Until a couple decades ago, Pakistanis had a complicated relationship with the sari. We love the way it looks and we love the way we look when we wear it, because – quite honestly – there are few items of clothing more flattering and seductive. But for Pakistanis, wearing one used to feel a bit like treason.
OK, maybe treason is a slight exaggeration, but there’s no denying the fact that, as a national dress, the sari is associated with India. Patriotism dictated that Pakistanis said “no” to it and showed their support for the salwar kameez, Pakistan’s national dress. But really, that just gave the sari more of that “forbidden fruit” quality, and made Pakistani women feel adventurous and rebellious when they wore one.
The rigid rules of sari-wearing were not lost on me as I was growing up: only grandmothers were allowed to wear them on a daily basis at home. I can’t recall either of my grandmothers ever wearing a salwar kameez. As for mums and aunts and other women, they only wore saris – secret stashes of silk and brocade affairs – for the most special of occasions. My grandmothers had dozens of cotton saris for daily use, but at weddings, they would pull out the fancier stuff: studded, gilded and beaded saris.
Twenty years ago, even these special-occasion sari-wearers used to be few and far in between, because the sari was an item of novelty clothing that brought on oohs and aahs.
Thanks to Indian soaps – which are the main TV diet of Pakistani housewives and which feature women immaculately dressed in resplendent silks and bedecked in spectacular jewels – the sari is much more common, and much more welcome. You’d be hard-pressed to attend a wedding where you didn’t spot a few beautifully draped women.
And so the sari finally won its battle for acceptance in the hearts of Pakistanis and found legitimate status in the wardrobes of women across the country. It would have made sense for this story to end there.
But a few weeks ago, the Pakistani fashion designer Ali Xeeshan decided that the sari needed to broaden its horizons even further and pushed the envelope a bit too far when they put a sari on the ramp at a recent fashion show. It wasn’t the sari that was the problem. It was the model. Actually, it wasn’t even the model. It was the model’s gender.
Yes, someone decided to put a man in a sari, and had him walk down the ramp.
There was a lot of name-calling and badmouthing after the curious catwalk incident. Accusations of tastelessness were thrown around, only to be countered with reminders of creative licence.
I’m all for creativity and showmanship, but I couldn’t help but question whether this crossed the line from experimental androgyny to sheer stupidity: a male model walking the ramp in a gorgeous, embroidered sari? I didn’t really understand what the point was.
There is conceptual genius and then there are poorly executed duds. Putting a man in a sari and sending him down a catwalk is definitely the latter.
The writer is an honest-to-goodness desi living in Dubai
