The evolution of denims

Denim Do’s & Don’ts

• Wear them hanging over your hip bones: high-waisted jeans are for old men
• Denim now comes in at least 20 colours: classic blue is “hideous”
• Bellbottoms? Only if you want to be laughed at
• Should hug the butt: “bubbly” bottoms are ugly
• Crotch hanging around knees are for kids, grow up and wear skinny jeans
• A designer belt is essential, especially if you are tucking in your shirt
• Even sports shoes have to be slim and flat-soled: avoid bulky shoewear
• Some jeans come in prints: avoid like the devil

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For years, Indian men have been the despair of fashion designers. After a fierce, decades-long struggle, they eventually surrendered to denim jeans, while sturdily resisting the many revolutions that have overtaken men’s legwear in the West. But there’s a new generation of Indian men that are now ready to go all the way—whether it’s showing off butt cleavage or a crotch fit so tight that it leaves no room for gender confusion. It is to these fashion-conscious young men in their low-slung pants that Levi’s brand ambassador Akshay Kumar aimed his frontal unbuttoning act at the Lakme Fashion Week last fortnight, bringing to boil a male fashion war that’s being waged for the last few years in nightclubs and coffeebars across the country.

“I think Akshay’s done a good job,” says fashion designer Rina Dhaka, defending the film-star against the charge of obscenity that a morally outraged social activist has filed against the he-man of Bollywood. “It’s time we shook up the boring Indian male who is far too conservative when it comes to his dress sense.”

Dhaka herself has been fighting a losing battle in her “household of three men”—her husband, an exporter, and two sons, 13 and 11. When she first married him, Dhaka confesses, she tried to change the clothes her husband wore. Like most men now in their thirties and forties, he insisted on putting comfort before style. To her repeated urging to get himself a pair of skin-tight jeans, his invariable answer was: “Don’t tell me what to buy.” So she did what any style-conscious wife would have done in her place: on her next trip abroad, she bought him a pair of skinny jeans. He’s been a convert to the crotch-enhancing, leg-hugging style since then.

The fly, according to Dhaka, is crucial for the jeans-end of the male fashion industry. “There’s little else you can experiment with—all the variations have to be in the height of the fly and crotch.” With denim jeans growing into a multi-billion dollar fashion industry, designers are growing bolder in how they project the male pelvis—from leaving the top trouser button open to the more daring thongs peeping over the sliding waistband. And with older men entering into the once-young denim jeans market, teenagers are more challenged than ever in devising styles that demarcate them from their dads. Dhaka’s sons, for instance, prefer to let the crotch hang somewhere around their knees. To watch them manoeuvre through doors with one hand clutching at their sliding pants can be painful, Dhaka admits. As excruciating, she says, as a young girl in a very short mini dress negotiating a stairway. “I itch to clean them up,” Dhaka says. But fashion, as she well knows, can be a hard taskmaster.

That’s probably the reason why skinny jeans took so long to become a trend among Indian men, despite being flogged repeatedly by the fashion industry: they can be punishing on a figure that’s not gym-trained, with washboard abs. But there’s no help for it, as business student Talimoa Aier, 21, confesses. Aier, who is from Nagaland and grew up with fashion in his genes, resisted the tight-crotched, low-waisted, leg-hugging jeans style for as long as he could. Then one day he couldn’t bear to be so out of style and just went out and bought himself a pair of denims in the new style that hang perilously—and uncomfortably—over the hip bones. There was no looking back: he took all his old pairs of jeans to a tailor to have them cut into the new style. It’s sometimes too hot in Delhi to dress this way, Aier admits, but it’s better than looking “weird”—or worse, like an old man.

In his thirties, former model-turned-photographer Anay Mann is certainly no old man, but he’s still a little suspicious of too-tight jeans. “They look slightly effiminate.” But even he knows that it’s time to make the switch from high-waisted to low-waisted, and from his mass-produced denim brand to a designer label. Do girls really care what style of fly or crotch you flaunt on your jeans? Things have changed for men in fashion since his modelling days, Mann says. Then it was all about how to attract the opposite sex; now it’s about how to make himself into his image of a perfect male: perfect body, perfectly attired. Looking good for oneself comes first, attracting the opposite sex almost immaterial. It presumably follows as a corollary from the boost in a man’s self-confidence.

Indian men in general still haven’t developed a fashion sense, points out Aier. That’s why they are obsessed with designer brands, convinced that a designer pair of jeans that costs Rs 45,000 or more will do more for their fashion quotient than risking buying mass-produced jeans like Levi’s. “You need to have a really good eye for fit, style and fabric to risk wearing unbranded clothes,” says the 21-year-old who frequently is asked by his college-mates: “Where can I buy clothes like yours?” The rush of male fashion magazines that have hit the stands recently are a boon, agrees Mann, to a young man aspiring to be fashionable but not knowing where to start.

There’s another big difference between young men now and ten years ago: they are just as likely as women to look at strangers and friends of the same sex, sizing them up silently for the fit of their pants and the brand of their T-shirt.

Hardly surprising, then, that young men now spend anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes doing what women were once notorious for: getting dressed. You’d think, with so little to choose from—just a pair of denim jeans teamed with a shirt or T-shirt—fashionable young men have an unfair advantage over their girlfriends on the vital what-shall-I-wear-today question. It turns out that young men are spending over an hour to emerge from their room with their casual sports look. It’s a nuanced exercise in choosing the right belt, shirt, shoes, tie, jacket and even colour-coordinated underwear to go with their jeans.

“I can only enjoy myself if I’m looking good,” explains another business student, Shivraj Sharma, who unabashedly admits to spending over an hour in getting dressed, emerging out of his room with a carefully coutured casual sporty look that probably set his parent back by nearly Rs 1 lakh: Dolce Gabbana jeans, Calvin Klein white shirt, Gucci belt and Prada sports shoes. Sharma says he doesn’t really care for branded wear, but everyone’s wearing it, so he too must. The tyranny of fashion!

So what is really happening here? Are men being persuaded by the fashion industry to turn themselves into sex objects? For film-maker and fashion-watcher Sunil Mehra, fashion today has an outright “homo-erotic” appeal—the waxed hairless chests with the bulging pelvis being the male version of the Madonna/whore sex appeal—pre-pubescent boy above and all-man below.

But for the heterosexual young man anxious not to be left behind in this new you-are-as-good-as-you-look world, it’s something else altogether: the beginning of a life-long affair with clothes.