Skip to main content

Uncomfortable People




It’s when I went to buy some dress for the month-long holiday I’m planning that I realised the stupidity of what’s called fashion.  I couldn’t get a single readymade pair of trousers which made me feel comfortable.  Fashion has got rid of pleats from trousers altogether.  Get into the showrooms of Pantaloons or Raymond or even my usual, humble Big Bazaar and you will realise how uncomfortable they want us to feel in the trousers they are offering. 

I asked the Pantaloons boy whether they had any pair of trousers with pleats.  And which were fairly loose.  He looked at me as if I was some creature descended from another planet.  I explained to him that pleats were invented in order to make the wearer feel comfortable around the loins with a lot of air circulation.  Thank my stars, he didn’t ask me what my profession was.  Instead he asked me whether I had heard of anything called Payback cards.  He said he could offer me one which would entitle me to some reward points for shopping with them.  When I tried to fish out my Payback card from among my other similar cards including the driving license, he understood that I was a damn fool who didn’t deserve more attention from a dealer in wares. 

I ventured to tell him, however, what a psychiatrist told us, teachers of a public school, in a workshop.  “I asked my teenage daughter who was wearing a tight T-shirt and even tighter Jeans whether she was feeling comfortable in that dress.  She said, ‘What’s comfort got to do with it?  It’s the dress code for today, decided by friends.’”  I told the Pantaloons boy that I had passed the age for dress codes and peer pressure and wanted to feel comfortable wearing whatever dress I wore.  And I love loose clothes for summer.  Any season, for that matter.

“What’s comfort beyond the fashion of the time?” he asked me.  Not in the same words, of course. 

I couldn’t get a single pair of trousers of my choice from any of the stylish, fashionable, branded outlets.  So I got them stitched. 

There are a few old-fashioned businessmen still selling readymade shirts which are comfortable to wear.  Most sell shirts which look like straitjackets.  And most youngsters wear them.  Any wonder why we find around us so many people who are uncomfortable with themselves?






Comments

  1. Good that you are still finding tailors that stitch trousers. Their tribe too is going to vanish soon I say.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True, Indrani. It isn't easy to find good tailors. Last winter one tailor made a straitjacket of the coat I had ordered. Even tailors take it for granted that everybody is interested in the latest style.

      Delete
  2. I can absolutely understand this whole fiasco...I suffer from the same fate...Just because I am a female, I am always expected to wear form-fitting kurtis and tops. So I compromise. I wear clothes as huge as tents when I want to feel comfortable and wear that other horrible stuff when my family wants to display me during social occassion :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, it becomes worse in the case of women. I have seen my wife struggling to choose her dress and often settling to get them tailored.

      Delete
  3. quite a lovely post (I would also add a bit funny). I can't say i m away from fashion I wish I could. I am decently concerned with fashion if I may permit myself to say so. But then what you have written is actually recently shown in Modern family (if you watch it) where Gloria's husband buys her large flat comfortable shoes and begins to see how nice she suddenly becomes in behavior. And he comments that could it be possible that your high heeled shoes have made you a bad person? Of course it was all in humour but somewhere it struck me as wonderfully true. I guess just to add further to your point of having uncomfortable people around :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Richa, since you mentioned shoes, I must say it's difficult to get a decent pair of them these days. You have all sorts of odd looking shapes, pointed and long and ...

      Delete
    2. its so true richa..i saw that episode too and unfortunately have to agree that fashion isnt always comfortable :(
      this post is a bit funny and ofcourse lovable and so true.

      Delete
  4. To the present generation, X or Y, going with time is more important than being comfortable with their outfits.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can understand peer pressure and also fashion consciousness. What I fail to understand is why anyone should choose to wear uncomfortable clothes.

      Delete
  5. smiles smiles smiles .. whatelse can you expect from me when narrate reality so humorously.. :)
    So true this is .. I have noticed my father almost hating their trouser collections and unlike you he is the one who gives them suggestions and asks them for dates when pleats wala trousers a little baggy ... would be available !! :D
    Poor pantaloon guys of 2013 who have compromised comfort long back for fashion .. they have them rarely in stock .. and if at all they have .. it has got a tight bottom ! :D
    Tailor-Made is the only option for gentlemen looking for comfort in 2013 and beyond !! :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They are neglecting the grown up generation altogether, you see :)

      Delete
  6. ha ha ha! At some point i do agree with you! Tod10ay all the brands have gone nuts over fashion and have forgotten that they are also people in this world who prefer comfort to fashion! :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Invariably, Bushra, all of them are cranky - and they think people like me are cranky :)

      Delete
  7. Sir, what should I say now.... I think fashion has taken over comfort... its a new tribe which likes to look stylish in the process they give up on comfort.. fashion house are very influence by the western culture sadly....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Funnily, I should say, friend. Have you noticed the new trousers which reveal half of the wearer's bums?

      Delete
  8. I can understand your predicament because of the varied thoughts that come to my mind when I go trouser or jeans hunting for my husband...and my husband is quite vocal about his thoughts and I end up having a cranky husband sans the trouser/jeans.

    Yes, stitching is the best option if you are able to find a tailor. I think people resort to buying and wearing whatever all these mega shops offer just to avoid the hazzle of finding a good tailor which gives you what you want. One salwar kurta can cause you to go five times to the tailor and eventually you decide to wear that ill fitting ready made kurta.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Very recently my daddy was embroiled in a similar argument at an apparel store. You have very rightly pointed out that clothes few years back, were stitched keeping comfort as the first priority and longevity of the fabric as second. You may not find many choices then, but atleast there was no breaking head in the name of fashion. My dad now prefers to get his shirts and trousers stitched with tailors. Although the tailor keeps poking his nose, by saying wat my dad wants is no more in fashion, but dad pays him deaf ears. For him his comfort is his priority.

    I love reading you blog. This one is great like always.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I pity all the people like your dad and me who have to go finding a good tailor. I'm lucky I found one.

      Thanks for the good word.

      Delete
  10. There was a time when I found almost all jeans in shops that were low waist. Thankfully that has passed. But I do agree with your sentiment! Give me comfortable clothes any day!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Low waist is still in fashion in my school, Mridula. I must tell my boys now that it's out of fashion. :)

      Delete
  11. Ha ha Tomichan .. but I have another issue .. whatever fits my budget, I don't like it and what I like is most of the time are way to expensive to buy .. eventually I end up not getting anything :(

    Maybe I have expensive taste :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sangeeta, Even when I was ready to pay (in times of emergency) I didn't get what i wanted. Maybe I have peculiar tastes :)

      Delete
  12. Who are you to criticize about not getting proper size clothes?!!!! Remember, I was all of 5' 2" tall, 28" waist and in the US only horse jockeys are of that size, at whatever age! I could not afford custom-made clothes and ready-made apparel were not available for my size. So what did I do? Don't ask!

    You get no sympathy from me :)

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What about the discomfort provided by the fashion? That's my focus, Raghuram. Availability of my choice is a secondary thing.

      Delete
  13. even i too fail to understand why they are ignoring the pleats in trousers- don't they wear the trousers they make themselves and realize how important the pleats are?!

    ReplyDelete
  14. such a nice read. sometime back I went with my father for shopping and i was bringing him all these jeans to try and he was just looking at me hoping me to understand that he wont be comfortable wearing any of those. now i understand his situation better. he just wanted to be comfortable.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af