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.
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