Are You a Designer Bride? Power Relations Between Popular Media and the Indian Bride

Abstract

In recent years, the Indian bride has become a representative fashion icon for the clothing, cosmetic, and entertainment industry. Designers like Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Manish Malhotra, Ritu Kumar, and Anita Dongre among others seem to project the bride’s access to bridal couture as a symbol of empowerment, emancipation, and sometimes even nationalism. However, statistics would prove that Indian brides still carry the burden of cultural evils like dowry, domestic abuse, and psychological pressures of marriage and child-bearing. Indian television shows like “Band, Baajaa, Bride;” lavish weddings of Bollywood actors like Anushka Sharma and Deepika Padukone have evoked new aspirational images within the Indian middle class. The present paper attempts to question the proliferation of wedding couture as a symbol of power and resistance to power. It aims to explore the complex route maps of capitalist desire and the seduction of women into this ambiguous role-play. The paper questions if fashionable brides dressed in hot pants are foolish consumers or artful minds who bend patriarchal structures even if for a short time. The paper will be premised on theories of popular culture, post-feminism, everyday feminism, and cultural studies. The paper will study the influence of designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee and the consequent creation of ‘Sabyasachi brides.’ Here, Sabyasachi, the brand, is only a representative example. The paper will enable us to address the reductive approach of contemporary capitalism towards complicated ideas of gender, class, caste, money, religion, and region in the context of Indian marriages. It will refer to ideas by Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Stephanie Genz, Maitrayee Chaudhuri, and Ipsita Chanda to investigate the empowering images of young brides — as curated and exhibited by popular media.