shoomlah asked: Hey- thanks for your response to the piece, I feel particularly schooled and am determined to get this shit right without relying on the fact that I’m coming from a place of privilege. Question! I know that choli and churidar aren’t normally worn together, and decided to play around with it in the same way that western steampunks wear visible bustles/corsets and play with fashion paradigms. Did my attempt just come across as uninformed?

1:10 pm - Tue, Jan 31, 2012: 31 notes

shoomlah asked: Hey- thanks for your response to the piece, I feel particularly schooled and am determined to get this shit right without relying on the fact that I’m coming from a place of privilege. Question! I know that choli and churidar aren’t normally worn together, and decided to play around with it in the same way that western steampunks wear visible bustles/corsets and play with fashion paradigms. Did my attempt just come across as uninformed?

I think you’d need to understand the history of how English imperialism affected pretty much everything about clothing in India - including textile production, fashions/norms, standards of modesty - and how all of these are tied to class & caste, before you can go creating neo-Victorian mash-ups. A choli worn like in your piece would’ve been considered immodest (and probably got the wearer vilified & thrown out of wherever they were). Those issues are still incredibly salient at the moment. Women wearing jeans and clothes that are considered too “modern” are still harassed and chucked out of places. Maybe you should think about these issues rather than just aiming for a mash-up according to steampunk conventions…

Thank you for that- having some context as to specifically why this ends up being problematic is extremely helpful. I’m aware of colonialism, vaguely aware of the textile crossover, and clearly not at all aware of the deeper social connotations tied up in all of it.