Fashion in Folk

Fashion in India resides in the modern bustling metropolis and in indigenous rural or craft pockets. And together this rural–urban divide constructs the meaning of Indian fashion. This chapter studies the intertextuality (meaning making) in folk media and traditional crafts. The chapter explores how meaning is derived through costumes and make-up in Folk Media. How the nomenclature of “Fashion” is perceived, is narrated, and may be critiqued in Folk commentary in both rural and urban spaces. And how Fashion resides in the costumes of the folk and finds its place in the urban markets. Fashion as defined by Kaiser “is not strictly a ‘western’, white, young heterosexual female bourgeois phenomenon, rather there are multiple fashion histories and systems, as well as modernities” (Kaiser and Green, Fashion and cultural studies, 2021). Diana Crane adds that “Fashion has effects such as the reinforcement of social differentiation, the expression of aspirations for social mobility, and the resolution of anxieties regarding social identity” (Crane, Fashion and its social agenda, 2000) Folk media/formats, on the other hand, are “indigenous systems embedded in the folk culture which predates mass media, still exist as a vital mode of communication presenting, certain degree of continuity, despite changes” (Kodavath, Global Journal for Research Analysis, 2015), thus making sense and meaning in normative times and giving way to the study of meaning-making theory of intertextuality. Intertextuality is a “poststructuralist, deconstructionist and postmodernist theory that changed the concept of text (a text can be an epic, a book, an art form, a movie, a costume, etc.) recognising it as an inter-text owing to the interrelations between texts and texts’ absorptions of other texts” (Zengin, An introduction to intertextuality as a literary theory: Definitions, axioms and the originators Journal of Social Sciences Institute, Pamukkale University, 2019), which further gives weight to folk artist’s own agency to lend meaning to the text, with what they adorn and what they say. Using a mixed research design, data are collected through a review of literature, semi-structured interviews with folk artists and experts, observation, visual analysis, and a case study method and analyzed through inductive narrative analysis drawing on relevant theories of communication, semiotics, and intertextuality. This study is limited to the regions of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand.