I Am a Fashion Girlie

But I’m also done pretending that fashion has rules.

I am a fashion girlie, but I refuse to let beauty standards become my religion.

And I want to be very clear about what that means because there’s a version of this sentence that sounds like a wellness caption, vague and toothless, slapped over a sunset photo. That’s not what I mean. I mean it the way you mean something after you’ve had it said to you enough times that you finally snap and say it back.

I have been dressing up for absolutely no reason since I was old enough to rummage through my mother’s saree collection. As a little girl, I would put together “outfits” in my bedroom like I was a one-woman fashion week. Nobody was watching, there was no occasion, I just liked the way fabric moved, the way colours talked to each other, the way a belt could completely restructure the logic of a kurta. I made Pinterest boards before I even had a Pinterest account; I just collected images on my brother’s laptop. I was that kid who looked at magazines and clocked every single styling detail like it was homework I actually wanted to do.

Madhuri’s red saree in Dil To Pagal Hai, the way Deepika dressed in the early 2010s, before everyone else caught up, Rachel Green’s entire wardrobe in Friends: the white trousers, the slip dresses, the blazers she made look effortless. And then a little later: midsize fashion influencers who looked like real women and wore real clothes and didn’t apologise for either.

So yes, fashion is mine. It has been mine since before I could articulate why.

But here’s what I am not: a high-fashion girlie. I don’t watch Vogue runway shows. I only recently watched The Devil Wears Prada for the first time ,the cultural event that apparently every woman is supposed to have strong feelings about and it was fine, good even, but I didn’t grow up on it. My fashion education came from Bollywood films and mall culture and Instagram and, honestly, just paying attention to women around me who dressed beautifully without making a big deal of it.

Fashion for me has always been something I do for the joy of it. Not a status symbol, not a lifestyle but just a thing I love, the way some people love cooking or making playlists.

The point is: fashion is something I enjoy, not something I worship. And yet, somewhere along the way, the world decided that my relationship to my own body, to the thing I dress every morning, needed to be supervised, managed and corrected.

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The Checklist Nobody Asked For

Here is a partial list of the things I have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that I need to fix before I am allowed to simply exist in the world without comment:

• Clear skin. No acne, no marks, no texture, nothing that suggests I am a living organism with pores.
• A flat stomach, but also thick thighs: the exact distribution of fat that keeps shifting depending on what year it is and who’s on the cover of what magazine.
• Curvy in the “right places,” which is a phrase that means nothing and everything simultaneously. A slim waist, no hip dips — those little indentations at the side of your hips that are a completely normal function of your skeleton, by the way, not a design flaw.
• No cellulite, which is something that the majority of women have and which exists entirely because women have more subcutaneous fat than men, and which we are still, somehow, taught to be ashamed of in the year of our lord.
• No body hair: not on the legs, not in the armpits, and certainly not on the face, which is something that many, many women have, especially those of us from Asian families where we are blessed with magnificent, thick, beautiful hair that apparently grows in inconvenient places.
• Expensive clothes that somehow still look effortless.
• Clothes that “flatter your body type,” which is just a polite way of saying clothes that make you look smaller than you are.
• Perfect nails.
• No dark circles, even though dark circles are largely genetic and also a result of being a human who sometimes doesn’t sleep well, and that is not a character flaw.
• No bloating: your stomach should look the same at 8 AM and 8 PM, which it never does for anyone, but especially for women, because our bodies do things that are entirely normal and entirely invisible in every piece of media we consume.
• No bra straps showing, as though the existence of the undergarment required to hold up your chest is somehow scandalous.

Confident, but not loud. Sexy, but not too much. Modest, but still desirable enough to warrant attention. Beautiful, but not so beautiful that you become threatening.

The math does not add up, and the list goes on!

Related read: Why Short Clothes Don’t Make Me “Immodest”

The Comments That Stay in Your Body

I have been told my hips are too fat. More than once, by more than one person, in more than one context: casual, affectionate, clinical, and once, memorably, by someone who said it like they were doing me a favour. Like pointing out a smudge on my face. Just FYI, just so you know, just in case you hadn’t noticed.

I had noticed.

I want to tell you about my eyebrows. Thick, dark, the kind that have a personality of their own and for a good chunk of my life, I was told they were too much. This was the early 2010s, in the era of the thin arch, before Cara Delevingne happened and everyone suddenly decided that full brows were a look. The same eyebrows that got comments then are now, apparently, desirable. My face didn’t change; the trend did so make of that what you will.

I want to tell you about being told I couldn’t wear shorts because my thighs were too big. Not in those exact words, but in the gentler Indian aunty version: “Beta, maybe something longer would be more suitable.” Translation: your body is a problem that clothing needs to solve. I was a teenager. I stored that sentence in my body like a splinter, the kind you stop feeling after a while, but that’s still in there.

I want to tell you about a partner who pointed out my arms. Flabby, he said, or something adjacent to that. The tone was casual, like pointing out that I’d left a light on. Like it was just information, not judgment. And I smiled and nodded and went home and stood in front of my mirror for twenty minutes doing something that felt like an audit. I still have so many full-sleeved tops in my wardrobe.

These comments don’t usually arrive like violence. They arrive like weather, small and persistent. A drizzle of observations about your body that you’re supposed to receive graciously because they’re delivered with affection, concern, or helpfulness. And slowly, if you’re not careful, you start to see your own body through a committee of eyes that were never yours to begin with.

That’s what nobody tells you about beauty standards: they don’t usually come at you from strangers on the internet. They come from people who love you. And that’s the part that makes them so difficult to dislodge.

The Elegant Trap of Modern Femininity

There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being a woman who is also expected to be decorative.

It isn’t just the labour of beauty routines: the waxing and the threading and the face masks and the hair care and the skincare that costs roughly the same as a semester of education. It’s the mental load. The constant, low-grade awareness of your own body as a thing being looked at. The way you walk into a room and some part of you is already doing a quick scan: What do I look like right now? Is this okay? Is this okay?

I think about the way womanhood gets inherited, passed down through mothers and aunts and cultural memory, all the things women are taught to be before they’re old enough to ask whether they want to. The beauty standards are part of that inheritance as they’re baked into the air. You absorb them without consent, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out which beliefs about your own body actually belong to you.

Modern femininity has created a very elegant trap: it tells you to love yourself while simultaneously selling you seventeen products that exist because you apparently don’t.

• It says your stretch marks are beautiful and then retouches them out of every image you’ll ever see.
• It says confidence is attractive and then calls you arrogant if you have too much of it.
• It hands you the language of self-love and then makes sure the world around you doesn’t actually reflect it, so you’re left performing body positivity in a culture that hasn’t actually changed its standards; it’s just learned to be more polite about enforcing them.

So now,

• You’re not supposed to diet; you’re supposed to eat clean.
• You’re not supposed to lose weight; you’re supposed to get healthy.
• You’re not supposed to wax; you’re supposed to just naturally not have body hair, somehow.
• The goalpost moves, the pressure doesn’t.

Desirability Is Political. Full Stop.

I want to talk about the thing nobody wants to say plainly: desirability is political.

The “correct” female body, clear skin, slim waist, hairless, smooth, eternally dewy, isn’t a natural preference. It’s a construction. It shifts with decades and markets and class and colourism, and geography. In India, particularly, there are multiple layers stacked on top of each other: fair skin, small nose, achhe nakhun, hair that is long enough and behaves well enough and doesn’t curl in ways that invite commentary. It is not an accident that the standard has always been defined by someone other than the women who are expected to meet it.

And the really painful part, the part I keep coming back to is that women are not just passive recipients of these standards. We police each other. We’ve been conditioned to.

The aunt who comments on your weight at a family function is not your enemy; she’s a woman who was told the same things and never got the chance to interrogate them. The friend who asks if you’ve “been taking care of yourself” when you gain five kilos is not malicious; she’s just doing what women have always done to women, which is hold each other accountable to standards we didn’t choose and can’t seem to shake.

I write about this because I am not immune to it. I have looked at my own reflection and found it wanting. I have stood in a changing room and thought, not this body, not in this. I have let other people’s words become my internal monologue in ways I’m still untangling. And I think that’s the honest starting point, not performing liberation, but actually, slowly, building it.

What I Actually Believe

So here’s what I actually believe, the version I’ve arrived at after years of being a woman in a body that people have always had opinions about:

Grow out your body hair if you want to. It doesn’t make you less clean; you’re not less attractive because of it. You’re just a person who has chosen by their own body, which is radical in a world that insists you consult a committee first.

Wear the sleeveless top. Yes, with the arms you have right now, not the arms you’ll have after whatever imagined future self-improvement plan. Right now, with the arm fat and the stretch marks and the loose skin that only ever seems to bother other people.

Let your pimples heal without a crisis. Your skin is doing its job; it is not letting you down. It is not a problem to be solved before you are allowed to show up somewhere.

Wear the short shorts. Wear the swimsuit. Wear the crop top. Wear the outfit that lives in your cart and that you talk yourself out of because you’re waiting to be smaller. Stop waiting.

And stop, please stop shrinking yourself to become palatable to people who were never going to appreciate the full version of you anyway.

Your body is not a trend cycle. It is not a project. It is not a before photo.

Fashion Is Still Mine. The Standards Are Not.

I still love fashion. God, I genuinely love it, the way I have since I was a kid playing dress-up alone in my room. I love a great silhouette, the specific pleasure of an outfit that makes you feel like yourself, only louder. I love colour blocking and interesting proportions, and the kind of dressing that is clearly having a conversation with itself.

But fashion, at its best, is supposed to be an extension of who you are, not a corrective measure. It’s supposed to be play, not performance. And somewhere in the gap between what fashion could be and what the beauty-industrial complex tells us it must be, a lot of women lose the thread.

I don’t want to lose the thread.

I want to dress well and have hip dips. I want to love clothes and not wax every six weeks if I don’t feel like it. I want to wear something fitted and not think about whether my stomach looks flat in it. I want to dress for the joy of dressing without it being wrapped up in the anxiety of whether my body is acceptable enough to be seen in the thing I’ve chosen to wear.

That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

Women deserve to exist without constantly editing themselves for public consumption. Not performing wellness. Not performing body positivity. Not even performing confidence, which is its own kind of pressure. Just existing: complicated, soft, hairy, bloated, pimpled, stretch-marked, loud, opinionated, fully present without treating their own bodies as something to be managed before they are allowed to take up space.

My feminism has always been this: the insistence that women are people first. Whole people, not bodies, are being assessed.

And I refuse, truly, genuinely refuse to make beauty standards my religion. I have too many good outfits to be that committed to self-punishment.

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