What dogs India's street style?

If 70-year-old men on the streets of Milan and Florence can look like a million bucks why can’t the common man in India make an effort to look half way interesting. No wonder the Italians invented the art of Sprezzatura (a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort). Are we a country of sloppy men and women who’ll wear crocs no matter what? How many of us bother to look presentable when we head to our workplace? Apart from those of us who operate in the fashion space, it is very rare to see people trying to push the envelope. The T-shirt and denim combo has become an eye sore and so are the cringe inducing formals.

A ray of hope
Photographer Manou of the street style blog Wear about, who started taking street style photos only three years ago feels that it’s too short a time to build a reference point and it requires a deeper study to gauge how it has evolved or if it has evolved. “There is a great variety of people and fashion everywhere in India. Both in small towns where people are oblivious to fashion and in the metropolitan cities where you find people mixing with each other from many different parts of the country. Guess one has to really look. I can’t be certain why there aren’t many street style photographers. It’s a matter of personal choice I guess,” says he. 

The street style phenomena is more or less Internet driven and only about 12 per cent of India’s population is on the internet. As the Internet population grows there will be more blogs in general. Somewhere in the future, I see city/state specific street style blogs coming up, he adds.

Still a long way to go!
Blogger Santu Misra of Devil Wore blog says, “I think the street style in India has reached nowhere. Having said that, I’d like to add that people have definitely started dressing up better and are more style conscious. I have seen girls wearing designer pieces with Sarojini Nagar finds. Thanks to the magazines who are featuring street style fashion in a big way, individuals on the streets have started to mix and match different looks. Thanks to the influx of e-commerce sites, blogs and the celebrity culture, people have started dressing better. People at fashion weeks make a lot of effort but that’s because they want to get shot and profiled.”

Blogger Anushka Hajela of Bombay Bubble blog says, “Globally street style has really come a long way but sadly that’s not the case in India. It’s heartbreaking but true. People like us who work in fashion definitely make a lot of effort however I can’t say that about the man on the streets. Delhi definitely has a crowd which dresses up but most of them wear brands from head to toe and look like clones of each other. Where is the creativity when you are putting together the look?”

Need to make more effort
Blogger Karishma Rajani of the street style blog Purple Peep Toes says, “Older woman are more conscious about dressing up now. Recently, I spotted a woman in her late 40s wearing a white maxi which I felt was very appropriate for her age. In fact men have started dressing up really well. At the recent ZARA sale, I actually saw men getting into catfights over merchandise, which used to be the case with women earlier. Girls in the bracket of 16 to 30 do a lot of online shopping thanks to the mushrooming of e-commerce sites, which have made the fashion very accessible. I think the man of the streets really need to evolve from the done-to-death basic T-shirt and jeans look. It’s sad to see college kids in this boring combo when they can afford to be much more experimental.”