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.
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.