Pardesi is an independent fashion and culture magazine exploring the duality of identity for Indian women living between two worlds. Through personal essays, fashion editorials, and intimate visual storytelling, it documents what happens to a woman's wardrobe; and her sense of self; when she leaves home for New York City. Conceived, written, designed, independently by a LIM College fashion marketing and media student, Pardesi is for every girl who has ever stood in front of her wardrobe and not known who she was dressing for.
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Ever since birth, an Indian girl is fed various versions of why she should wear a particular style of clothing. A clothing that society calls "respectable." Long sleeved. Full jeans. Hell, she needed to disregard the fact that it was 33 degrees outside.
I am that Indian girl. I always found comfort in being covered; not because it was something I voluntarily adapted to myself, but because of the expectation of society. Because of the watching. Because of the way a hemline could become a conversation, a sleeveless top could become a rumor, and a girl's clothing could somehow say everything about her character and nothing about the weather.
So while I was packing for my undergrad in New York City, the biggest dilemma was: what should I even pack. I stood in front of my wardrobe for forty minutes.
Not because I didn't know what I owned. I knew every piece intimately; the full-sleeved t-shirts that I wore even in May, the jeans that reached exactly where jeans were supposed to reach. I knew them the way you know things you never chose but learned to call yours.
The dilemma wasn't what to pack. It was who to pack for.
Because for the first time in my life, I was about to exist in a city that didn't know me. No aunties on the stairs. No colony neighbours with opinions dressed up as concern. No silent calculation happening behind someone's eyes as they looked at what I was wearing and decided what kind of girl I was. New York didn't know my family, my building, my reputation. New York didn't know anything.
And standing in front of that wardrobe, I realised I didn't know what I looked like without all of that watching. I packed the covered things. Mostly out of habit, partly out of fear, and if I'm being honest; partly because I didn't yet know what the alternative even was. The full-sleeve t-shirt made it in. The sleeveless top I'd bought two years ago and worn exactly once inside my bedroom did not.
But New York has a way of asking you questions your wardrobe can't answer. Who are you when no one who knew you before can see you? What do you actually like? What were you wearing for them, and what were you wearing for yourself; and do you even know the difference yet?
This magazine is for the girl still standing in front of that wardrobe. The one trying to figure out which pieces are hers and which ones were handed to her so slowly and so early that she stopped noticing the difference. It is for every girl who has felt the specific weight of being watched, and the equally specific disorientation of suddenly not being.
It is not a magazine about shedding where you came from. It is not a before and after. It is about the forty minutes in between; and everything that lives there.
Welcome to Pardesi.
Editor's Letter
The editor's letter the clothes that came with me
First Winter - what happened when I arrived The Carry-On - two looks, one girl What Didn't Make It - the inventory
In Between - three girls, three moments Both/And the small daily negotiations
Ghar Se Going Back - when home felt foreign too
Still Carrying a closing image
Table of
The version of me that never questioned her wardrobe The assumption that covered meant comfortable The girl my colony knew
The certainty of knowing exactly who I was The dupatta my mother folded in without asking The belief that dressing was ever just about clothes The idea that I had to choose
The girl who left
The forty minutes in front of the wardrobe
Cotton kurta, worn every day at home.
She never thought of it as a style.
It was just what getting dressed looked like.
What happened to what we wore when we arrived.
1. the season in which everything familiar becomes insufficient 2. among Indian students abroad the period in which one's wardrobe, sense of self, and understanding of visibility are quietly, permanently rearranged
Nobody warns you about the wardrobe.
They warn you about the cold, the cost of living, the homesickness that arrives around week three. But nobody tells you that the clothes you packed will start to feel like they belong to someone else and that the new ones you buy will take years before they feel like they belong to you.
We spoke to three Indian girls living in New York. We asked them about their wardrobes. What came out was something larger.
Priya Mehta arrived in New York from Pune in August 2024 with two checked bags and a carry-on. She had packed carefully. Four salwar kameez, two kurtis, one formal anarkali for occasions she imagined would arise, a stack of dupattas in various colours, and enough bangles to fill a small bowl on her dressing table. She had also packed, somewhat optimistically, a pair of kolhapuri chappals.
"I genuinely thought I would wear all of it," she says, laughing in the way people laugh at a version of themselves that feels like a different person now. "I had this idea of New York in my head; very Sex and the City, very bold, very whatever you want to be. And I thought, okay, in that city I will be someone who wears her kurtas proudly and nobody will look twice."
Nobody looked twice. That was not the problem.
The problem arrived on a Tuesday in October, on the C train going uptown, when Priya looked down at her mustard cotton salwar kameez; her favourite, the one her mother had got stitched for her at their neighbourhood tailor, the one she had worn to every important occasion in the last two years of her life in Pune; and felt, for the first time, that it was wearing her rather than the other way around. Not because anyone had said anything. Because nobody had. She was invisible in it in a way she had never been invisible in it before, and invisibility, she was learning, could feel like erasure depending on the day.
"It sounds strange," she says. "But at home, wearing that kurta meant something. People knew what it meant. Here it just meant; nothing. It didn't communicate anything to anyone. And I hadn't realised how much I depended on my clothes to communicate for me until they suddenly couldn't."
Rhea Nair arrived from Bangalore in September with what she describes as a deliberately curated wardrobe. She had thought about this, she explains. She had watched videos, read articles, consulted a cousin who had done her masters in Boston three years earlier. She was going to do this consciously. She was not going to lose herself.
She packed fifty percent Indian clothes and fifty percent what she called, at the time, her New York clothes; pieces she had bought in Bangalore specifically for this move. Western cuts, muted colours, nothing that would make her stand out.
"I thought I was being smart," she says. "I thought I had figured it out. Both wardrobes, both identities, perfectly balanced."
By December the fifty-fifty split had become something closer to eighty-twenty. By February it was closer to ninety-ten. The shift happened so gradually she could not point to a single moment and say, there, that is where it happened. It was more like a tide going out. You don't see the water leaving. You just look up one day and the shore looks different.
"The thing nobody tells you," Rhea says, pulling her sleeves over her hands; a habit, she mentions, she has had since she was a child; "is that it's not dramatic. It's not a moment of crisis where you stand in front of the mirror and don't recognise yourself. It's quieter than that. It's just one morning you reach for the kurta and then you don't. And then that happens again. And again.
And eventually the not-reaching becomes the habit and the reaching becomes the exception and you don't even notice it happening until it's already happened."
She pauses.
"And then you go home for the holidays and you open your old wardrobe and you don't know who those clothes belong to anymore. And that's, that's when it gets complicated."
Anika Sharma came from Delhi. She arrived in January, straight into the first winter, no adjustment period, no gentle autumn introduction to the cold. She stepped out of JFK in a wool shawl over a thick salwar kameez and understood within approximately four minutes that she was going to need a different coat.
The coat she bought that first week; a black puffer from a shop on 34th Street, chosen in under ten minutes because her fingers were going numb; became, without her planning it, the beginning of a new wardrobe. One piece at a time, out of necessity rather than desire, she started acquiring a New York winter. Thermal underlayers. Chunky socks. A pair of boots that could handle slush. A sweater that was not a kurta.
"I wasn't trying to change," she says. "I was just trying to be warm. But then one day I looked at my wardrobe and I realised the Indian clothes had all moved to one side. I hadn't done it consciously. They had just, migrated."
The dupatta was the first thing to go. Not thrown away. Just left on the chair one morning when she was running late. Then the chair became the wardrobe. Then the wardrobe became the bag under the bed.
"I wore it to the Diwali event on campus in November," she says. "And it felt like wearing a costume. Not because it looked wrong. Because I felt like I was performing something for an audience rather than just, getting dressed. That was the moment I understood that something had shifted. I just didn't know what to do with that understanding yet."
She still has the bag under the bed. She has not opened it since February.
Between the three of them, Priya, Anika, and Rhea have brought to New York fourteen salwar kameez, eleven kurtis, seven dupattas, four pairs of Indian footwear, and enough bangles and jhumkas to fill a small jewellery box.
Between the three of them they currently wear these things, on average, twice a month; at cultural events, at Diwali, at moments that feel like they require it.
They do not feel guilty about this, exactly. But they do not feel nothing, either.
"I love my New York wardrobe," Priya says carefully, in the tone of someone choosing their words with precision. "I genuinely do. I feel like myself in it. But I also felt like myself in my kurtas. And I'm still trying to figure out what it means that both of those things are true at the same time."
Anika nods when this is put to her. "It's not either or," she says. "That's what I keep trying to tell myself. It's not that I became someone new. It's that I found out there was more of me than I knew. I just wish I hadn't had to leave half my wardrobe in a bag under my bed to figure that out."
Rhea is quiet for a moment before she answers.
"I think about my grandmother," she says finally. "She wore a saree every single day of her life. Never questioned it. Never thought about it. It was just what getting dressed looked like. And I used to think that was a kind of limitation. Now I think it was a kind of freedom. To just, know. To not have to figure it out every morning."
She looks out the window. Outside, New York is doing what New York does; moving, loudly, in every direction at once.
"I'm still figuring it out," she says. "Most days that feels okay. Some days it doesn't."
She didn't lose herself.
She just started dressing for a version of herself she was still getting to know.
Cotton kurta - brought from home. Dupatta - her mother's.
Juttis Janpath Market, Delhi, 2023.
Everything else, hers since before she can remember.
Boots
Blazer - thrifted, Lower East Side. January 2025.
Jeans – Zara. a necessary purchase, first winter. Gold earrings - brought from home. Still wearing them.
The Carry On She couldn't bring everything. She brought herself twice.
carry-on /'kæri ¤n/ noun
1. a bag small enough to be taken onto an aircraft as hand luggage
2. among girls who have moved countries, it is the version of yourself you decide is small enough to fit into the life you are building somewhere new; what remains when everything heavy gets left behind
Both are her. Neither is the whole story.
inventory/'Invǝntri/ noun 1. a complete list of items such as property, goods in stock, or the contents of a building
What Didn't Make It An inventory of the left behind.
2. personal - the things you catalogued in your hands the night before you left, decided were too much, and placed back on the shelf; the version of yourself you couldn't fit into 23 kilograms
My mother folded it in without telling me. Still in the shape of her hands.
4. Glass Bangles Too loud for the subway.
Too beautiful to leave.
Living in a bowl on my desk.
3. The Anarkali
Packed for occasions I was certain would arise. Still waiting.
2. Kolhapuri Chappals Worn every day in Mumbai. Worn once in New York. The cold won.
5. The Jhumkas
My grandmother's, then my mother's, then mine.
Worn twice in New York. Both times someone said beautiful. Still deciding how I feel about that.
My mother slipped it in at the last minute.
But it came in the suitcase so it counts.
6. The Salwar Kameez I Loved Most Someone asked if it was a dress. I said yes. Haven't worn it since.
9. The Woolen Shawl
Made for a different kind of cold than New York has.
7. Mehndi Cone
Did my own mehndi alone in my dorm on Diwali.
One of the best nights I've had here.
Priya, on the last time she wore Indian clothes in New York
"My roommate's idea, not mine. I wore the green kurta. Did my eyeliner the way my mother does hers. For three hours I felt like I was performing a version of myself for an audience that thought it was a costume. Nobody meant any harm. That almost made it worse. I went home and didn't take it off right away. Sat on my bed in it for a while, just sat there, before I changed into pyjamas. I don't fully know what I was doing in those few minutes. Maybe just sitting with her a little longer before she went back in the drawer."
Three moments of not knowing which version to be.
I asked all three of these questions to myself before I asked them to anyone else. I still don't have better answers than they do. Maybe that's the point of this page. Nobody here is resolved. We are just, finally, saying it out loud.
D wwww
in between /In bi'twi:n/ adjective, phrase thing nor th
1. in an intermediate position; neither one thing nor the other
2. for the girl who has moved countries, the only honest place to stand
Rhea, on a comment that stayed with her
A girl in my class said I looked "so exotic" in my kurta and meant it as a compliment. I said thank you because I didn't know what else to say. I thought about it for weeks afterward. Exotic. Like I was a flower somebody photographed on vacation. I didn't wear the kurta again for a long time after that, not because I was ashamed of it, but because I didn't want to be a flower in someone's photograph. I'm trying to get back to wearing it for me again. Some days that's easier than others.
Anika, on going home and feeling like a stranger in her own wardrobe ber and di
I opened my closet in Delhi in December and didn't recognise half of it. Reached for a kurta and it felt borrowed, like I was wearing my sister's clothes. My mother noticed. She didn't say anything, but she noticed, the way she does, where her face says one sentence and her mouth says another. I wore three different outfits before I left for my cousin's wedding. None of them felt like mine. I ended up in the one I'd worn the least in the last two years. It felt the most like a stranger, which somehow made it feel the most
honest.
NYT Book Review
1. a way of thinking that holds two seemingly opposite truths at once, rather than forcing a choice between them
2. in practice: jhumkas with a hoodie; mehndi under a flannel sleeve; kolhapuris with straight- leg jeans. nothing separated. nothing performed. just what felt right that morning.
She came home. Home had questions about her wardrobe too.
going back /'goʊiŋ bæk/phrase
1. returning to a place one previously lived going back
2. for the girl who has moved away - discovering that the place you left has kept changing without you, and so have you, and neither of you noticed until you were standing in the same room again
I went home for Diwali in October. I had been counting down to it since August – not just the holiday, but the version of myself I assumed was waiting for me there. The girl who knew exactly what to wear without thinking about it. I packed light. I didn't need to bring much, I told myself. Everything I needed was already in my old wardrobe, untouched since June. My mother had laid out a few options for me on the bed before I'd even unpacked - the way she always does, the way that used to feel like care and now, for one strange moment, felt like a question I hadn't been asked in months. What do you want to wear. Not what do other people expect. What do you want.
I stood in front of my own closet the one I grew up with, the one I knew every item of by heart — and felt the same forty minutes happen in reverse.
Nothing fit wrong, exactly. But something felt borrowed. The salwar kameez I chose for the actual celebration sat differently on me than I remembered. Not physically. Something else. I kept catching myself standing a little straighter than I used to, a habit picked up somewhere on a New York sidewalk where I'd learned that how you carried yourself mattered as much as what you wore. My mother noticed before I said anything. She always does. She didn't ask. She just looked, the way mothers look when they're recalculating something quietly.
At the actual celebration, my cousin asked if I'd "become very firang" ― very foreign – because of how I was standing, how I'd tucked my dupatta, something in the way I said hello to our uncles. I laughed it off. I thought about it for the rest of the night.
Here is the thing nobody prepares you for: you assume the hard part is becoming someone new somewhere new. Nobody tells you that going back doesn't undo it. You don't get to return to the girl who left. She's not in that wardrobe anymore. She's somewhere in between New York and Mumbai, still being assembled, and home – the actual physical place, the actual closet, the actual mother laying out three choices on the bed is just as confused by the new version of you as you are. I wore the salwar kameez. I tucked the dupatta the way my mother showed me when I was twelve. And for one evening, standing among family who had known me my whole life, I felt, for the first time since August, completely unsure of who exactly was standing in those clothes.
Maybe that's not a problem to solve. Maybe that's just what it means to be from two places now. Not half of each. Something else entirely, still finding its name.
You don't get to return to the girl who left.
She packed two lives into one suitcase.
The crease down the middle is where she actually lives.
Pardesi for the girl still standing in front of her wardrobe.
Issue 01, Fall 2026