If I were Prerna, Parveena, Perizaad or Paula in any Indian town, city or village who has since childhood been asked to dress “appropriately,” “modestly” or “like a girl” – lest I be construed as being sexually loose or invite unnecessary attention – then I would justifiably feel a sense of freedom if told ‘Behen! kuch bhi pehen!’ (Sister! wear whatever you choose!). I would wear #BehenKuchBhiPehen as my medallion of empowerment. But should I?
The global market-driven economy and neoliberal sensibilities of the new world economic order are often riding on and modelled after the purported desires and ambitions of young women. The narrative is often cast in terms of a historical lack that is now being compensated by the “freedom to choose” in a milieu of unbridled consumerist choices.
Particularly in the context of clothing, it is also shaped as a response to the restrictions that have been placed on women’s attire socially – which indirectly aim to control women’s sexuality – over centuries of patriarchal order. ‘My choice!’ is often paraded as the mantra of “women empowerment” by bastions of consumerism. Remember Deepika Padukone’s tirade on ‘My Choice’ as part of Vogue’s Empower campaign? The script starts off fairly predictably by emphasising “My body. My mind. My choice. To wear the clothes I like, even as my spirit roams naked.”
Many feminist scholars have argued that it is mostly young women who are the targets and participants of excessive “self-improvement” products and the plethora of lifestyle management discourses available in the market in a dizzyingly varied arena, all subscribing to the vision of empowerment through personal transformation.
Femvertising or the phenomena of brands selling #empowerment to women has also been highlighted. Women’s freedom in this market-driven story is constructed as being able to make unconstrained choices regarding their bodies and their sexualities.
The empowerment story consists of stimulating a sense of freedom, confidence and self-esteem – mostly through material choices, especially clothes – while staying mum about significant structural changes in social norms regarding the very idea of ‘beauty’ or the consumerist culture that buttresses these notions.
In this regard, the new ad campaign by Max Fashion exhorting “Behen! Kuch Bhi Pehen!” on the occasion of International Women’s Day is highly paradigmatic. It opens with music that begs to sound bold and transgressive, exclaiming “They may judge you for what you wear, but you, YOU can’t care!”.
Max’s ‘Behen Kuch Bhi Pehen’ campaign. Credit: YouTube
A mind-boggling array of choices of clothing and accessory is presented as the road to an empowered “selfhood” (played dutifully by a character attempting hip-hop moves in a t-shirt with “selfhood” emblazoned on it). The “fearless female” (another character bearing this quote on her t-shirt) funnily fights against the very consumerist narratives of the makeover culture that tell her to look desirably attractive in “distressed denims paired with cowboy boots blah blah blah”.
But absurdly the answer to all of it lies in buying more clothes – even the entire shop – that inspire you to “be yourself”. Never mind that the ‘you’ in this ‘yourself’ still adheres to strictures of idealised norms of beauty and fashion.
Choice is essentially the bedrock of typical evaluations of freedom and “progress”, such as in Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach which highlight the intrinsic worth of the freedom to choose. Especially to particular groups denied autonomy in the most basic of attributes, such as clothing, the expansion of choice can no doubt be construed and experienced as emancipation as well as freedom.
The feminist movement has also relied on the “right to choose” argument for vying for the expansion of rights such as reproductive right. The importance of increasing the range of choices of an individual as a marker of increased wellbeing cannot be denied. However, not all kinds of choices are innocent or favourable, and choice as a tool of empowerment only makes sense when the entire context is considered.
Not only can dizzying choice be paralysing, but by playing into the choice rhetoric, we could be sidelining various other issues that are equally pertinent. Besides, there is the question of who is well-placed enough to make these choices as they please. An unmindful effort at conjoining uninhibited choice with an empowered female selfhood can be thoroughly irresponsible as well as misleading.
Accordingly, as critical feminist scholars have argued, one needs to keep the following in mind when thinking about choice: What meanings does choice acquire in particular contexts? Who has access to choose? Who doesn’t? Why? What choices? Under what conditions? To whose benefit? and to what ends?
The “You can’t care” attitude promoted by campaigns such as #BehenKuchBhiPehen blur these associated questions, in the explicit agenda to foreground only one side of freedom to choose – overt consumerism.
By playing into the choice rhetoric, we could be sidelining various other issues that are equally pertinent. Credit: Reuters
The irony of it all
The internationally observed day for celebrating womanhood, i.e. March 8 was originally propelled by actions of women workers and politically organised demands for equal rights for women.
It was adopted and popularised internationally by the UN in 1975. It is the irony of our times that the day for reflection on women’s achievements and enhanced participation in all spheres of public life – born out of labour movements and demands of women workers – has been used as an occasion to further the consumerist propping of choice of clothing as stand-ins for freedom and selfhood.
It is not just Max Fashion but also hyper retailers such as Pantaloons, Shoppers Stop and Big Bazaar that entice young women to celebrate their womanhood by maximising their choices in clothes – put simply, shopping more for self-actualisation.
This, when the work to produce and sustain ‘fast fashion’ consumption, continues to be low-paid, labour-intensive and relatively insecure. Most of these apparels are manufactured along global supply chains, more often than not, by fragmented labour in developing countries. Many of the workers are women, including the extremely underpaid and unrecognised home-based women workers.
Most of these women are not even able to earn enough to support a household, have questionable working conditions and terrible work terms or social benefits. Moreover, what is termed as “fast fashion” is nothing but low-cost clothing collections based and modelled on contemporary and ever-changing high-cost luxury fashion trends, which by its very nature encourages and thrives on constant obsolescence.
Fashion consumers are lured to scan the stores every three weeks or so in search of the latest designs and styles. These consumers are often ones with disposable incomes and primed for the immediate gratification of their continually evolving temporary identities based on fast-changing styles.
As highlighted plentifully over the years, such high speed, low-cost fashion has several environmental costs as well – including inadvertent water consumption, the increased carbon footprint of moving textile cargo across the globe, use of chemicals that are toxic and the insurmountable problem of textile waste, ending up in landfills or incinerators.
Production of cotton and use of polyester – both popular raw materials for the fast fashion industry – have been linked to increased levels of water pollution. There are several other seen or unseen costs to the environment. The supermarket fashion such as that of Max Fashion – with constant seasonal sales present in ever-ubiquitous convenient locations – has further exacerbated the problem.
Most ‘fast fashion’ apparels are manufactured along global supply chains, more often than not, by fragmented labour in developing countries. Credit: Reuters
The way ahead
Buying less stuff, being more conscious about the fabric used as well supporting better working terms and conditions for the labour that is manufacturing all of these clothes is increasingly touted as at least a beginning in terms of solutions.
The Rana Plaza incident of 2013 wherein a building in Bangladesh housing various outsourced garment factories of global apparel brands collapsed due to structural failures and pathetic conditions – killing more than 1000 workers – jolted the Western world and initiated talks about the “True Cost” of fast fashion as well as “slow-fashion” and “fair trade”.
Thus, the call to wear anything and everything you wish on a day internationally marked to celebrate womanhood and commemorate women’s work for the betterment of this world is not just a cruel joke but a highly dangerous one too. It is not in the interest of any woman or the environment if looked at from a larger perspective. It is time we collectively reflect and twist the call a bit: Behen! Thoda Sochke Pehen! (Sister! Think a little before you wear!)
Maggie Paul is a scholar of Politics and IR at the University of Adelaide, Australia.