ABSTRACT
Fashion and beauty cultures have marked the convergence of the Indian nation-state and the diaspora in defining the terms of democratic citizenship since the 1990s (Grewal, 2005). Whether defined in or through the terms of middle-class Indian women’s increased spending on products to enhance their physical appearance, the increased availability of full service beauty salons, skin-lightening products and procedures, or aspirations to go into fashion design and modelling as career choices for urban girls and women, Indian fashion and beauty are connected to neoliberal practices of citizenship. 1 The increased production and consumption of women’s lifestyle magazines in India since the late 1990s prompted the production of similar magazines, such as Anokhi, Nirali, Sapna, and Nirvana, for diasporic women at the beginning of the new millennium. (Nirvana was discontinued in 2004 but bore the same overall visual aesthetic of India’s best-selling women’s beauty magazine, Femina, which began publication in 1959.) The popularity of diasporic sartorial conventions such as the salwar kameez was both influenced by and influenced similar style trends on the subcontinent (see, for example, Bhachu, 2003). Indian-inspired fashions, known as Indo chic, took the global fashion industry by storm in the 1990s and became a popular design aesthetic among Indian and diasporic fashion industrialists in the first decade of the new millennium through which elite and urban consumers could cultivate a sense of cosmopolitanism. Even more recently, mainstream Indian media were quick to claim Nina Davuluri, the first woman of Indian ethnicity to win the Miss America pageant, a diasporic daughter of the Indian nation.
