These three artists are making everyday clothes feel sexy and unapologetic

In a pair of red socks and black panties, Jahnavi’s friend stretches on the wrinkled bed sheet in a photograph. Bare chested, she exudes the quiet discomfort of a summer afternoon when men take off their shirts and we blaspheme internally, wishing we could do the same. It’s finding the freedom within a certain kind of intimacy with one’s underclothes that the Delhi-and-London-based stylist and creative director, Jahnavi Sharma, and her friend and photographer, Carina Lammers, focus on, in Drawers, a zine released earlier this year. “It’s about how we feel in these private moments,” says Sharma.

Standing amid blooming flowers, a man laughs as water from the garden hose drizzles all around him like a midsummer rain shower. When British-Indian designer Ashish Gupta took this photograph for his book Looking for Now last year, he was taking from vintage porn magazines and their idealisation of the male physique in all its musculature, clad in skintight Speedos. It glorified the body, but it also thrived on sexualising a very primal and instinctual relationship with one’s underwear. Perhaps that’s why he photographed his models in the very clothes they’d arrived in for the shoot, highlighting their choice in picking up a grey undershirt or white pants. It’s this decision—the choice behind donning a certain piece of underwear—that Drawers gently pushes from the private towards the public.

Sharma works with the community she has created in London, whose intimacies she highlights through the undergarments they have come to subconsciously adore. It included moving away from the usual poses of fashion photography while showing the body and its curves, folds, and hair.

For many of us, it’s snatching the first dry thing on the rack before exiting the apartment.“I’ve always been on the go as a stylist and now as a creative director,” Sharma smiles, adding: “I was never really concerned about what I’m wearing underneath. I’d put on purple pants and a navy blue bra—it was kind of all over the place.” She wasn’t alone, she realised, as she and Lammers trudged all over London and beyond, shooting at their friends’ homes, finding other mismatched pairs. “And those that had turned red in the washing!” she says. “They also get stained when we menstruate, and it is considered a bad thing if someone sees it—but who really cares about that anymore? Underwear doesn’t have to look cute. It can be nasty, torn apart, and completely ridiculous and still make sense,” she adds.

A familiar photograph in the zine is one where a sofa has been brazenly splattered with a bunch of clothes— including underwear—left out to dry, probably on a rainy day or when the clothes line was too full. “It’s my daily ritual, so it felt very natural to me. But, once it’s dry, our parents would be like, don’t keep it here...particularly if there was a stain,” Sharma shares. This knell of shame has taken the shape of the difficulty of finding local bookstores who’d stock the zine in and around Delhi. “They said people won’t buy the zine here as they live in joint families...I don’t think there’s any problem in showcasing being a woman and one’s true self,” she adds.

Therefore, it was important that the shoot does not turn into a fashion commercial. “We had conversations around what made the subjects feel sexy: ‘Does a thong make you feel sexy?’” she asks. “For some, it was uncomfortable, and even I’m a big no on thongs. If it’s not something that is comfortable, it’s not going to make me feel like myself,” says Sharma. So, either her friends got their own underwear, or she approached smaller brands by Central Saint Martins graduates. In the photos, everything is soft and homely, with someone’s grandmother’s painting hanging on the wall or a tiny soft toy, in keeping with Sharma’s assurances that the shoot would encompass what feels comfortable to everyone. “One of my friends preferred wearing tights and I was like, of course...I bought a billion tights in all colours!” 

Sense and sensuality

It’s a similar feeling of community that photographer Jitendra Jerry encounters when she makes eye contact with another queer person. “There’s something in the queer eye,” she says. We were looking at a photograph of a trans woman in a white woolly sweater and black jeans with the Louis Vuitton logo splattered around, posing in front of a car. “She was on the streets making money...Whenever trans people look at me, they know I’m trans, and it’s a very instinctual conversation that happens,” Jerry says. When they met, the subject was very dissatisfied with the way trans people in India had been portrayed in Western media, as living in squalid conditions and unkempt clothing. Wanting to make queer portrayals more assertive, Jerry asked her to wear something she liked: “She told me that she’d like to be shot in front of a car, and I did.”

In another photograph, a girl in a blue tank top balances a blue frog on her head, hiding her eye with a blown glass fish. The hair under her arms has begun to grow back. She also has the smallest blue bindi on her forehead and a pearl necklace with what seems like a crochet boa around her neck. “She’s an artist and this was her studio,” says Jerry, who started her ongoing book project photographing queer and fashionable cis young people across India, titled Who Am I?!, by first becoming friends with the muses online.

In another striking image, a girl stares at us in a glassy sequinned dress, its sparkle reflected in her pink lip gloss and piercings. It is often through such clothing—which Jerry finds fascinating—that she is motivated to bottle up the essence of a person’s energy in an image. At a deeper level, it’s also the act of finding herself reflected in others. “I see myself in so many people,” she says, adding: “Like, ‘oh, this person is me’. And the way I love myself, I love my subjects.”

Therefore, there’s an aspect of emotion which is palpable in the work. Vulnerability bleeds through, I realise, looking at a photograph of two of her friends holding each other on the floor, inebriated but happy. For Jerry, it’s capturing this intense emotion and following through with an immediate and serendipitous connection. Like, travelling to Yellapur (in Karnataka) after meeting a guy from there on Grindr to photograph him. One of the photos shows him and another friend standing shirtless—a subject in silver sunglasses, the other in skintight khaki pants in front of a river. “Both of them were gay and from the Siddi community with African ancestors living in India,” she says, adding, “I stayed there for a while and found there are only a few trans people there, who I also photographed.”

Clothing becomes important to Jerry, like it is for Sharma, as a means of expression. In a beautiful photograph of a trans man who she met at a playground in Mumbai (when the “eyes connected, I knew,” Jerry says, smiling), one can see the subject in a white shirt and purple handknitted sweater, reminiscent of a vintage college-going bad boy. The hair, slightly askew, and a sword tattoo on the neck. In another, a man is seen standing outside a gate, the dance-induced sweat on his face giving his entire being a glow as he stares at us in a mesh sleeveless shirt and jeans, hands sparkling with bejewelled rings on almost every finger. Jerry also recalls photographing a friend on the beach in Goa in red Shibari ropes, the art of Japanese bondage. And another in a red choli in front of a red car at a Pride march. A mood so coordinated that it’s sweet and heart-warming at the same time. And, it is indeed an intuitive collaboration—as much as the subject’s decision as it is Jerry’s. “That’s the way I want things to be,” she concludes.

Photography by Carina Lammers

This article first appeared in Cosmopolitan India's July-August 2025 print edition.

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