An Ode To Ugliness

Shapeless clothing, bulky sneakers and bold statements... Indian designers are using ‘ugly fashion’ to rebel against received notions of beauty

- Chinki Sinha

“Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.” —Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

A recurring dream about a classical pianist once became the inspiration for Kolkata-based fashion designer Kallol Datta’s collection, Untitled. In this dream, the pianist, at the peak of his career, develops a hump one night and finds his right arm swelling up grotesquely. Unable to perform any more, he ends up at a circus freak show where people come to gawk at him and revel in his misery. The absurdist mutilations of the pianist’s body eventually made it into Datta’s creations. It took a while for the ‘fashionable’ crowd to understand Datta’s rebellion. “What spaceship is this guy on?” That was their initial reaction to his fantasies. However, Datta’s fashion was clearly reflecting a trend, gathering steam globally. A trend that celebrates the “ugly”.

Another fashion label with shock value is HUEMN. At the Lotus Make-up India Fashion Week Autumn/ Winter 2019 in Delhi, when Pranav Mishra, co-creator of HUEMN, took a bow, the logo on his T-shirt read “Don’t F**k with Me”. HUEMN, launched in 2012, has worked with trans models, such as Taksh Sharma, and celebrates gender fluidity, often putting provocative slogans on its clothes. HUEMN and Datta are among a group of labels and designers leading the charge against Indian fashion’s decorative ensembles as part of a trend that has loosely come to be known the world over as “ugly fashion”.

What is ugly fashion?