought and beauty of clothes, for the next six I return to the Thoreauvian thought of "Never trust any enterprise that requires new clothes". The indulgence in pretty clothes, the desire for possession and the absurdity of "dressing well" begin to trouble me. Virginia Woolf, an eccentric dresser, writes of an attempt to buy a hat, "green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon: all a flop like a pancake in mid air." One is arrested of course not by Woolf's fashion sense, which is immaterial, but her felicity with language. Woolf also observes with some wicked delight on the assistance women always offerto the fashion inept sister whilst well dressed women "are pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with blood - at the bottom of the cage". Clothes just don't seem to matter sometimes.

6. The wearing and removing of women's clothes is also invested with a certain eroticisation. A man taking off his clothes is direct; there is no teasing, no artifice as with a woman. Likewise a swathed man evokes no mystery. However, brides for example always arrive in a cornucopia of things - many layers a man must work through before his final prize. Indian movies of course make much of this. Then again, the supremely romantic moment of Monsoon Wedding is not its vulgar Punjabi wedding but the side romance replete with the ephemeral beauty of marigolds and clothes so homespun one barely notices them.

7. Coming back to Sydney, this season's offerings are bohemian, luxurious and plundered from most of the last century. Mismatched layers, shrugs, cardies, chiffon, luxe, tweeds, velvets, crocheted bits, the odd item from your grandma's closet, that kind of thing. The girls in the stores look pretty, all ruffled, romantic charm when they wear it. For the first time I just admire the clothes on girls dotting the streets like autumn flowers – but don't feel the temptation to buy some of it. It isn't that clothes don't matter at all as much as the need for possessing everything the world has to offer each passing month lessens.

8. The last word on fashion however belongs to DH Lawrence. Lawrence invests the uber bitch of Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen, with a dramatic fashion sense, especially for the Edwardian era. Thus Gudrun has a "dress of dark blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace and emerald green stockings", "a grass green velour hat", "her coat is a strong blue". On another occasion Gudrun and her sister Ursula are described thus: Both girls wore light, gay summer dresses. Ursula had an orange colored knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow. Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun rose. Elsewhere there are silvery velvet dresses and a soft blue dress with red stockings. Lawrence, for a heterosexual man (albeit uneasy) of the 1900s, devotes much attention to the clothing of his heroines though his most famous creation, Lady Chatterley also has a more erotic Monsoon Wedding fashion moment when the most famous gamekeeper in history says it with flowers – albeit with a twist (I am not telling, read the book). While bohemianism is stock-in-trade for fashion these days, green stockings are still not a clothing staple. Fashion these days is so much the monopoly of women and homosexuals that I do wish there would be a Lawrentian moment in fashion – not just the stockings - but having a heterosexual man write seriously of fashion.

What a strange power there is in clothing

The Sartorialist is on my blogroll and I check it once in awhile. For the most part it is an engaging photojournal of classic fashion on the streets with more than a few nods to quirk. But this one caught my eye because it takes a classic template and then makes it so bold and original. It helps that the subject is easy on the eye but not everyone can dream up and carry off that mix of colours and patterns.

The Sartorialist is respectful, indeed it only records "good fashion", but HHC puts a bit of snark in its comments on Indian/Bollywood fashion. Its not exactly my favourite site but a bit of a guilty pleasure given it names and shames an astonishing amount of bad Indian fashion (by the looks of it extremely derivative these days). For the most part I don't care what people wear and I don't buy into fickle ideas of what constitutes dressing well but at least some posts in HHC beg the Q, "what was that person thinking!'.

Title Quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

English Colours

There was at least one school of aesthetic thought (if it can be called that) in India that required one to dress in "English colours" which chiefly constituted pastels. Apart from the fact that we have chalked up 60+ years as an independent nation and are no longer English, this school's death knell may also have been sounded by the new aggressively marketed Bollywood which ignores anything that is not a sherbet colour.

This preference for English colours was no doubt a leftover of the Raj and touted as an indicator of respectable, good taste - as opposed to those untouched by the Angrez who persisted with vermilion red and brilliant yellow. That English colours do not equal pastels and is indeed a fairly fluid concept was brought home to me in many ways, most notably in The French Lieutenant's Woman which took a diversion into brilliant costumes and aniline dyes (also of interest to me as a chemist). In fact Victorian ladies possibly looked like this:



Likewise, Byatt's Victoriana oddity Angels and Insects also had brilliant costumes, albeit to literally illustrate the author's theme.



If I had to choose an English colour, it would be the autumnal palette of the Aesthetic movement. Not too far from that brief flowering of ethnic wear in the early 80s in India but more on that some other day.