Karan Johar was a glorious black bird in flight at Lakme Fashion Week X FDCI

A year ago, at my son’s school graduation ceremony, I was thrilled to find a young boy in his grade come on stage wearing a ponytail, makeup, and finely threaded eyebrows. I already knew the school, run by the inimitable Neerja Birla, had taken great strides in its mental health programme. It was also incredibly progressive in allowing for blurring gender behaviours and dressing. It had long allowed female students to choose pants over skirts as their uniform of choice, and male students to choose skirts over trousers if they wanted to.

 

I was especially thrilled because there had been no mention of this child before, neither by my son nor his friends. To them, he was just another child at school. He was a ‘regular’ kid.

 

As I watched the behind-the-scenes images of a fashion show Karan Johar recently shared, I was reminded of this child. The celebrated filmmaker walked the runway for designers Falguni and Shane Peacock at the recent Lakme Fashion Week X FDCI in Mumbai. Johar was so beautiful. He wore a sharp, black, fitted suit, with a sheer shirt, and diaphanous strips billowing in the wind. He wore his now-signature high heels (he has been wearing them publicly since 2019), rings, earrings, ear cuffs, and black nail paint. Johar was a glorious black bird in flight.

 

“We decided to layer the suit with a bit of fluidity, adding organza rose stems to the look. He also wore a transparent black beaded tie-up shirt. We suggested a little gothic look and added black nail paint,” Shane tells me later.

 

I don’t even know if he knows this, but Johar is responsible for so many young boys choosing to dress the way they want to, for them not feeling trapped by old and entrapping ideas of masculinity, where they struggle to breathe in their own skins.

 

Johar is telling our sons that they can just be. Telling them they can be as camp publicly as they want to be. That they don’t have to be in lavender marriages and pretend to love and procreate with women. That they can have their children without having wives. Johar is saving our sons. He is also saving our daughters.

 

If a hugely successful mainstream movie producer can be so ‘regular’, our children can also be as regular as they want to be. Johar is speaking about the most important issues to us and our children, without saying a word. This is the power of fashion, of clothing, and he has been using it to our great advantage.

 

One could argue that Ranveer Singh began the trend of gender-bending dressing in Bollywood, and they would be correct. Singh’s ponytails, vivid prints, nail paint, and lehengas remain pioneering. But Singh is such a masculine man and actor. He is the lusty Alauddin Khilji, crazy about other men’s wives. He is Simmba, who can lift a car and throw it on 20 goons. He is the oh-so-delicious Rocky, “all natural, no steroids”. And he is married to the country’s most beautiful female actor, Deepika Padukone.

 

In so many interviews, Johar has admitted to being teased in school for being too feminine or not conventionally macho. He said he was made fun of for being overweight, which led to body-image issues ever since. His recent weight loss (whether medically induced or natural, let’s give him his privacy) has been widely commented on. But it really is the reaction to a bullied child by a man who can finally afford to be himself.

 

Johar is the child we should have nurtured. And now he is nurturing our children.

 

X@namratazakaria

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