Clothes maketh a woman

I dreaded the days when my daughter was young and wanted to be my stylist before I went to work. She would bring out the most binding outfits and the highest heels. No amount of convincing could drive home the point that work life on earth wasn’t similar to that in the Idiot box. One has never seen a lawyer in any part of the world dress like Calista Flockhart or heard of doctors wearing stilletoes to hospital and making out in laundry closets. I could not bear her sulking before I left for work and so spent the day in maternal agony as the waist band of my skirt progressively tightened into my duodenum and I had to bend at the knees in a dainty manner to pick up a pencil from the floor.

The tables turned when she went to intern at an office during her summer holidays at the age of sixteen and within five minutes of trying to look like what the women’s magazines today term as “the corporate look”, she decided that perhaps her school uniform wasn’t as ugly as she believed. As the years have gone by she has decided not to renew the subscriptions of the fashion magazines and resolutely refused to wear the spikey heels on the pretext that her feet are hurting from Bharatnatyam. I suspect that if her fancy school parties did not require most young girls to squeeze into miracle latex sub attire meant to transform the silhouette and tiptoe around in heels, she would attend more of them.

The papers this week announced that a Delhi based surgeon can insert cushions into the ball of one’s foot at a cost of sixty to eighty thousand rupees which would make wearing heel shoes less painful. It would be like having all those sticky Scholl comfort appendages inside one’s foot. The doctor should seriously consider a tie up with Reebok to incorporate “stability balls under the heels and forefoot to create a natural instability to force muscles to adapt and encourage toning", which is the logic behind the Easytone footwear that promises the user a fabulous derrière.

Much as the corporate sponsored media parrots the line that clothes maketh the man or woman, the only women I have seen in “corporate attire” have been in beauty salons, five star kitty parties or below twenty years of age. When I was young, naive and vain, I wore stilettos in the Mumbai suburban trains to work. I am glad that my daughter is more confident and knows that despite what she reads it’s unlikely that a person will first look at her feet before speaking to her. It also makes life easier as we now share the same comfortable shoes.