What we wear, wears us

it has not been long since I began looking at the politics of things around me, and I hadn't realised how clothing was like a stone thrown into water whose ripples I had been carrying for years, mistaking them for my own patterns, not tracing them back to where it all started

In Varanasi, clothes are not just clothes, they are declarations. Warnings. Promises. Shields. They speak before you do. And often, they speak instead of you.

I grew up watching my mother wear kurtis and shoes, simple, comfortable, practical. In a city where sarees signify submission and womanhood, she dressed like someone who didn’t care to perform either.

It was a rebellion I didn’t understand until much later.

Because at the time, I was also being told, in whispers and stares, what not to wear.

Now, I live between cities and between wardrobes.

In Pune, I sometimes wear jeans. Sometimes a crop top. And almost always, I get compliments when I do. The irony is cruel; the more of my body I show, the more validation I receive.

But I also know the cost of that visibility. I feel the internal tension even now: something in me still flinches when a strap slips. When skin is unplanned.

So most days, I fall back into cargo pants and crocs, a uniform of safety. Of non-performance.

It’s not that I’m against dressing up. It’s that my body still hasn’t fully unlearned who’s watching.

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler tells us that gender is performed, not possessed; and what is clothing if not one of its primary scripts?

What we wear becomes a ritual of recognition. Or a refusal. It invites or avoids attention. It is at once deeply personal and entirely public.

Even now, I find myself admiring teachers who wear crisp cotton sarees. There’s something authoritative, intellectual, grounded about them. But is it the fabric, or the person inside it? What if that grace has nothing to do with the drape, and everything to do with the substance it holds?

And yet, I also know how we judge. I know how quickly we code someone as ‘dignified’, ‘bold’, ‘vulgar’, or ‘repressed’ based solely on cut and cloth. We think we’re reading the person, but we’re just reading the silhouette. And often, we’re projecting our own discomfort onto their choices.

I still can’t wear something “too revealing.” Not because I believe it’s wrong, but because my body raised in Banaras, trained to shrink, hasn’t fully made peace with being seen.

And so the question becomes:

When will wearing what I want no longer feel like a decision?

When will clothing stop being a boundary between safety and self?

Until then, I exist in layers. I undress slowly, metaphorically.

Because even when I wear my softest clothes, the ones that don’t announce me, I am still performing. Still resisting.

But at least now, I know what the performance is.

And slowly, I’m writing my own script.

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Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.