How Immigrant Women In The US Create Their Own Style
Recently, while living and reporting in India, I found myself scouring Instagram for glimpses of how Indian and Indian-American designers, artists, and stylists were blending Indian and Western fashion. This isn’t something I usually spend much time doing — I’m not what anyone would call fashion-conscious — but there’s nothing like living in India to drive home the ways in which I absorb my grandmotherland, and the ways in which I forsake it.
Clothing has always been a form of code-switching for me: A way to keep two half-lives separate. I grew up wearing Indian clothes to Indian functions — baptisms, weddings, Diwali parties — but never to school, or Girl Scout meetings, or a white friend’s home. This is true, I think, of most immigrant kids. The way the world views us is an inescapable part of our identity. We are treated according to the ways we can be categorized by others, and so much of this treatment is based on what we cannot change.
I can’t hide the fact that I’m Indian-American. It’s written so plainly on my face, I never saw any reason to wear it on my sleeve. I was always worried that wearing Indian clothing or jewelry — even pieces of it, paired with Levi’s or Converse sneakers — would make me look fresh off the boat. Americans claim to love Indian fashion, food, and weddings, but don’t love them quite so much on Indians. Immigrant kids do not learn to flaunt what makes us different. We learn the language of Americana. We learn that we can only trust America with slices of ourselves.
It felt as if I could never wear Indian clothing on my own terms. If I wore it in America I would be seen as too foreign, a girl both unpatriotic and uncomfortable in her own skin. And wearing Indian outfits in India made me feel as though I lived by someone else’s rules. I chafed at the way anything tight-fitting had to be covered with a shawl, at having to wear thick leggings under ankle-length anarkalis.
I wanted to blend these worlds on my body in a way that made them mine. After coming back to the States, I set out to discover what other first- and second-generation women think about wearing styles or artifacts from their own cultures, how they rationalize the decision to incorporate or leave behind what marks them as “other,” and — perhaps more importantly — how they claim these pieces as their own.
These statements have been edited for length and clarity.