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.
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.