Suhani

Last month I worked on a large-scale styling project for an e-commerce portal in Mumbai. I was hired a night before to fill in the gap of an assistant stylist. When I arrived on set on my first morning, I was ready to tackle heavily stuffed racks and memory-challenging inventory keeping. So, no I was not surprised to find myself walking towards the rest of the styling team besides a mountain of tagged, untagged, packed and unpacked clothes. The goal was to produce two hundred and eighty something fully accessorised looks on specific themes, both men and women. Day after day as we produced the best possible looks out of multiple piles of clothes, I realised how this wasn’t really about clothes or styling tips. This was entirely about consumerism.

The looks we produced were finalised by some of the top stylists in the country. And even blue on blue was given a pass. (No not denim on denim cause I’m game for that.) I thought about my fashion styling tutor at university who I didn’t agree much with for making us maintain a journal of design principles for most of the semester. The content of her class was so 101 but somehow it perfectly applied to this commercial job. The bare minimum of understanding how to dress was required here. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting to produce Rihanna’s 2018 September cover by Edward Enninful here. But my hope to add a sprinkle of creativity died on day four when we received a delivery of another forty cartons of apparel and accessories. Most were filled with such basic pieces that at this point it was all felt like a beige cargo trouser. My ambitious and hardworking team and I scouted through all of them to perfect the looks we had already produced and build the rest required. Because I think somewhere inside of us, we still had the urge to do this right- the urge to swap that basic graphic tee with a crosscut hemline t-shirt. Who is to blame here though? Even in 2021 after the world has faced an apocalyptic pandemic pushing us to redesign our lives; I saw someone grab the overpriced even in sale, branded but stained with a missing button shirt off the rack. So, I’m sure most of these built-with-compromise looks are going to be sold out on the e-commerce platform soon.