Autor: Mgr. Tereza Kuldova, Ph.D.

The dominant trend within Indian ‘haute couture’ has been, especially following the financial crisis of 2008, something I have labeled ‘royal chic’, a trend that re-imagines contemporary India through the symbols of its past greatness, which is then projected onto the imaginary canvas of India’s future. The key feature of the trend is an aesthetic reworking of aristocratic styles from bygone eras, from the Rajputs to the Mughal Empire and beyond, something that enables the contemporary business elite to reimagine itself as a neo-aristocratic class within the purported Indian democracy. Trends like this has been analyzed within fashion studies predominantly as a form of ‘self-Orientalization’. This article argues that in order to make sense of such aesthetic trends and the way they relate to contemporary material and ideological structures, we have to abandon such unproductive notions.

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