The lecturer was making a Power Point presentation with a large Educomp screen in the background. When it came to dos and don’ts regarding dresses, girls were instructed to avoid wearing tight fitting and short sleeved dresses; jeans and coloured hair too fell in the list of don’ts. "Remember this is a co-ed college and hence everyone has to stay within one’s limits," was the cautionary observation by the lecturer.
However what surprised and amused me was the next slide regarding the dress code for boys. The forbidden list was much longer than that of girls, reflecting the long strides accomplished by the male grooming industry since my college days in 1980s.
Like girls, boys too were prohibited from wearing jeans and cargos. But the forbidden list also included tattoos, piercings on the body, gel on hair, sporting a goatee ...
Probably if such a list of don’ts was created during my college days, it may have just included wearing jeans and long hair. Those were early days of TV and Bollywood was the ultimate style guru. And having hair long enough to cover the ears was in vogue, thanks to Amitabh Bachchan. As the superstar’s stranglehold over box office tightened, so did the popularity of this hairstyle.
Calendars with pictures of Big B adorned friendly neighbourhood barber shops and almost everyone wanted barbers to shape their hair accordingly.
Shampooed and blow dried hair was the norm. Hence even traces of coconut oil or any other hair oil was considered a major fashion infraction. Gel was totally unheard of. Though Brylcreem ad used to appear in some newspapers and magazines (TV commercials were in their infancy), it had positioned itself as a product that gives an ‘orderly’ look to scruffy hair, without being oily. Spiky hair was almost unheard of, sometimes sported by b-grade comedians to show their ‘dehati-ness’.
Goatee those days was sported by mullahs and orthodox Muslims and hence enjoyed a very low cool quotient. Apart from full beard, the only option those days was the French beard, popularized by some yesteryear cricketers.
Tattoos were again considered very downmarket and confined to religious symbols, and tattoo artists were holed up in small stalls housed in busy markets with instruments of dubious sterility. In movies it was used as prop, but never as a fashion statement.
In Deewar we had Amitabh Bachchan getting branded with infamous tattoo ‘mera baap chor hai’ in his childhood. In lost-and-found Bollywood potboilers of Manmohan Desai kind, tattoos and birthmarks played a vital role in reuniting estranged brothers in the final reel. Tattoos of snakes, mainly cobras, were sported by the villains such as Amrish Puri and Bob Christo on their brawny arms to look more menacing.
Piercings were totally unheard of in the 80s. In the 90s it did catch the fancy, but even then those who were intrepid enough to come within earshot of piercing gun, risked being branded as gays.
The interim decades witnessed tectonic shifts in fashion, thanks to satellite television, MTV and internet, which gave rise to concepts such as metrosexual men. Even Bollywood was forced to fall in line with Aamir Khan sporting a soul patch in Dil Chahta Hai and Salman Khan’s middle parting in Tere Naam.
One of the early casualties of this trend was the friendly neighbourhood tailor, as customer preference shifted towards readymade and branded clothes. He either had to shut shop or get subsumed as supplier to garment units.
The other casualty was the barber as he had to either diversify into a new age salon or shut shop as men’s grooming was now no longer confined to haircuts, shave and tel maalish. It quite literally deals with matters from head to toe - hair cuts to pedicures.
In fact male grooming has now become so elaborate that it has almost caught up with their female counterparts in terms of vanity, which since time immemorial had been a female preserve.
Also Read: Bangalore Beat
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