So I was sent to Kanpur to do a story on the nuances of jeans ...
An edited version http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-fitting-reply/484625/ appeared in the Indian Express on July 5.
Chinki Sinha
Kanpur, July 1, 2009
“Blue, blue jeans I wear them every day
There’s no particular reason to change.” Blur
Nancy Parihar’s rebellion starts from her head. The 20-year-old ‘s curls are streaked a bold blonde, and then are tight-fitting jeans are the perfect badge of nonconformity in a Kanpur, a late-starter when it comes to adopting jeans. Only recently, some colleges banned jeans on campus though when women protested, the ban was lifted.
Her streaked hair, with golden specks scattered through the mass of curly hair, flying, and the world looking less menacing through the tinted sunglasses that she wore, Nancy Parihar rides through the shanty towns where men turn to stare at her, through upscale neighborhoods where she perfectly fits in, by the glittering mall at the intersection of the modern and the old parts of the city where the mannequins reflect her aspirations, and through the mean, narrow streets, into an alley. And the world changes drastically.
Certainly, this isn’t the neighborhood where cigarette jeans or the knee-length denim capris would go unnoticed. But Nancy is unfazed. She is the small town girl getting ready to take on the world like millions of others in thousands of smaller cities and towns and even villages in India where denim has come to them through the television screens, globalization working its way through the layers, tempting them to break free.
Denim’s association with a “sexy rebelliousness” started almost half a century ago when the hippies took to denim and made it a symbol of protest, of anti-establishment. Then, through the years, jeans became mainstream alternating between comfort wear to fashion wear, pushing through the mindsets with a vengeance.
In fact, in the last couple of years, the sale of western clothes in Grade B and C cities like Kanpur has been phenomenal, according to industry experts.
“It is under 20 percent but that’s huge. Western wear is the fastest-growing segement in the garment industry. Most of the demand is coming from smaller cities. Kanpur is one of the fastest-growing cities in terms of western clothing, including jeans,” Rakesh Vaid, Chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council, said.
“The world is changing. Who wants the behenji look? We didn’t wear jeans until Class 10th here. But in 2006 when Kareena Kapoor wore those bell bottoms in Mujhse Dosti Karoge, I had to get those,” Nancy said. “We have evolved. We are getting there.”
And the tight-fighting midnight blue jeans Nancy sported was playing its due role in the young rebel’s life.
Nancy is fashion-forward and checks out the latest trends online. Her jeans must convey a carefully crafted image. She is someone with some disposable income, a modern, liberated young woman, and one who knows that other women will be checking out her butt.
But then, as with any change, denim’s entry in small-town India hasn’t been without its hitches. It was frowned upon, it was dismissed as a symbol of warped mentality, and it was denounced as being against the Indian culture. And the women, dreamy-eyed and totally in love with what denim promised were pitched in a battle with those that guarded the culture so fiercely.
Nancy doesn't want to closeted into roles. When she wore jeans and looked at the reflection of herself into the mirror, she saw a woman who was strong, and who dared to dream. Her mother Mandeep Kaur never wore jeans in her life but she did buy jeans for her daughters, dressing them up in the garb that she had been beyond what she could have even dreamed of in a small village in Jalandhar.
“Everyone wears them. Let them go with the flow,” she said.
Once a neighbor had come to Kaur, demanding she ask her daughters to be “decent” and give up on jeans. Those things don’t like nice in this area, they had said.
“But we didn’t bother. Mother told us to wear long kurtas with capris. We did. But that became a trend, too,” Nancy said.
In Shastri Nagar, Nancy was the first to wear the dreaded apparel that sort of jolted the conservative quarters and pushed it in times much ahead of what the residents would have been comfortable with.
Kanpur, city that’s catching up
Navin Market has all the trappings of modernity. A group of teenagers in embroidered jeans gather in front of the mall, scanning the jeans on display in store windows. Levis, and Lee, and all others have made it to Kanpur.
In a city hit by the jeans wave, where billboards with women sporting knee-length denim capris, or tapered, and low-waist jeans dominate the landscape and tailors are busy flipping pages of latest style books, deciphering how to make those cool jeans, denim is more than just a stylish, comfortable piece of clothing. Inherent in it is an attitude, a struggle, an aspiration, and even a tinge of rebellion.
A lone cow walked by Nancy’s gate. An old woman looked up from where she was sitting, her nose wrinkling, a disapproving look on her face, but Nancy didn’t care. Stares, smirks, taunts, and plenty of them came her way, was part of the deal.
In the family’s modest quarters, in a little space, squeezed in between the living room, and the kitchen, is where Nancy’s denim treasure lies. This is the sum total of her aspirations, and her investments. And when she pulls them out, you can’t miss the glint in her eyes.
She pulled out the first pair, a flared bell bottoms with trappings and buckles. She was in Class 6 when she bought those. Those were in vogue then –high waist and sung fit and elephant flares. Then she gently tossed the grayish, slim fit jeans on to the chair. And then, it was the turn of the hippie-style ones with embroidery and torn finish, inducted into the collection three years ago. And they got bolder with years. When Nancy entered college, she bought a pair of black low-waist jeans from Fade Out, a shop known in those days as the most up-to-date when it came to stocking the latest denim wear. It cost her much of her savings. Nancy had been saving pocket cash for months.
Even now, Nancy, who earns Rs. 7,000 per month, invests much of what is left over from contributing to the household expenses, in her denim dreams.
But now she frequents Chandu’s Western Wear for Women near Swaroop Nagar where she can get what she wants for a small sum. She stumbled upon the little tailor shop and wanted everything they made.
But denim dreams aren’t just for Nancy.
Chand Alam keeps away from sermonizing to his customers about modesty. When the women push the fashion magazines in front of him, asking him to stitch the ultra low-waist jeans that barely have an inch-long zip, he tries keeping a straight face. But he can’t always help smirking. No point converting the dreamy-eyed girls who want to look like poster girls, he said.
“If you try to impose length, then customers won’t like it. They want to look like film stars. It is the start of a revolution here. Now girls here can’t do without jeans. Everything is fine when it comes to fashion,” he said. “Ban or no ban, jeans will still sell.”
A year ago, Alam didn’t have such dilemmas. He used to stitch men’s trousers then. But a year ago, when everywhere he looked, he saw women wearing jeans, he decided to switch from tailoring men’s pants to exclusively cutting out denim for women. And his little store became an instant hit.
That was the decisive moment. Alam the future was in jeans. A year ago, he took the plunge and switched over from stitching men’s clothes to exclusively cutting out denim for women.
But even in a year’s time, the jeans have themselves have undergone transformation. Here women set new bars for waist every day, he said.
“Those just get lower,” Alam said.
When Alam betrayed his kind to tailor jeans for the fairer sex, he was the first tailor in Kanpur to take the plunge. And it was worth taking the risk. He and Abdul Rauf, the other tailor in the shop, have a deluge of orders. When Nancy walked into the shop that evening, Rauf was trying to beat the heat off, fanning himself.
“We get at least five orders a day,” Rauf said, as Nancy walked into the store, magazine in hand.. “There’s no time to even relax.”
And in that intersecting point in their lives, it was jeans that became the focal point of aspiration. For one, it was a symbol of liberation from the stereotype of a small town girl, and for the other, a means to get a better life, a better future, a livelihood that paid better.
Jeans is everywhere
When four colleges banned jeans on campus in the city recently, women were out on the streets, protesting the move, demanding the authorities to scrap the “unreasonable” order that only victimized them and justified men’s eve-teasing. College principals, sitting in their office, had drafted the guidelines because it was the need of the hour. When girls wore the tight-fitting jeans, showing off the curves, so tight that it could rip in the middle if you had to bend, principals said, the men taunted them, and eve-teased them. Women had to be modest, and wear clothes that didn’t get them in trouble was the classic argument that the principals offered.
After all Kanpur isn’t Mumbai or Delhi. It is slowly awakening as most of the Tier B and C cities, and will take its time. Mindsets didn’t change overnight, they said.
But they underestimated the power or the penetration of denim. In their heydays, the hippie era that the Vietnam War had galvanized, they too had rebelled. Or at least they sported the era’s clothing – the granny sunglasses, the bell bottoms, and the frayed denim pants.
In the old parts of the city, where the muezzin calls are duly heard five times a day and where mosque ramparts are visible from a distance, and veiled women hurry past the shops, and disappear into the narrow gullies, the dreaded jeans, a symbol of western decadence for most of the old timers, has made an appearance. In Colonelganj, in tucked-away lanes, little manufacturing units, the sweatshops where thin, emaciated men are bent over the machines stitching jeans, stand neck to neck.
In these cramped quarters, signs of change aren’t hard to find. A tailor shop advertises its skills in making the most trendy, western wear for women, including jeans. It is called “Naughty Girl”. Yet another shop is named “A touch of New Feeling.”
Across the street, on a clothesline, a woman’s jeans are drying. In another quarter of the city called Chamanganj, where women drift in and out of henna and bangle shops, their burquas swishing as they move about, a shopkeeper claimed he had seen denim and not salwars underneath some of those long-flowing veils.
In Shukla Ganj, on the other side of the river, Shiraz Ahmed looked up at a woman who was wearing jeans and a short top on a rickshaw and looked away.
“It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “It is a bubble, a myth. It will burst. It is fashion mania. Why take it seriously? It will go. They will come back to senses.”
Ijaz Ahmed can go on and on about the side effects of jeans. A resident of Bacpn Ganj in Kanpur and driver by profession, Ahmed feels the jeans is the biggest vice to have befallen the city of his ancestors.
“This is destroying our society. When they see women in jeans, men can be tempted to imagine their bodies. But what can you do. Even in Muslim areas, women are wearing jeans. They wear in under the burquas or carry it to their friend’s house in the city and change into them,” he said. “Recently, some women eloped with men. The women were the jeans-wearing type.”
Class Act
Ajanta Chadha, principal of SN Sen Balika PG College where jeans have been banned for the last six years, said it wasn’t as if Kanpur suddenly woke up to jeans. They wore it in their time, too, but then not in college where the focus should be on studies and not on fashion, she said.
Also, denim used to be an elite wear. Only women from the posh areas wore them. But now denim has transcended class barriers in the city with too many shops selling denim. But then, these women travel in rickshaws and not in cars, and live in conservative neighborhoods.
“Even the servant class is wearing jeans now. But Kanpur is an industrial city. The working class mentality is different,” she said. “The spirit nowadays is all about asserting identity. Hum barabar hai. But jeans don’t liberate you. The change has to be slowed down.”
While the ban was lifted in the colleges after Mayawati government issued a statement saying she would take action if the colleges didn’t turn around, principals are now considering an alternative.
“We are thinking about introducing uniform in colleges,” another principal said. “Let’s just root out the problem. I have seen men leching at women wearing jeans outside college. On television they said we have issued a Taliban like diktat. But we are moral guardians. It is for their good.”
The day the ban was lifted, defiance was evident in students’ attitude. Most came to the colleges to see the admissions list wearing jeans, and teachers frowned. But stayed mum.
Dr. Kshama Tripathy, of the Dayanand Girls College that was the first among the four colleges to ban the jeans, sat in the administrative office looking at the women who queued up to submit the forms.
“These days, they wear vulgar tops. The tops are going up and up, and the jeans is getting lower and lower,” she said. “What can we do? We can’t be America. They all want to show they are modern but then the jeans are so low, you can almost see the divider. We thought if we stop them from wearing jeans, then automatically the vulgar tops will go away.”
Outside the hall, on the notice board, the order that asked girls to keep off from wearing jeans on campus hadn’t been taken off. But that didn’t scare the girls. They had read about the lifting of the ban in the papers.
Ria Tiwari, a master’s student at the college, said she was angry that the college had even thought of such a thing.
“Jeans are so comfortable. We are happy the government sided with us,” she said.
At the gate, gatekeeper Shekhar Saini almost stopped a woman in short cropped hair and snug jeans from entering the premises.
“I thought he was a man. We couldn’t recognize. These days, you can’t even make out,” he said.
Sonika, 21, who hails from Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh, started wearing jeans when she came to Kanpur around four years ago. As with her transition from a village to a city, her new attire symbolized freedom from the past.
“I don’t wear it in when I am in my village. We have to follow rules there. But here I am free,” she said.
In her grey, embroidered jeans, and black top, Sonika, who kept pulling the top, embodied the city’s dilemma. She couldn’t let go of the traditions. She was too grounded in those, shackled almost. But modernity beckoned, too. She was tempted.
The year was 1972, the year when jeans first hit Kanpur. Keshav Jashnani, a businessman, could predict the potential of jeans in his native city and he traveled to Mumbai and stocked Kalpana, a known store, with denim.
“Back in those days, only fashion-conscious women used to come to the store. And they were the ones who wore it everywhere. Slowly, the jeans started catching up in Kanpur,” he said. “Girls came to us from Etawa, Kalpi, even far-flung villages to buy jeans. Jeans is localized now. There’s no stopping it.”
The legendary store, which is shutting in a few days, was among the first few stores to sell jeans in Uttar Pradesh, where jeans became popular in the last decade, blurring class barriers, and infusing women with dreams that they too could dress like the big-city women, be modern, and challenge the norms.
Outside PPN College in Kanpur, a bunch of young men stood, helping out newcomers with forms. Satish Kumar Gupta, 22, and a student, banning jeans in colleges was no solution to social ills like rape and molestation. Women can’t be reined in just because men could be provoked by their dress, he said.
“What if someone asked us to wear dhotis? This is outrageous,” he said. “We don’t agree.”
Nancy couldn't care less. Often her mother tells her to wear salwar kurtas and give up on jeans. She is growing up and the neighbors are talking.
"So what? I will wear jeans. They make me feel confident. It's me when I am in jeans," she said. "Let them talk. Let them ban jeans. I will still wear it."
BOX on jeans
But jeans wasn’t always the coveted wear, at least not for women. When it first arrived more than a century and a half ago, it was as workmen’s clothing, its rough fabric perfect for wear and tear.
Then it was exported around the world. It became a symbol of civilization and then slowly, fashion houses picked up the fabric and burned the runway with super models sashaying down the ramp in denim pants, shirts, and even skirts.
From its humble origins as work pants, jeans have come a long way, penetrating societies that have adopted it as its own.
For women, too, the jeans stood for a sort of liberation. The feminist movement demanded a change from the cumbersome Victorian era dresses like the corsets to clothing women could wear to work, and break from the society had then earmarked for them.
Jeans Market in India
It was in the sixties that jeans came to India. At first, imported jeans were in demand but then after the 1970s the jeans market has expanded substantially. With globalization and satellite media penetrating the nooks and corners of the country, jeans are everywhere.
While until about 17 years ago, the jean market in India was dominated by unbranded jeans, customers have now become brand conscious and from a casual, comfortable clothing, it has now become a revolution where the apparel itself symbolizes the aspirations of small-town India, waking up, and trying to catch up with the cosmopolitan, urban and fashionable cities.
Because jeans are not classifed seperately and are merged with trousers, statistics are not available on the number of jeans sold in India.
But industry insiders say that denim have also spread to rural areas. The proportion of jeans in urban and rural areas is expected to be about equal.
In 2007 -08, the number of trousers in the domestic market were estimated to be around 308 million pieces for men and 324 million pieces for women, according to M K Panthaki, director of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India.
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