Fashion magazines in the west say that layering is 'in' this winter. Wasn't it 'in' in the summer too? And studiously Indian fashionistas decide to adopt this trend in the summer. Told us to layer in the 40 degrees Celsius temperatures.

 

Somebody tell them stop. We in India have been 'layering' for centuries. What else is a sari for heaven's sake? Its layers and layers of fabric that loving drapes over layers and layers of adipose. We discovered 'layering' a couple of centuries before the west discovered layering.

 

But layering as Stella McCartney tells us to do…i.e. wear a fine cashmere polo neck over a neat metallic shift or a "goddess gown". No thank you. Indian women do not wear "goddess gowns" or "metallic shifts". Not unless you are blessed with a figure like Feroze Gujral or Ramona Garware whose pictures one peers over while greedily reading page 3, over the sixth cup of tea every morning, in the desperate hope that the picture would melt away into the page that tells us that Pakistan is now actually in a state of crisis.

 

But seriously will the fashion advise columnists not tell us these things. And yes what's with the 70's romanticism and back to velvet? Only people who haven't lived in that era can romanticize about the seventies. Do you really like seeing those pictures of yours in dog-collared tight shirts and bell-bottom pants. Only Zeenat Aman looked good in them. Ok a Parveen Babi too. Have you noticed how the marketing gurus who are pedaling the back to seventies era fashion have not distributed pictures of Mithun Chakravarty, Reena Roy, Jayshree T and heaven forbid Sachin, Ranjeet, Kamalahasan, Silk Smitha and so many more in those colourful seventies ensembles? Shahrukh was not even a teenager back then and the Padukone babe's father was in miniscule shorts on the badminton court desperately trying to look as hot as the hottie of those times Sunil Gavaskar. And while on cricketers picture Gundappa Vishwanath or Brijesh Patel in bell-bottoms. Think how "hot" they looked.