In pre-colonial Bengal, Dhaka was the fashion capital, a city known globally for its rich heritage of luxury muslin fabric and its handloom industry. During the colonial period, the British Administration enacted an onslaught of measures like banning the export of muslin to England, pushing weavers into debt by flooding the market with cheap industrially-produced textiles, and, in extreme cases, severing the fingers of artisans to stop the weaving factories of Dhaka. That British cultural hegemony delivered the final nail in the fashion capital’s coffin by systematically devaluing the local craft as ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilized’ and imposing a dress code on the natives. Even today, the colonized British education system of Dhaka shaped my – and my peers’ – early fashion sense. During the early 1990s, a very tiny class of rich hobnobs went to Dhaka’s newly emerging shopping malls. However, my uncles would not wear trousers, even today, as they still value the comfortable and cultural wear of lungi (a local unstitched piece of cloth) produced in local villages. My distant aunts would stitch their clothes with textiles from domestic weavers. Bangladeshi boy wearing a lungi. Image by Paul La Porte via Wikimedia Commons. But advertisement hoardings, news outlets, and electronic media idolized Western fashion and were heavily sponsored to create social hierarchical standards based on Western fashion. Western fashion was manufactured in the ready-made garment (RMG) factories popping up in the nearby cities of Savar and Gazipur, and it also produced misery and poverty at its peripheries, as…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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