Decoding Dress

This article proposes androgyny not merely as an aesthetic category but as a critical-analytical framework for interrogating the structural, historical, and political dimensions of gendered fashion in contemporary India. By situating androgynous sartorial practices within precolonial draping traditions, colonial interventions in dress codes, and post-liberalization fashion economies, it traces how androgyny emerges through recurring forms and sartorial adaptations across temporalities. Through a close examination of a range of contemporary Indian designers and designer labels, the article argues for an expanded understanding of androgyny that exceeds the binary logics of masculine/feminine legibility. Centering the analysis on cis-male models, it further contends that androgyny, as a mode of embodied performance and stylistic articulation in contemporary Indian high fashion, demonstrates a re-Orientalist aesthetic within the circuits of capitalist fashion and global consumption. In doing so, the article theorizes androgyny as a site of aesthetic innovation and political negotiation within the neoliberal fashion economy.