When I was stepping gingerly into my teens, I was a stickler for body-image instructions – those shampoo labels which proclaimed ‘Lather, Rinse, Repeat’ (I never missed a repeat), the code which said one should never wear a bindi with jeans, the beauty columns which said we should always slather our faces with make-up remover and dab it off with cotton swabs (never mind, that our make-up consisted of face-powder and kohl only).
These years of slavishly following rules prepared a whole generation, I believe, for the 21st Century Age of Instagram. That’s because no get-together today, whether a ladies’ coffee morning or a milestone event or wedding is complete without detailed wardrobe instructions.
It goes beyond the Miss Manners guidelines that you should try to avoid white and ivory at church weddings and red at classic Indian weddings so that the bride stands unique.
Remember the Ambani wedding where each function came with fine-print of what to wear and which colours would hold good? If you were an invitee, you suspended your dress sense for a week to earn that privilege.
Now everybody has gotten onto the act – a friend recently splurged a small fortune on a white tux set and a full complement of yachting outfits for himself and family to attend a beloved cousin’s wedding where the tux was de rigueur and there were high-fashion stakes at the after-party on board a (borrowed) yacht.
That was three years ago and since then the tux has been hanging idly in a cupboard and the yachting clothes lie forgotten in my land-locked friends’ home. Not to belabour the point, but if they had not been forced to spend so much on ‘themed’ clothes, perhaps the newlyweds would have gotten a couple of grand more as a wedding gift.
I even had a relative who was forced to ‘twin’ with the groom’s mother at her daughter’s wedding because Momzilla felt it would look better on Instagram – never mind that my relative hated the colour in question.
Funnily enough, a friend whose daughter is getting married next week in Bahrain has a different kind of problem. The bride, who is effortlessly lovely and believes in sustainability, is wearing family heirloom sarees for the functions, borrowed from her mother’s wardrobe.
The invitations went out and nobody was told to wear yellow for the henna party or pink for the wedding – or, for that matter, a white tux. And now, the guests are calling up from all time zones, anxiously asking if they missed a cue and needed to pack specific colours. When told they could wear the colours they prefer, they felt stonewalled!
Remember that ancient hypothetical question: “If a tree crashes in the forest and nobody sees it falling or hears the noise, has it really crashed?”
In these social media-driven times, we could paraphrase that to “If it has not been posted on Instagram, did it even take place?”
Agreed, we all want a picture-perfect celebration but let us not burden our family and friends with the need to spend on clothes they would never wear otherwise or afterwards. The best colour for any special moment, is the colour of a shared happiness.
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