To dress up or dress down?

4 min readNov 8, 2026 06:58 AM IST First published on: Nov 8, 2026 at 06:58 AM IST

By Jyoti Raina

Last month, I received a tidy parcel containing three magnificent sarees. Over the last decades, receiving timeless majestic sarees: cottons, silks, and chinnons; sometimes handloomed at other times hand-woven; has been a regular occurrence. I receive them from my various mamis, mausis and chachis who have all crossed 75 years of age and in an attempt to  become reticent septuagenarians are offloading their life-long elaborate wardrobes.  Even my ageing cousins have started passing on their heritage sarees to me.

It oddly does not delight me anymore because the question this benevolent phenomenon begs is: why no one else in the extended family had received such an offering? Why such largesse to me, even though the mamis, mausis and chachis had daughters and daughters-in-law of their own? I raised this question at a major get-together of the extended family where many women belonging to both the generations were present. The unequivocal response or rather consensus was:  because you teach at a women’s college!

Of course it baffled me what teaching at a women’s college had to do with dressing up in sarees but when I interrogated the collective group,  the general response was that the educational institution and especially a woman’s college was among the few sites where such dressing up was acceptable.

I hold the reverse view. Before I go on to explicate it, it can be argued that why should what one wears be of any consequence in professional activities? No individual needs to be judged at the workplace based on their clothes. The mandate at work needs to be the discharge of one’s professional duties but I do not agree on that either. It is in the matter of dressing up or not dressing up that the personal is the political in a direct way.

That women employed in educational institutions dress up is not a stereotype but much rather a fact. Several teachers dress in sarees that are traditional handlooms, complemented by appropriate jewellery that is rich, to say the least. My occasional comments in favour of dressing less on a regular basis were unwelcome with the critique that the process was part of cultural refinement, mark of respect to the workplace and built self-cheer. Others are more cosmopolitan, donning expensive jewels that they claim demonstrate economic empowerment!

My politics is not to embrace either of the dressing up frameworks. This opposition is on three grounds. First, the social base of students and faculty  in higher education institutions in India has expanded, over the last two decades of affirmative action, to include more and more members from the margins of society. If the mainstream material culture, of which everyday clothes are a visible marker, is not simple, or propagates anything that is more than minimal, it turns into an instrument of alienation as well as hegemony; for those who are not in a position to indulge economically. Second, college education is the only time when students of social science aim at recovery of criticality. Coursework framed in critical orientation needs to be experienced beyond the classroom. For instance, while teaching Gandhian Basic Education, I contextualise non-violence through possessing very few clothes. My politics in teaching involves wearing only one or two sets of clothes — a saree or salwar kurta. Dressing up would not be authentic to the critical framework I hope to embrace. Third, college education is a realm of ideas, not material substances. This is best fostered in a simple, dressing down at all levels of personal orientation freeing the mind from burdens of everyday grooming.

Returning to the gifted sarees, I wear them without additional accessories. I also never buy any other clothes and contribute nothing to the neoliberal marketplace within my college microcosm of saree purchases.

The author is a professor at Gargi College (University of Delhi), New Delhi

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