Dangerous Designs : Asian Women Fashion the Diaspora
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DANGEROUS DESIGNS In late-1990s Britain, the salwaar-kameez or ‘Punjabi suit’ emerged as a high-fashion garment. Popular both on the catwalk and on the street, it made front-page news when worn by Diana, Princess of Wales and Cherie Booth, the wife of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. In her ethnography of the local and global design economies established by Asian women fashion entrepreneurs, Parminder Bhachu focuses on the transformation of the salwaar-kameez from negatively coded ‘ethnic clothing’ to a global garment fashionable both on the margins and in the mainstream Exploring the design and sewing businesses, shops and street fashions in which this revolution has taken place, she shows how the salwaar-kameez is today at the heart of new economic micro-markets which themselves represent complex, powerfully coded means of cultural dialogue and racial politics. The innovative designs of second-generation British Asian women are drawn from characteristically improvisational migrant cultural codes. Through their hybrid designs and creation of new aesthetics, these women cross cultural boundaries, battling with racism and redefining both Asian and British identities. At the same time, their border- crossing commercial entrepreneurship produces new diaspora economies which give them control over many economic, aesthetic, cultural and technological resources. In this way, the processes of global capitalism are gendered, racialized and localized through the interventions of diasporic women from the margins. Parminder Bhachu is Professor of Sociology at Clark University, Massachusetts, USA. She was formerly Henry R.Luce Professor of Cultural Identities and Global Processes, and Director of the Women’s Studies program. She is author of Twice Migrants (1985), and is co-editor of Immigration and Entrepreneurship (1993) and Enterprising Women (1988). ‘Parminder Bhachu is the most authentic and imaginative intellectual of the diaspora that I have come across…. on the cutting edge—a sophisticated analyser of the multilayered identities and cultural locations that also occupy my films in the global diasporic arena…the first academic to take me and my films seriously…in all their complexities…and wears great salwaar-kameezes too.’ Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend it like Beckham, Bhaji on the Beach and What’s Cooking? ‘This is such a smart, engaging, eye-opening book. Parminder Bhachu takes you inside the east London shop of Bubby Mahil and from there, amid patterns and customers and fax machines, you begin to see the globalized market in fashion and identities in a totally fresh way. Thanks to this innovative ethnography, we think new thoughts about defiance in the face of anti-Asian racism, entrepreneurial innovation from the cultural margins, and women’s agency against the global odds.’ Cynthia Enloe, author of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics ‘In my view, she is one of the most gifted writers working on the issues of diasporic cultures, ethnicity and cultural hybridity… Her new book…provides insights into the complexities of globalisation and the ways in which Asian women have been proactive agents within the micromarkets of the fashion industry.’ Les Back, Goldsmiths College, University of London, author of Out of Whiteness and New Ethnicity and Urban Culture ‘Parminder Bhachu’s Dangerous Designs is a revelation. Bhachu’s Asian women are designing and stitching together both clothes and a new culture more in touch with our new capitalist global world than the traditional Anglo- and Indian elites who foolishly thought they were the center of a modern culture in which the center no longer holds.’ James Paul Gee, Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading, University of Wisconsin- Madison DANGEROUS DESIGNS Asian women fashion the diaspora economies Parminder Bhachu NEW YORK AND LONDON First published 2004 Simultaneously published in the UK, USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 and Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2004 Parminder Bhachu All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bhachu, Parminder. Dangerous designs: Asian women fashion the diaspora economies/ Parminder Bhachu p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Fashion—Asian influences—History—20th century. 2. Costume design—Asian influences—History—20th century. 3. Women fashion designers—Asia— History—20th century. 4. Suits (Clothing) I. Title. TT504.B43 2003 391′.2–dc21 2003046893 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-48149-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-47921-1 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-07220-4 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-07221-2 (pbk) DEDICATED TO MY SWEET MOTHER, MERI PIARI MAMA CONTENTS List of illustrations Viii Acknowledgements X Introduction 1 8 PART I Travels of the suit 1 Cultural narratives of the suit 9 2 Ethnicized consumption 22 34 PART II Design narratives Introduction 35 3 Pioneering fashion entrepreneur: Geeta Sarin 37 4 Second-generation design globalizer: Bubby Mahil 51 5 Selling the nation: revivalist Indian designer Ritu Kumar 63 6 Selling art clothes in classed markets 77 Conclusion: national elites versus diaspora design entrepreneurs 87 93 PART III Suit marketers Introduction 94 7 Daminis: a commercial community mama’s shops 95 8 Networking marketers of ready-made suits 106 121 PART IV Sewing cultures: sketching and designing Introduction 123 9 Diasporic sina-prona: sewing and patterning cultures 124 10 Designing diasporas through sketches 131 Conclusion: disruptive markets from the margins 157 Glossary 162 Notes 164 Bibliography 175 Index 180 ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 The heroines of my tale—older women wearing classically 11 styled suits in a south London Sikh temple 2.1 Princess Diana in Catherine Walker suit with Jemima Khan and 25 Imran Khan during private visit to Pakistan in February 1996 2.2 Cherie Booth wearing Bubby Mahil suit, together with her 28 husband, Prime Minister Tony Blair, at Diwali Celebrations at Alexandra Palace, London, 3 November 1999 3.1 Fusion-inspired raw silk high-neck kameez worn with low 46 square-neck beadwork jacket, typical of Geeta Sarin’s hybridized cut and innovative mix of fabrics 4.1 Simple sketch of kameez made by Bubby Mahil with the 58 customer in the shop 4.2 Elaborated sketch as subsequently faxed to the factory in India 59 5.1 Classic chic—a Ritu Kumar-designed salwaar-kameez 73 embellished with fine zardozi embroidery in the traditional gold thread 6.1 The image of a woman on the front of Yazz’s business card 84 8.1 Chiffon mania—the easy-to-maintain synthetic chiffon dress-like 107 kameez is inset with a boldly embroidered panel, studded with red ‘stones’ 10.1 Hardev’s sketch of her adapted version of the Catherine Walker 147 suit worn by Princess Diana 10.2 The dress Jini made for her daughter’s graduation ball 151 10.3 Butterick 4415—showing Jini’s ‘Punjabifying’ lines on the pink 153 dress on the left-hand side ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I dedicate this book to my mother without whose help and love nothing would have been possible for me. She got me to wear the Punjabi salwaar-kameez suits with cultural confidence and ethnic defiance in the 1970’s by sewing them for me collaboratively, according to my own styles and design codes. She later also taught me to stitch these clothes proficiently for myself, making me a participant in the very suit economies I capture in this book. She was able to persuade me to remain culturally and sartorially confident in the overtly racist terrains of late 1960s/early 1970s London. This period was culturally barren, in British Asian terms, for young Asians like myself in their teens and early twenties, growing up in predominantly white areas of London. We had almost no Asian friends, nor were we from the directly migrant Indian and Pakistani home- orientated communities who returned to the subcontinent regularly for cultural reinforcement. In these racially and culturally harsh landscapes, our mothers played a central role in giving us a sense of ethnic pride and a sense of ourselves on our own terms—a confidence which spilled into other dimensions of our lives. My brother, Binny Bhachu, has been my link to the larger world of design and fashion since I was a child. His professional training is in these fields and his own very striking hybridized style, a product of the multiple sites where he has lived in Europe and Africa, gave me exposure as a young person to these diasporically mediated and innovative worlds of fashion in which design-conscious turban-wearing Asian men like himself were influential trend-setters. I thank him for making me aware of these interesting worlds which I have since made my own in my academic and personal domains. I could not have written this book without the help of my close friend of many years, Sasha Josephedis. I live in Massachusetts, USA. She lives in London, UK. Sasha acted as my writing coach and therapist—and for no charge! She is an anthropologist with multiple skills. For two years, whilst I was working intensively on this book, she monitored my time and she helped me think through its central themes and organize the material.