Not exactly a model life

The last time somebody tried portraying the modelling world, they ended up reducing the entire industry into a series of hackneyed and cringe-worthy tropes. Madhur Bhandarkar’s film Fashion is, at best, the most forgettable attempt at showcasing the modelling world to any kind of audience. In a scenario where one is constantly bombarded by images from the glamour industry, a feature on the nitty-gritties of the modelling world is conspicuous by its absence. This is where Manjima Bhattarcharjya’s Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry becomes an important read.

The book is divided into five sections — ‘memory’, ‘dreams’, ‘field’, ‘work’ and ‘change’. Bhattacharjya covers a range of topics such as the everyday struggles at work, failed attempts at unionising, the dilemmas of having and maintaining a perfect body, and so on. Circumscribing this is the question of reconciling the seemingly oppositional worlds of fashion and feminism. Bhattacharjya’s comprehensive ethnography establishes the often overlooked but basic fact that modelling is a profession and that models are labouring bodies, whose work needs to be valued. The section on “dreams” draws the reader into a world of aspirational female professionals. Lifeworlds that revolve around trying to learn English, grooming lessons, salsa classes, pageant applications, and so on, all in a bid to attain “class” and the elusive “x-factor”.

The book also discusses the dual life that most Indian women lead, particularly in urban areas. Urban women are accustomed to juggling their images on the move, depending on context and audience. This constant fashioning and refashioning of their selves as the inconspicuous girl-next-door, to carrying an arsenal of transformation tools in your handbag, depending on the demands of work, are the narratives of real women.

Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry; Manjima Bhattacharjya; Zubaan Books; Non fiction; ₹495

Mannequin offers fascinating insights into the India Fashion Week — the politics of seating, and the backstage as a mélange of actors such as the models, choreographers, designers, hair and make-up artistes, but also the nameless helpers whose identities are an extension of the models they serve. Struggling models station themselves in the lobby, hoping to be noticed and, thereby, solicit work.

Undoubtedly, Mannequin is one of the first books in India that takes the world of glamour and modelling seriously and accords it the respect that the models claim is missing in their profession. The author sketches a brief history of glamour following the post-war developments in the West, and sees glamour as a language of allure in a capitalist society. But a more interesting narrative could have been the etymology of glamour — an early 18th-century Scottish term, which meant to cast a spell or create an illusion, leading one to question what the illusion is that is being made and re-made. And indeed, in the age of capitalism, the world of fashion and the bodies of models are deployed to create an illusion. Additionally, the emergence of glamour in the Western context also coincided with the rise of the first generation of working women — the sky girls, the typists and stenographers. Thus, glamour was underscored by the phenomenon of working women experiencing financial independence.

While Bhattacharjya successfully depicts the fashion industry as a legitimate profession and recasts models as workers, attempts to problematise the uneasy relationship between fashion and feminism remains underwhelming. For instance, one is unable to understand why the author had to assume the role of an agony aunt in one of the chapters and thereby make it preachy — a charge that feminists have often been accused of. Most importantly, a section exclusively dedicated to the history of the commodification of women in India remains dissonant owing to its standalone nature. The recounting of the anecdotes would have worked better had they been integrated with the earlier chapters that talk about the struggles of achieving a fantasy body or narratives that speak of the moralising attitude towards models. It is refreshing to see the book move away from pitting the models in victim-agent tropes, but how exactly are fashion and feminism allies today? It cannot be just attributed to feminism becoming the new commodity that is up for grabs, or the rhetoric of “my choice”.

Given that the author is a trained sociologist, the lack of citations in her interviews is disconcerting. While the line between fiction and ethnography is often not impermeable, the use of a methodological tool is required, keeping in mind the conventions of the discipline. The conversations would have been more grounded in a sociopolitical context had the editorial team pointed out the lack of dates and years of the interviews. Though this book is aimed at a wider, non-academic audience, a bibliography and citations would have benefited researchers in related fields.

Nonetheless, this does not take away from the fact that Mannequin is an engaging read. The lack of jargon ensures the book is extremely accessible, while the author’s self-reflexive and candid admissions make it pleasantly relatable. Ultimately, Mannequin drives home the point that models are not all just beautifully similar people.

Suchismita Chattopadhyay is pursuing her PhD in anthropology

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