Fashion. The word connotes many things to many people. Glamour, glitz, big money, fame and so on. It can be traced to man’s innate desire to look good and attractive to the opposite gender and to be admired by everybody.
From Rome to Egypt to India, the ‘look-good’ factor has been glamourised by royalty. If queen Cleopatra was the legendary beauty of Egypt, probably the progenitor of the ‘beauty treatment’ regimen, Indian queens and princesses with their ‘eyes like a lotus bloom’, ‘neck like a conch’, ‘tresses like a swarm of bees’ and jewellery and silks that ‘rivalled the sun’ in brilliance have been extolled in Sanskrit lore. In modern times, we have a whole army of professionals catering to the beauty conscious.
From dress designers to hair stylists to ‘body sculptors’ to diet advisers to speech and voice modulation experts to soft skills ‘polishers’ to ‘accessorisation specialists’ to dermatologists to trichologists to pedicurists to liposuction specialists to cosmetic dentists to plastic surgeons to yoga masters, the search for beauty, never mind if its only skin deep is just a phone call or click away from that appointment to emerge as ‘the face that will set a thousand hearts aflutter’. Even the queens could not boast of this array of services!
Every locality has its own ‘herbal beauty parlour’ whatever that means! The upmarket areas have their ‘salons and beauty clinics’. Modelling agencies turn awkward teens and wannabe models into cool dudes who stare out from billboards and TV screens, making us drool over their looks. The lucky ones walk the ramps of Paris, Milan and Cannes.
Have the bucks? How about the Ayurvedic resorts of Kerala where ‘ancient, proven remedies with coconut oil, choornams and lehyams’ promise to detoxify, destress and rejuvenate smog and noise battered city bodies. Or the spas and hot water springs of Europe or the ‘Dead Sea’ for a dip in the invigorating, medicinally charged salty waters.
For those with thinner purses, branded clothes, watches, footwear, sunglasses, perfumes and deodorants give psychological satisfaction of travelling on the highways of high fashion. Talking of fashion, the fashion designers need special mention. For, does not ‘dress maketh a man’?
Even a plain Jane gets transformed into a head turner with their creations. While some of the fashion wear makes one wonder whether they can be really worn, others like the bare chested male models in eight yard dhoti worn in the two fold pattern like the priests beg the question ‘what is new or fashionable in it’?
But, this one takes the cake for bizarre creations. A designer in Melbourne has created a dress for the dead. For those who want to go in style. There are designer coffins and designer tombstones. Agreed, there must be dignity in death. But designer dresses for the dead? What will we have next?
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