Anamika Khanna gave a man a backside. Not a metaphorical one or a clever cut of trousers, but a proper, rounded, emphatic backside, a few inches behind him.
He wore a sharply cut jacket, tailored close through the shoulders and chest, over trousers that disappeared beneath the sudden swell of fabric at the back. The look was part of ‘Moonlit Palace’, which opened this year’s Hyundai India Couture Week.
When Anamika Khanna gave a man a backside.
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Anamika Khanna after she launched ‘Moonlit Palace’ at the Taj Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad
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Gulshan Sacheva
His body hadn’t changed, just the silhouette. “We created bustles, like how the Victorian bustles were created,” says Khanna. “Sometimes you use boning, and where required, metal.” She’d sell the look as shown if anyone were brave enough to wear it. “It opens up Pandora’s box after that,” she says.
Tarun Tahiliani followed days later with ‘Ang’, a conceptual exploration of the human form through sculpted couture. His intervention went further: sculpted abs, an emphatic hip, a fuller torso, an answer of sorts to the bewilderment over what the body is supposed to be.
Tarun Tahilian’s ‘Ang’ is a conceptual exploration of the human form through sculpted couture.
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Each form was individually sculpted from layers of foam in an R&D room, then dressed in satin, lace, and, in one look, Kanjeevaram. He wanted the effect to feel “hard and soft, almost like marble or stone”. He was, as he put it, acting like a plastic surgeon through clothes.
Tarun Tahiliani’s Kanjeevaram
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Each form was individually sculpted from layers of foam, and then dressed in satin and lace.
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Manufacturing a body
The idea had been taking shape since January. At Tahiliani’s 30th anniversary show, a detachable boned ‘tashreef bustle’ enlarged the hip. ‘Ang’ went further: padding beneath the clothes widened the hip and carved the abdomen.
In New York, Tahiliani had noticed a body ideal he found increasingly narrow. His answer was to alter the silhouette rather than ask the wearer to alter her body. “Everyone’s become too thin, too fit. You can be curvaceous, you can be Indian, you can have abs if you want,” he says. Some looks had them, some didn’t.
Tahilian’s padding beneath the clothes widened the hip and carved the abdomen
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This puts his padding inside a much longer history of manipulating the silhouette. “Today people use shoulder pads for bigger shoulders, stuffed bras to enhance the bust, butt pads for a fuller shape,” he says. “We’ve always done it in history, with the bust and the farthingales that were in the West. Not so much in India, where the drape expects curves and usually finds them.”
A history of padding
Padding has done one of two things: made the body agree with power or disagree with everything. Shoulder pads did the former. Elsa Schiaparelli brought padded shoulders into fashion in 1931, borrowing from American football; by World War II, structured shoulders signalled women stepping into wartime work. The 1980s turned them into shorthand for authority, from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to French designers Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana.
Christian Dior shifted the emphasis lower. After years of mending coats and rationing fabric, the French designer’s 1947 Bar Suit padded the hip and let the skirt fall full, abundance made visible after scarcity. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), which has an original suit in its Costume Institute, specifies that the haircloth interlining shaped the contour. On Dior’s Chérie dress, thirteen-and-a-half yards of fabric were compressed into the seam. The MET’s 2001 ‘Extreme Beauty’ exhibition traced the same instinct across centuries: bodies constricted, padded, truncated or extended through panniers, bustles, hip pads, crinolines.
A 1947 Christian Dior bar suit (and a 2011 Junya Watanabe ensemble) on display at the Costume Institute.
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Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo ruptured that construction in 1997. Her ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’ collection padded the hip, rear and belly into strange, lopsided forms — “lumps and bumps” designed to disrupt rather than flatter the body. Magazines shot the same garments with the pads quietly removed.
India had its own version. Actresses including Sadhana and Asha Parekh wore what women in the 1960s called “fake bottoms” under tight saris. The sari draped better over a shape the body didn’t have. Set against this history, Tahiliani’s ‘Ang’ reads less as invention than escalation. His foam reshaped the body until the silhouette read almost like an X-ray. His construction even changed what viewers could see. The belly button, mostly hidden in modern sari draping, was left visible.
The belly button is visible in Tahiliani’s garment construction
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“Such a sexy thing,” Tahiliani says. “Rather than be aggressive, I wanted to bring back the idea of beautiful girls being beautiful. In this age of individuality, I don’t think we can have codes anymore.”
The body under scrutiny
This loosening of fixed codes lands at a moment when the body itself is under surveillance. American singer-songwriter-actress Ariana Grande stepped back from public life this year amid intense scrutiny over her thinness; singer-songwriter Billie Eilish said years earlier that a big shirt gave her “relief” from a body she’d had a “toxic relationship” with.
Ariana Grande at the Golden Globe Awards earlier this year
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Billie Eilish attends the ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour’ at Leicester Square in London in April.
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Looksmaxxing, the online pursuit of a sharper face through jawline exercises, extreme diets and, in some cases, self-inflicted injury, has brought a familiar body anxiety into men’s lives. An Indian innerwear brand sells a padded vest that sculpts the chest and biceps for a few hundred rupees.
Khanna, however, is not interested in answering that anxiety with another ideal. Asked whether Ozempic or the body conversation was behind her volume, she says she has stopped thinking about it. “If you’re too big, it’s not okay; if you’re too thin, it’s not okay. I’m letting it go. To each their own,” she says.
Anamika Khanna kept the volume of the Victorian silhouette without prescribing the posture.
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Gulshan Sacheva
Her volume comes from several histories. There’s bridal tradition: brides who “feel that if they are bigger in volume, they stand out”. There’s the men’s bustle, borrowed from war-era dress, and the Victorian silhouette itself, where volume could dictate how a woman stood, moved and even sat. Khanna kept the volume without prescribing the posture; hers was provisional, worn or not depending on the person and occasion.
Anamika Khanna’s red bridal look from ‘Moonlit Palace’, drawing on the tradition of bridal volume and her broader exploration of the Victorian bustle.
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Gulshan Sacheva
There’s Kalighat too, the 19th-century Bengal painting tradition of satirical, puffed-up men and voluptuous women. “Sensuous without being afraid,” is how she explained it. The show’s opening look featured a female model in a moustache, nodding to maharajas who once dressed as women in private. “Right now, it’s acceptable. So why should I hide it?” asks Khanna.
A model in a moustache at Anamika Khanna’s ‘Moonlit Palace’, part of the designer’s play with gender and identity.
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Gulshan Sacheva
The men’s bustle was not simply a feminine volume transferred onto a male body. Khanna was drawing on a language where gender could be played through dress, posture, manner. “There’s a lot of boundaries being blurred, a lot of braveness in it,” she says.
Dior used padding to make scarcity look abundant. Kawakubo used it to make the body strange. Tahiliani used it to construct a fuller one; Khanna used it to ask what volume could do. None needed a different body. Just different padding. For a while, anyway.
The writer is a columnist and critic, with a keen focus on fashion, textiles, and culture.