Met Gala 2018 has timely lessons for Indian fashion — if the fraternity's willing to take note

There’s a part of Lena Waithe’s acceptance speech at the 2017 Emmy Awards that I play over and over in my head, because of the sheer power her words exude. Addressing her LGBTQUIA ‘family’, Waithe declared :

“The things that make us different, those are our superpowers. Every day when you walk out the door, you put on your imaginary cape, and go out there and conquer the world, because the world would not be as beautiful as it is without us in it.”

Waithe put on her superhero cape — rather literally — when she attended the Met Gala 2018. A floor-sweeping rainbow cape from the Carolina Herrera label was Waithe’s response to the Gala’s theme this year — Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. Waithe’s was among the more striking sartorial statements that drew from Catholic iconography at the Gala, which saw the likes of Huma Abedin and Amal Clooney among other celebrities, walk the beige carpet. Rihanna could dress like the Pope, Jared Leto could wear a golden wreath, religious imagery was everywhere — and yet no designer or celebrity was threatened by fundamentalists who wanted to burn their effigies, abuse them virulently or otherwise protest violently against their chosen mode of creative expression.

The Met Gala underscores the understanding of fashion’s powers-that-be, that reality isn’t divided into compartments that an audience selectively responds to. It reflects an appreciation for fashion as being more than a tool for vanity, or an element of lifestyle. It highlights that fashion is bound with ideology, and isn’t the sole preserve of glamorous, uber-coiffed beings.

Contrast this with the Indian scene, where there is an unwillingness (or inability) to dissociate fashion from Bollywood. Fashion magazines may change their photography styles and locales, but the same faces appear on the covers, in rotation. Actress/actor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, repeat. After a while, even when a new vision is projected, it invokes a sense of déjà vu. Within a magazine’s glossy pages, fashion and beauty are presented as the niche of those who consider all other subjects uninteresting. (Again, juxtapose this with GQ America’s profile of Dylann Roof , which won the magazine a Pulitzer.) Fashion can no longer afford to be a cocoon that prevents the realities of the world from filtering through.

We needn’t emulate an event in its entirety. Rather, what the Indian fashion fraternity can learn from the Met Ball is that identifying with the flag-bearers of “soft culture” needn’t mean staying away from reality. That fashion isn’t just about aesthetically pleasing apparel or expensive labels, that it’s not all soirees and air kisses, and that fashion doesn’t equal what a Bollywood celebrity wears. No; fashion is an art form so individual that it becomes a force to reckon with. It is understanding that your audience can want fashion tips and socio-political commentary. A consumer today wears, worships, votes for and dreams of just what he/she wants. For him/her, fashion is politics, religion is attitude, faith is confidence, and individual desires are unflinching.