The other day I happened to visit a college to finish formalities of my daughter’s admission. There was a half-an-hour session to brief children and parents about the rules and regulations.
Girls were instructed to avoid tight-fitting and short-sleeved clothes, jeans and coloured hair. However, what surprised and amused me was the next slide regarding the dress code for boys. The forbidden list was much longer than that of girls, reflecting the long strides accomplished by the male grooming industry since my college days in the 1980s.
Boys too were prohibited from wearing jeans and cargoes. The forbidden list included tattoos, body piercing, hair gel and goatee.
Probably if such a list of don’ts was created during my college days, it may have just included jeans and long hair. Those were early days of TV, and Bollywood was the ultimate style guru. And having hair long enough to cover the ears was in vogue, thanks to Amitabh Bachchan.
Shampooed and blow-dried hair was the norm. Hence even traces of coconut or any other oil was considered a major fashion infraction. Gel was unheard-of. So was spiky hair.
Apart from a full beard, the only option those days was the French beard, popularised by some yesteryear cricketers.
Tattoos were again considered downmarket and confined to religious symbols, and tattoo artists were holed up in small stalls housed in busy markets with instruments of dubious sterility. In movies it was used as prop, but never as a fashion statement.
In Deewar, we had Amitabh Bachchan getting branded with the infamous tattoo Mera baap chor hai in his childhood. In lost-and-found potboilers of the Manmohan Desai kind, tattoos and birthmarks played a vital role in reuniting estranged brothers. Tattoos of snakes, mainly cobras, were sported by villains such as Amrish Puri and Bob Christo on their brawny arms to look more menacing.
Piercings were unheard-of. In the 1990s, it did catch on, but even then those who were intrepid enough to come within earshot of the piercing gun, risked being branded as gays.
The interim decades witnessed tectonic shifts in fashion, thanks to satellite television, MTV and Internet, which gave rise to concepts such as metrosexual men. Even Bollywood was forced to fall in line with Aamir Khan sporting a soul patch in Dil Chahta Hai and Salman Khan’s middle parting in Tere Naam.
One of the early casualties of this trend was the friendly neighbourhood tailor, as customer preference shifted towards readymade and branded clothes. He either had to shut shop or get subsumed as a supplier to garment units.
The other casualty was the barber as he had to either diversify into a new-age salon or shut shop.
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