The real professional: Designers and discourse in Hindi film costume

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, successive generations of Hindi film costume designers and costume workers have asserted claims to an aesthetic and professional distinction. As each new cluster of designers comes on the scene, they draw a contrast between their practices and knowledge and those of past designers (or other costume department personnel) in ways that boost their own claims of being the first to do the job ‘professionally’. Such claims often tend to revolve around evolving (and often competing) notions of what makes a costume ‘real’. Based on in-depth interviews and ethnography among a cross-section of film costume producers from different eras, this article points out the ways in which discrepant discourses among designers and makers, and between designers of different generations, reveal important differences in how ‘real’ costume is understood. Paying attention to a wider range of voices within costume production also reveals the linkage of narrative, costume, and aesthetics in collaborative, albeit conflicted practice, as opposed to being the direct outcome of an intellectual and somewhat disembodied process of design.

Wrinkles in Time: Ageing Costume in Hindi Film

“…Transposing Gieryn's (1983) concept of boundary-work to the Hindi film context, Ganti (2012, p. 9) argues that the unceasing work of lending distinction to one's own practices while disdaining others is crucial for 'assert[ing] exceptionalism within the filmmaking community' and 'allows us to see the ideal type of filmmaker that members of the Hindi film industry strive to be-innovative, autonomous, sincere, rational, professional, and cosmopolitan-as representative of a modern, globally competitive media industry, indexing India's "arrival" on the world stage ' (2012, p. 35). My own work on costume confirms Ganti's findings, with the qualification that contrary affirmations from sidelined designers and crew attempt to undermine those of ascendant personnel by emphasising the ingenuity and sincerity of filmmakers in the pre-1990s period (Wilkinson-Weber, 201;Wilkinson, 2016). Costume ageing, though, is an important exception to this latter pattern, first, because ageing processes have less to do with what the costume is than how it is treated; and second because dressmen continue to be called upon to do costume ageing, even as they are debarred from much of the decision-making over the choice of costuming itself.…”

“…However, it is perhaps more significant that filmmakers believe that they are correct. As I have written elsewhere, 'the real' functions as much as a flexible signifier of filmmakers' sensibilities that they claim are better attuned to the audience, as it does as an impartial, and presumably objective key to distinguishing superior industry content (Wilkinson, 2016). It is probably safe to assume that many film viewers respond to and are enchanted by the aged costume's visual and sensory potential, such as touch and smell.…”