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.
FIRST WINTER | first winter/forst 'winter/ noun, colloquial
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."