If you were a Martian in town, hanging around one of these days in shopping malls, pubs, night clubs to check out those earthly delights called women of whom you had heard so much about, you might have been led to believe that the city has been struck by plague or some such severe physical disorder. Till of course some kind soul walked up to you and told you that even if it’s a disease, it is a fashionable one. And more importantly, it’s a disease that every woman wants to fall prey to!
Welcome to the Get Slim disease. It’s spreading like wildfire and there’s no escaping it in any walk of life. Gone are the days when Bollywood had heroines who could be truly called women of substance. Close your eyes and think of Madhubala, Mumtaz, Helen, Hema Malini, Neetu Singh, Parveen Babi and Sridevi – in your mind’s eye you would be able to see what well rounded personalities they truly were. Now open your eyes and look around at the Shilpa Shetty’s, the Katrina Kaifs, the Bipasha Basu’s, the Priyanka Chopra’s, the Mallika Sherawats, the Sheetal Mallars, the teenage girls next door, your office colleagues, and I bet you will have to admit that they will appear pretty linear, or should we say, uni-dimensional in comparison. Now wonder Mogambo would not have been khush with thunder thighs Sridevi anymore!
Getting slim is however a mere physical manifestation. Something that women are accomplishing easily by working longer hours on gyms and spending lesser time at the dinner table. The bigger challenge is to have the body confidence to show the world the fruits of your toil. And that is where fashion brands like Levi’s have been instrumental in emboldening young Indian women to shed both their excess baggage and their inhibitions. By launching a separate Slim Jeans range for women, Levi’s heralded the era of the body beautiful in India. An image of the new female diva was created through Bipasha Basu. And the onus was promptly shifted to all those who aspired to live up to that image. Suddenly everybody, including women who had waistlines of 34” and 36” queued up to fit into a Levi’s Slims, though the product range stopped at 32” only.
However, it’s not women alone who have been bitten by the slimness bug. Sleek is in even when it comes to gadgets and accessories. The big fat DVD players have been replaced by their sleeker, sexier looking new avatars, while the image of the sturdy and resilient mobile hand-set has almost been obliterated from our collective consciousness through the continuous bombardment of slimmer, smaller and funkier models. In fact, Motorazr from Motorola, has been the frontrunner in this “Honey, I shrunk the world” movement, a movement which was initiated some years back by the Ericsson ‘Surprisingly small’ campaign. Even when it comes to home décor and interiors, music systems, TVs, furnishings, sleek seems to be the overwhelmingly popular design principle in each of these categories as well.
Women though have to pay the hardest price in order to catch this bug. How long will these painful sacrifices of rich chocolate pastry last for them? How long and hard will women stare at mirrors watching their backs? How much longer will women queue up to fit into a pair of Slim Jeans? Well in the US, the counter movement has started already. The recent Nike and Dove campaigns show what they call ‘real’ women – women who are obese, with wrinkles and not as picture perfect as they look in most cosmetics and fashion brand advertising. For years women in the US have strived to live up to that image of desirability, made sacrifices, fell short of their expectations and finally, perhaps the signs of wear and tear are showing. They are not willing to put up with the show anymore … or at least some of them are not.
In India however, we have just woken up to the sinful pleasures of the body. We have just about started avoiding the dollop of butter on our aloo paratha. We have just about realized how good we, and our bodies can look. Edna Ferber once said: “Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets”. In India, it’s time for the violets to bloom. The sunflowers will have to wait … for some time at least!
Navonil Chatterjee
Account Planning Director
JWT Bangalore
