the borders of my style

vamika sinha

I have no affinity for any border or nation. This is my identity, that there is none. 

I don’t know my measurements – height, width, curve, fold. Why commit them to memory, when they are never defined, never fixed, never remain? I was born in one country and given a passport, immediately moved to another and watched my body grow from girl to woman, felt it gain a firmness and flaccidity at the same time, as I flew away again to sink new ideas into the grooves of my brain. At no point did I remain one way, just like a culture or country. 

We all know what Audre Lorde said: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. I began seeing my body as a house, that some unknown master, presumed a man, had built on his land, and felt he could enter and leave and change and define and label when he wanted, with all the power and control of a supposed deity. It’s easy to unpack this metaphor, as multi-storeyed as it is. I write about becoming aware of my existence as a woman without allegiance, in multiple systems – patriarchy, patriotism, gender, ethnicity – that don’t pledge allegiance to anything but themselves, let alone me.

I only know one thing: that I have always wanted to be free. My college thesis was a project in searching for agency, and I argued that for a marginalized woman of color like me, the only sliver of that fulsome, privileged, intoxicating power in making your own decisions and choices lay in creating things, in creativity. I made music and wrote things and sang and produced a book and, in those moments and processes, not even the clear demarcations of time and its boundaries had a hold on me. Even if I wasn’t, I felt, temporarily, free. 

So many male-aligned and dominated structures had come to create and label and confine my bones, my brain, my flesh, my “identity” so far. If the antidote was creation, then why not create myself the way I wanted? Why not, Audre, rebuild the house itself?

Any individual is as rich and complex and beautiful as a symphony; I would write my own now. I would rewrite me. 

***
In my free time, I watch a lot of YouTube videos about clothes – summer lookbooks and hauls and makeup tutorials from girls all over the world. Most of these YouTubers are in their teens or twenties, the same age group as me. I can imagine many consider this part of the Internet a site of mere frivolity, of play. We often dismiss women talking about fashion and beauty; discourse about fashion itself is stuck in an unfortunate binary between serious, sidelined academia and quick-to-digest blog content in the vein of “10 cool hats for the summer.” 

But what we put on our bodies is an attempted act of agency and freedom, and an assertion and real-time interrogation of one’s self, live in 3-D. If the body is an empty stage, then clothes are our props and staging, and fashion is a theatrical production, in which we are the directors, the stars, the show itself. 

I noticed this idea as I grew older and started living in different countries. I was born in India, and inherited a set of cultural, traditional codes for dress from this specific ethnicity I was born into. But then, I almost immediately moved to Botswana, a small country above South Africa, where I spent my childhood until the age of 18. There, I rejected the idea of ever wearing Indian dress because it othered me, and spent most of my time in a school uniform, and then whatever my peers wore in order to fit in. 

Fashion was an instrument for belonging, and whether it felt right or not, all I wanted was to conform so I would not feel alone in my skin. For university, I moved to the Middle East, a campus of New York University on one of the islands of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I started studying postcolonial literature and inevitably, concepts of decolonization, and apart from my yearly visits to family in India and childhood diet of Bollywood shows and movies, spent the longest amount of time in my life within a South Asian community, both on campus and out in the city (the UAE has a very large population of South Asian immigrants). 

I also studied abroad for periods of time in Paris and New York, two cities with ugly histories of hegemony and white supremacy, during which my already complicated identity, so far raised in just the ‘Global South,’ was thrown against new canvases like splattered, mixed-up paint on white buildings. 

The life I’ve had naturally inclines me to recoil from traditional concepts of nations, borders, homes and identities, while being hyper-aware of them at the same time. Over the years, as Instagram slowly took over our conceptions of self in both the digital and physical realms, I found other people like me online, and apart from looking at their work or their art, I studied what they wore, how they performed the mixed-up-ness they came from. I remember discovering the London singer Joy Crookes during a difficult period in Paris, who is Irish-Bengali by birth, and was stunned by how she mixed Nike tracksuits and Clarks shoes with traditional jhumka earrings, for instance. It was stunning, striking, and she looked, ultimately, so comfortable within herself.

I started to experiment. How could I perform a new me, and rebuild it with my own hands, through fashion? I tied the process to what I was learning in university where just as a rich literary text is complex with influences, references and implicit quoting of other ideas and writers, my style became a kind of visual text that incorporated various political, cultural, artistic and personal ideas. I spent time picking up trinkets, accessories, jewelry and clothes during my travels to map a new cartography of my identity. I worked to decolonize the gazes that had implicitly led me to wear certain things and reject others, even if they were important to me or reflected my history or actually empowered me. Along the way, I also learned to trust and accept parts of myself that I had been taught to repress, ignore or be ashamed of.

I monitored how I felt wearing different things throughout the day. Sometimes I would feel unprecedentedly confident and powerful, even if what I was wearing wasn’t necessarily trendy or aligned with current beauty standards, all of which often come from Eurocentric perspectives anyway. I could easily figure out when something didn’t work, even if unexpectedly, because I would feel conscious, strange and off. I would keep nervously checking my reflection and anxiously wonder if people were staring at me on the subway or just start tugging at an earring or jacket that didn’t feel right.

I was trying to figure out the way I wanted to express my identity, my personality and my body authentically, all in real-time. And it’s an ongoing journey, as it is for anyone, because we’re always changing, always discarding old beliefs, picking up new ideas and knowledge, making memories in new places, forming fresh cultural ties, traveling and moving and uprooting and re-rooting (or re-routing) ourselves. The borders are always in flux. And of course, we are also constantly under the massive influences of social media and other power structures that place hegemonic standards on us, and we must resist them in our work to reclaim agency over ourselves.

I now enjoy exploring new ways to present the “map” of histories and memories that have led me to my current position. At present, I own a large collection of traditional Indian earrings and a few necklaces, because jewelry connects me to the ritualistic aspect of my Indian culture and reminds me of the collective celebrations as well as the mythologies I grew up with.

Music is a big factor; I listen to a lot of hip-hop and jazz, and the style from those scenes bleeds into mine through baggy hoodies and tees, and a growing affinity for sneakers. My love of rock music shows through several industrial-type boots in my closet along with band tees, casual jeans, and messy eyeliner. 

My time in Paris infused small, dainty scarves into the mix, and I often add blazers to unexpected ensembles, playing with their “masculine” sharp angles. Cowrie-shell jewelry, although now trendy, comes from my childhood in Botswana, and witnessing the soft flows of abayas in the UAE has led me to gravitate toward similar silhouettes through kimono-style wraparounds and skirts with similar ways of draping. I can wear an Indian kurta with combat boots or sneakers, maybe put a blazer on it, some African jewelry or accessories. There are countless permutations depending on my mood, state or situation. I mix up all the performances of borders, cultures, “genders” and “aesthetics” in a single outfit because I myself don’t fit in any. Experimenting through fashion is a way of figuring out and simultaneously performing the multiplicity of who I am and the many, many places, interests and aspects that make up me.

The way our feelings manifest into the narrative we create with our clothing remains a key factor in how we relate to each other, how we forge snap judgements and choose to develop these further into some kind of relationship, too. Instagram is evidence of that; we’re often drawn to how people express and perform themselves, and this is made more so evident on the social media platform that, despite its many flaws, does indeed connect people. I found the models, such as Joy Crookes, for expressing personal cartography through fashion, via the Internet in the first place. And I love seeing that more and more different kinds of people are playing with their own borders through fashion and sharing them online.

Through fashion, I can engage with art and the act of creation to explore and retell the narrative of my identity, one that I refuse to be defined by limiting borders or by any ‘master.’ Fashion can be a thrilling and decolonizing site for disrupting pre-defined and oppressive influences on our self-expression. In the end, it is play, but with immensely deeper meaning and power than we might originally have thought.

about the artist

Vamika Sinha is a writer, poet and photographer from India and Botswana. She currently works for Canvas Magazine from her base in Dubai and is also the co-founder of Postscript Magazine, an online literary-arts journal. Vamika holds a BA in Literature & Creative Writing from NYU Abu Dhabi and her research and creative focuses include cosmopolitanism, feminism, identity, diaspora, postcolonialism and jazz. She also photographs in and around the UAE under the moniker foodqueenhoney. Read more on her official website: vamikasinha.com.