What my wardrobe taught me about identity, belonging, and style

Living across multiple cities takes a definitive toll not just on your aesthetic sensibilities, but also on your wardrobe. Hear me out: Growing up in Kolkata in the noughties, “sustainability” and “tailoring” were not buzzwords that I had come across as part of an Instagram caption. Instead, they were among the many intangible inheritances of Bengali middle-class upbringing, which entailed biannual trips to Khadi Emporium, bulk-buying fabrics, and then making the inevitable visit to your most faithful tailor. As one can imagine, long before India’s position as a global authority on craft was being debated every week, I took the presence of Maheshwari checks, ikkat temples, and ajrakh florals around me as a given.

It was a repertoire of knowledge that I barely knew would come to be of immense use when I finally moved to New Delhi for my undergraduate degree, where my existing wardrobe—bereft of H&M T-shirts and Uniqlo denims—would prove to be the perfect fit for what my fellow students labelled the “DU aesthetic.” Soon my block-printed shirts, mywhite-as-snow chikankari kurtas, and my handloom mandarin-collared short kurtas—collected and carefully made by my mother over years—became the envy of the roost. They not only marked me among my peers as someone with impeccable taste, but, when paired with my Decathlon tennis shorts, turned me into a living, breathing poster child of flamboyant, yet restrained, homosexuality.

Of course, there were others who pushed the limits of how newly discovered queerness ought to be expressed—jhumkas, kadas, and nail paint et al—but this was the first time that I found myself in a geographic and cultural setting where my sartorial choices became a weapon I could wield at will. I took several trips to Janpath, Dilli Haat, and Lajpat Nagar, steadily adding to my wardrobe. There were reds, midnight blues, all shades of white, and a few carefully chosen pieces in black. By the time I was packing my suitcase for my postgraduate studies in London, I was ready to take on the Western metropolis with what I believed represented the very best of Indian craft.

Fabric of change 

But no amount of reading Dickens, Hardy, or Woolf can prepare one for the coldness that awaits a transition like this. Upon my arrival, I was met with the harsh reality of accepting, first and foremost, that the very sun I had taken for granted was now a luxury that I needed to learn to use sparingly. There was little space now for my embroidered shirts, which more often than not disappeared beneath woollen overcoats and scarves, becoming invisible under layers designed for survival.

And, even before I could make peace again with the realities of building a winter wardrobe from scratch (the bare bones of the one I had built in Delhi, obviously quickly proved to be deeply inadequate), I was confronted with a harsher truth. Pieces of clothing that I had taken for granted over the past two decades no longer became my strongest expression of taste. Instead, they began to mark me in crowds—whether in university hallways, on the Tube, or along the cold aisles of a Tesco—as an outsider. An immigrant who was still struggling to fit in.

The mesh-topped, thong-sporting bodies of Soho and Hackney soon presented a language of queerness with which I had little familiarity. Every time my European friends walked up to hug me at a pub or a house party, they wore the same uncanny surprise across their faces. The very choices that had once made me stand out with admiration were now an invitation for people to regard me as something exotic.

My initial reaction was a complete overhaul of my wardrobe. Shoving my shirts and kurtas into the absolute recesses of my closet, I began donning cheap white T-shirts from Primark—a subscription to the trappings of fast fashion that would have scared the living daylights out of my parents. I told myself it was practicality. But underneath those excuses of changing cityscapes and embracing alien cultures, was the quiet prayer for anonymity and sign to fit in that could perhaps be purchased against the price of a multipack.

Closer to my first birthday away from home, I distinctly remember my mother calling and asking, “What would you like me to make you for your birthday?” For the first time in 23 years, I had no answer for her. The possibilities had always been endless: A shirt from Fabindia? A new set of cotton or fitted silk pyjamas? I took a breath and answered instead, “A white linen shirt would be perfect. You have my measurements, right?”

A month later, a distant relative brought with her a small brown cardboard parcel that carried within its folds my mother’s month-old promise: A crisp linen shirt, tailor-made for my body, that sat on my frame like second skin. As I stepped out in it on my birthday, I remember every friend in my seminar, for the very first time, complimenting my outfit in the August sun. “You look so lovely. Must be so much fun to have something bespoke, tailor-made for you,” one casually remarked.

And that was when it hit me. In a desperate bid to champion the craft legacies of our subcontinent, we from South Asia have perhaps forgotten the quiet austerity of the design histories that we inherit from our everyday lives. Histories that include handcrafting garments built to last in the most severe of climates through thoughtfully sourced materials; objects that travel across borders with ease and endure the passing of years.

Today, after three years of living away from home, I own close to six such shirts, all of which I have shamelessly forced my mother to send my way to London. She, of course, unaware of the lexicon of a Charvet or a Budd, sees my gradual discarding of embroidered fabrics and colourful prints as a shedding of my past; another excuse to dissolve into the crowds of a rainy, often sunless city that she is yet to visit.

But, I have increasingly come to see it differently. Because the question is no longer whether London sees me as South Asian. The truth is, that it always will. Whether I am wrapped in ajrakh cotton or crisp white linen, I continue to arrive in every room carrying an inheritance that precedes me. The difference lies in which parts of that inheritance I choose to foreground.

Today, the conversation around South Asian fashion on the global stage has lingered for too long on spectacle—on embroidery, ornamentation, and craft as performance as opposed to knowledge. There is immense pride to be taken in those histories, undoubtedly. But there is equal pride to be found in the quieter design traditions that have always existed alongside them: Traditions of tailoring, utility, longevity, and restraint. Clothes that do not merely mark our origins, but stand by quietly as we make homes elsewhere.

This article originally appeared in Cosmopolitan India's July-August 2026 print issue.

Image credits: Shutterstock

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