Dropping the fig leaf

IN Media Practice | 06/04/2006

Dasu Krihnamoorty

News bulletins on TV channels always ended with weather forecasts. With the increasing clout of money in public life, business too became a regular feature of the news bulletins. We now have 24-hour business channels with focus exclusively on money matters. The latest addition to the regular TV newsfare is fashion or haute couture. In a country like India where what people wear is very different from what is in vogue in Paris’s Montaigne Avenue or New York’s Fifth Avenue, the relevance of the fashion segment of the news bulletin stops with the very rich, the splurging classes. Shown on news channels watched mostly by curiosity-bitten audiences, these shows do little more than selling textile minimalism.

It is not one of media functions to collaborate in this market drive. Both print and TV media vied with each other in reporting a striptease called wardrobe malfunction at a Lakme Fashion Week show in Mumbai. On Aaj Tak a woman anchor dwelt on it at some length. (Two days later another LFW segment showing a woman wearing a painted body stocking was again given considerable space, with the male anchor wondering in the end whether she was wearing anything at all.)  Okay, some one dropped her halter. Was that so intoxicating that the media should behave, in the words of a Hindustan Times edit,  "like a hormonally confused schoolboy, overplaying the ‘wardrobe malfunction’ news item as if they had stumbled on to a risqué joke?" The Daily Times of Pakistan mocked: "Clothes coming undone on the ramp are nothing new to the fashion world, but in India the slip-ups have sent newspaper editors and TV producers into a feeding frenzy." 

Models and organizers played the ulta chor act by blaming the media for repeatedly showing the embarrassing frames. "This is shameful and totally condemnable," said leading Indian model Dipannita Sharma. "It has happened to Carol, it could have happened to any one of us. It shows Indians have not matured." Agreed. If what the models are doing is fine what is not so fine in MMS and the media giving publicity? The shows are not off-the-record events for the media. They are held before an invited audience, TV crews, photographers and reporters in the hope that they would be covered or uncovered. Then why cry foul? Diandra Soares says, "These things happen." Sure, if these things happen why did not the organizers take care to prevent them or why did not the models demand fool-proof clothes? Is it a veshti or a mundu that it can drop off easily?

This is not to exonerate media of the charge of abjuring news judgment. Both TV and print public have a right to call media to account for squandering space/time on the foibles of the leisure class. However, neither the models nor the organizers have a right to blame the media for what they have done. One may even suggest that the malfunction was staged with a view to garner publicity. Cybernoon.com nearly said it, "It is now suspected that these incidents were deliberate and not a case of defective designer wears."  Some of the clips show that it is possible for models to expose without dropping halters. I do not question the morality or ethics of wardrobe malfunction. It is anyway what millions of poor women in this country are forced to do every day because they cannot buy a few yards of cloth to cover themselves adequately.

A woman is raped every one hour in India. Every city brags that it is safe for women to freely move at any time of the day. Yet a rape happens every day in every city of India. Media homage to the fashion shows brings to the surface elemental urges in men that find release in rape. They add to the crime graph. They add to the moral anarchy that is sweeping the country where teachers rape their wards, father figures molest children, cabbies sexually assault foreign tourists and jilted students kill their prey.

Fashion shows whet the appetites of weak people and swell the crimes against women.  The media would do well to set for the people a better agenda than preoccupation with clothes. Clothes are functional for a majority of the people. It is a media function to help their audiences distinguish between wants and needs. Are we to presume that the advertisement budgets of the sponsors of the fashion shows and their organizers justify media neglect of other pressing problems?

They need to seriously debate the cultural fallout of these shows that mock at what a vast majority of the people wear or are not able to wear. The embarrassment of the models is not shared by the common folk because what they do is so uncommon in the Indian milieu. How many times have these fashion events showcased the grace or elegance of a saree or salwar kameez or portray the variety of ways in which the saree is worn in different regions of the country? Everyone knows how the fashion community looks down on Indian culture. They refer to women wearing a saree or salwar kameez outfit as behenjis. These attitudes add to the divisive forces wrecking what is left of social harmony in the country.

One newspaper faulted the State government for ordering a probe. But a government is bound to do that in a democracy when legislators representing all parties make a demand. The Federal Communications Commission in the US did the same thing after the Janet Jackson act. FCC chairman Michael Powell termed it "a classless, crass and deplorable stunt." FCC slapped a fine of $550,000 on CBS. "Ms Jackson`s unrehearsed and unapproved display went far beyond what are acceptable standards for our broadcast network," explained the Viacom chief that owns CBS and MTV.

But I do agree with the Indian Express when it says, "There are issues of greater importance that should have exercised the legislators who demanded a police investigation into the "wardrobe malfunctions": the power crisis staring the city in the face, the crash in onion prices, the general decline of India’s financial capital at every level." That is the crux of my complaint too. The same applies to the media; there are greater issues meriting editorial notice than wardrobe malfunctions on which four newspapers wrote editorials.

Fashion shows, just like high society weddings, demonstrate the widespread economic and social stratification prevailing in the country. They are collaborators in the globalization drive that seeks to homogenize culture and create enclaves of exclusivity. When Fashion has its own magazines like Elle, Lifestylz and Gladrags and the FTV channel, newspapers and TV news channels are letting down their original constituency by squandering space/time on the low doings in high places. As Daniel Horowitz, professor of American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., says, "These issues raise profoundly moral questions about what is enough, and what is a good society, and does satisfaction in our lives come from consuming more."

One can understand P.Sainath’s agony/anger when he writes in the Hindu, "Contrast that with the negligible number of reporters sent out to cover Vidarbha in the depths of its great misery. At the LFW (Lakme Fashion Week), journalists jostle for "exclusives" while TV crews shove one another around for the best "camera space". In Vidarbha itself, the best reporters push only the limits of their own sanity. Faced with dailies that kill most of their stories, or with channels that scorn such reports, they still persist. Trying desperately to draw the nation’s attention to what is happening. To touch its collective conscience. So intense has been their tryst with misery, they drag themselves to cover the next household against the instinct to switch off. Every one of them knows the farm suicides are just the tip of the iceberg."

Contact: dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com