Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking

In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.

This book, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai, provides the uninitiated reader with a thorough introduction to the world of Bollywood cinema. The book provides an in-depth descript...

Bollywood: a guidebook to popular Hindi cinema

Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City

Embroidering Lives: Women's Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry

‘Bollywood’ film costume has inspired clothing trends for many years. Female consumers have managed their relation to film costume through negotiations with their tailor as to how film outfits can be modified. These efforts have coincided with, and reinforced, a semiotic of female film costume where eroticized Indian clothing, and most forms of western clothing set the vamp apart from the heroine. Since the late 1980s, consumer capitalism in India has flourished, as have films that combine the display of material excess with conservative moral values. New film costume designers, well connected to the fashion industry, dress heroines in lavish Indian outfits and western clothes; what had previously symbolized the excessive and immoral expression of modernity has become an acceptable marker of global cosmopolitanism. Material scarcity made earlier excessive costume display difficult to achieve. The altered meaning of women's costume in film corresponds with the availability of ready‐to‐wear clothing, and th...

TAILORING EXPECTATIONS: How film costumes become the audience's clothes

This article examines cultural production and social relations in the making of costume for commercial Hindi cinema, focusing in particular upon costume (“dress”) designers and tailors. Dress designers see themselves as the creative force in costume production, regarding tailors who stitch the costumes as mere technicians. In fact, interviews with tailors reveal that they regard their own contributions as both creative and essential. With the rise in fashion markets and media industries in India, the dress designer is ever more important as an “gimage consultant” who can consolidate a star's positioning in the worlds of both film and fashion. At the same time, the paternalistic connection between tailors and their clients, wherein customers–including film stars–go to a personal tailor to have their clothes made-to-measure, endures. In converting the designer's conception into a costume, the tailor claims a degree of inventiveness and creativity that is separate from the designer's. At the same time, tailors see themselves providing a necessary and personal service to the star. The tailor, a largely anonymous figure in western film designing and costuming, remains a key figure in Indian film costume.

Behind the seams: designers and tailors in popular hindi cinema

Gender and Power in Affluent Asia. Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens. eds. London: Routledge, 1998. xiv. 323 pp., photographs, tables, figures, index.

Gender and Power in Affluent Asia

As scholarly interest in consumption has risen, little attention has been paid to productive consumption, or the acquisition and use of commodities within production processes. Since the shift towa...

Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

Papers

Embroidering Lives: Women's Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry

TAILORING EXPECTATIONS: How film costumes become the audience's clothes

Behind the seams: designers and tailors in popular hindi cinema

Gender and Power in Affluent Asia

From Commodity to Costume Productive Consumption in the Making of Bollywood Film Looks