Ranveer Singh's Best Is Yet To Come!

In that space between boy-next-door and warrior king is a man of many talents and interests. While there have been major hits, Ranveer Singh's best is yet to come, finds Shalini Shah.

- Shalini Shah

Our worlds are shrinking, and our minds and hearts expanding. For long, identities have been wrapped in layers of mores and social codes, the mysterious idea of “appropriate” being invoked to determine how we make simple choices. A tangible outcome has been the way we clothe ourselves.

For long, clothes have been a great differentiator between the sexes—a man’s suit was supposed to denote power, virility and success, while a woman’s dress conveyed grace and docility. There are numerous examples in history that prove the contrary—the frocked, preening men in Anthony van Dyck’s paintings, the unisex unstitched cloth (the dhoti, antariya and lungi) and gender-less juttis of the Indian subcontinent, the skirt-wearing Egyptian kings and kilt-wearing Scots... But stereotypes go deep; the “colour rule” established by Ladies’ Home Journal as far back as 1918, which marked pink as the colour for girls and blue for boys, somehow permeated to present day, and countless young boys and girls across the world go through colour-coded childhoods.

But change is brewing. When Yves Saint Laurent introduced the Le Smoking in 1966, it was revolutionary in the sense that it tailored a “masculine” silhouette to suit a woman’s body. It was a political statement as much as sartorial; though, in today’s world it would raise no eyebrows. In 2018, the silhouettes, fits, materials and colours reserved for male and female are intermingling. Tartan for him and florals for her is passé. So if Jeremy Scott sends out male models in fishnets and boas, or Jaden Smith rocks a skirt in a Louis Vuitton campaign, and Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik front a US Vogue with the cover line “shop each other’s closet”, it is only an acknowledgement of the fact that gender roles and codes are a social construct.