Hip 038; Happening

And then came Karisma Kapoor. And as if by sorcery, and a little help from starvation, suddenly the hip 8212; and along with it, the collective anatomical aspirations of an entire nation 8212; shifts mindbogglingly from Zone Erogenous to Zone Extinct. Till the last decade, as the self-confessed, old-fashioned romantic, Yash Chopra admits, the traditional curve was used by the director to signify the traditional idea of 8216;8216;womanhood.8217;8217; Which is why, admits Chopra, 8216;8216;in Dil To Pagal Hai, despite Karisma being well-toned and younger, it was the better-endowed and fuller Madhuri Dixit who was seen as 8216;wife material8217; and got the man in the end.8217;8217; Cut to Dil Chahta Hai, with its standardised body types and global look, and such subtle symbolisms seem meaningless and futile.

And why shouldn8217;t they be, says fashion stylist Manish Malhotra, generally given credit for creating Bollywood8217;s new look. 8216;8216;Yes, slim is in. I am glad that Indian women are taking to the global trend,8217;8217; he says. 8216;8216;It all started with Urmila Matondkar shaking her hips in Rangeela. Now almost every heroine wants to do an Urmila.8217;8217; As for the demise of the hip, he argues, 8216;8216;In the 8217;60s and 8217;70s we had women like Asha Parekh, Mumtaz and Rekha starring against men. Today, we have girls starring against boys. To me the transformation is good.8217;8217;

Indeed, as mid-level load-shedding becomes a national obsession and the hip, once compared in its roundness by ancient Indian poets to the wheel of the chariot of the God of Love Kama, heads towards oblivion, it becomes important to indulge in some heartfelt, hip-searching. The response is not favourable. In Mumbai, veejay Ruby Bhatia shoots the hip, saying 8216;8216;The day I have a large hip, I will look ugly.8217;8217; In New Delhi, of the 800 people who go to Clinic Rejuvination run by slimming diva Dr Shikha Sharma, a majority of the women want to trim down the hip area. 8216;8216;Till some years ago, women allowed weight on themselves on the hip 8212; where we are genetically fuller 8212; because it was part of looking good. But it is no longer 8216;allowed8217;, so what we8217;re doing is curtailing our calories before the weight accumulates,8217;8217; says Sharma. She cautions: 8216;8216;Right now it8217;s a happy situation but the thing with any mass movement is that it doesn8217;t end there and goes out of control. Five years from now, we8217;re looking at teenage problems, widespread anorexia and bulimia in the cities.8217;8217;

Fashion designer Raghavendra Rathore has an interesting way of describing the trend. 8216;8216;When clients come to me for fittings, I find there is a perpetual war going on between the upper half and lower half of the body,8217;8217; he says. 8216;8216;With these drastic diets, inevitably, the upper half is slim and the hip is larger in proportion but the client is not willing to accept it. They insist there8217;s something wrong in the way the designer has styled the garment.8217;8217; He finds that more often than not the battle is won, only for the war to be lost. The hip always returns. The trick, he says, is to cut clothes a little loose on the hips. 8216;8216;If you8217;re not leaving a margin on the zipper, I would say a designer is heading towards danger zone.8217;8217;

As the hip increasingly becomes a Do-Not-Mention word in the female vocabulary, there are some who believe in the traditional Indian body. Says Madhu Sapre, the supermodel of oomph, 8216;8216;The Indian body shape is different 8212; we must accept that. No matter how much we diet or exercise, we cannot change our bone structure.8217;8217; But her words fall on deaf ears as women continue to either starve or delude themselves into hoping to pull up the zippers on the Gap, Lee or Levi8217;s steadily entering the market.

The 8216;globalisation of fashion8217; is, as expected, an obvious whipping boy. And while the feminist8217;s argument against pret-a-porter or off-the-rack clothing is that it tends to 8216;8216;standardise8217;8217; body types into Small, Medium, Large, in India, the problem is compounded by other factors. 8216;8216;Does pret encourage a certain body type? Yes it does,8217;8217; admits Simran Singh, Fashion Retail Consultant and Senior Faculty at the National Institute of Fashion Technology NIFT, Delhi. 8216;8216;But my point is that if fashion was led by Indian designers, we wouldn8217;t have to try to fit into narrow clothes. But today fashion is led by western sensibilities and therefore we are being forced to be narrow on the hips,8217;8217; she asserts. Singh believes if the Indian fashion industry was powerful, it could have had a greater role in dictating what that body type should be.

Unfortunately, the Indian fashion industry is too small to make a national impact, forget setting international trends. As the local tailor 8212; who painstakingly did your clothes made-to-order 8212; loses out to mushrooming off-the-rack retailers and a still-developing fashion industry continues to follow the UK or US sizing, the hip has become a fashion victim. As of now, India still lacks a local sizing standard though the newly formed Fashion Design Council of India did make a feeble attempt at changing this. 8216;8216;We had planned to do a sizing study 8212; known as the Anthgro Po Metric 8212; so that we could get an idea of the average Indian shape, across different regions,8217;8217; says Sumit Nair, who has just stepped down as Executive Director, FDCI, 8216;8216;but it8217;s a large study and will be undertaken over the next two-three years,8217;8217; he adds.

But wait. There could be hope, even if you have to once again look to the West for signs. Celebrity popstar J-Lo, the world8217;s new Curvy Spice, who has also taken out her own brand of clothing, could well take up Asha Parekh8217;s lost cause. 8216;8216;Tomorrow if the voluptuous look comes back to the West 8212; and remember that the only thing constant about fashion is change 8212; it will be to our advantage,8217;8217; says Simran Singh. 8216;8216;Narrow hips need not be our only destiny.8217;8217;

But you would be advised to wait a while before saying Hip Hip Hooray to a fullsome future.

With inputs from Mohammed Wajihuddin and Umaima Tinwala-Rajkotwala in Mumbai