DESIGNING ELITE INDIAN MASCULINITIES
FASHION, WHISKY AND COSMOPOLITAN NEO-ROYALTY
Tereza Kuldova, PhD
University of Oslo
The lecture is based on a final chapter of Tereza Kuldova’s forthcoming anthropological monograph,
Designing Elites: Fashion, Fantasy and Ideology among India’s Rich (2015). Grounded in a long-term
ethnographic research in urban North India (New Delhi and Lucknow) among India’s leading fashion
designers and their elite clientele, the lecture will present a critical discussion of the constructions of
contemporary Indian elite masculinities and of the experiences of elite masculinity in crisis. In
particular, the lecture will address the ways in which ambiguous symbols of low class machismo,
muscular politics, and goonda-ism (gangster habitus), that are notoriously mocked and despised as
much as admired and desired, become translated into an elitist aesthetics of powerful masculinity.
Furthermore, the lecture will explore the nostalgia for warrior-hood, the re-invention of precolonial
history and of the iconic luxurious lives of the maharajas and Mughals, and the re-imaginations of the
ambiguous figure of an English gentleman that still haunts the elite men. Finally, the lecture will show
how contemporary elite Indian fashion designers both diagnose and manufacture this crisis of
masculinity, and how they promise to remedy it by joining forces with the alcohol industry and the art
world thus creating virilising event platforms, where powerful elitist masculinities can be repetitively
staged and reinforced.
Tereza Kuldova is a social anthropologist specializing on contemporary India and a post-doctoral
fellow and curator at the Department of Ethnography, Museum of Cultural History, University of
Oslo, Norway. She received her PhD in 2013, with her thesis Designing Elites: Fashion and Prestige
in Urban North India. Among recent publications are edited volume Fashion India: Spectacular
Capitalism (Oslo: Akademika Publishing, 2013) and journal article ‘Fashionable Erotic Masquerades:
Of Brides, Gods and Vamps in India’ (Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, vol. 3: 1&2, 2012). She
has also curated an ethnographic museum exhibition Fashion India, which opened in September 2013
at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo and produced several short ethnographic movies.