A professor from an upper-caste background at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) was teaching the concept of Dandyism. The professor asked the students to name a famous Indian Dandy. Jay Sagathia, a student from Gujarat, said, Dr BR Ambedkar.
The professor did not accept that answer. What the lecturer wanted was the name of Jawaharlal Nehru. “I got the entire picture,” Jay recalls. “I got the inherent casteist nature of the professor from that interaction.”
Jay is now an illustrator, communication designer, and an Ambedkarite, who completed Master of Arts in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art in London in 2024. The incident in that classroom is still in his memory.
Dr Ambedkar was among the most consciously dressed men of his era. He wore three-piece suits at a time when Brahminical society had decided that dignity in clothing was not a Dalit man’s entitlement. “Fashion history itself has popularly been written without us [the lowered caste and class communities],” Jay says. “The historians are predominantly upper caste. They would always write about their own kith and kin. Why would they care to write about us?”
India is a country where more art has been made, worn, and woven from the margins than from any palace or design studio, and yet no art movement in its name has ever been formally acknowledged. Jay draws the contrast, “In European history, you would see Renaissance, Baroque, neoclassicism, postmodernism. Why do we not have any art movements? Because most of the artists were from lowered castes and the patrons did not think about mentioning their name.”
On Ambedkar Jayanti, CE delves into the state of assertive clothing that emphasises political messaging, which aims to annihilate all notions of caste in visual art — one Jay prefers to call Ambedkarite fashion rather than anticaste, a very vague term, according to him.
Assertive fashion choices
The Indian fashion industry’s relationship with its most marginalised communities follows a familiar architecture of extraction and erasure. Purushu Arie, a Chennai-based fashion designer, NIFT New Delhi alumnus, and founder of India’s first exclusively gender-neutral fashion label, has watched this structure operate up close. He describes the industry’s version of inclusivity. “The term anti-caste fashion doesn’t make sense right now, because there is no representation of caste in fashion,” he says.
He points to the last decade of Western fashion’s diversity. “All of the representation came from specific models with specific caste surnames, which belong to a dominant identity. A representation of the generic OBC, SC/ST who make up the majority of the population — probably around 80 to 85 per cent — their representation in leadership roles is negligible,” he notes.
This is an institutional fact. Popular fashion institutes reserve seats for SC, ST and OBC candidates. But these institutions’ leadership, from editorial boards to juries to runway aesthetics, remains overwhelmingly Savarna.
Sudheer Rajbhar, artist and founder of Chamar Studio, has felt this exclusion from within. He grew up in the slums of Mumbai, training as a visual artist, and found himself assisting established designers who saw past him with the ease of long practice. “There is always one lobby. A groupism of the class system and caste system. Not a single person from our community is on a board in mainstream fashion. How will things change?” he asks. After the Maharashtra government’s 2015 beef ban destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of Dalit and Muslim leather workers in Dharavi, Sudheer founded Chamar Studio. In 2017, he registered the caste-based slur as a trademark, replaced leather with recycled rubber, and built a luxury brand around the same artisans. He returned up to 50 per cent of profits to them through the Chamar Foundation. In December 2024, Rihanna was photographed at Design Miami on a chair he designed. “History and value is luxury. That is why I am reclaiming Chamar as a luxury because there is history, there is a community, there is craftsmanship,” shares Sudheer.
Purushu frames the same principle through a different lens. He recalls working at a garment production unit in Tiruppur in 2015 and noticing a board in his hotel corridor that read, “Do not wear a lungi on hotel premises to avoid indecency to guests.” It pushed him towards founding his own label. Since 2017, Purushu has built his practice on Tamil street style — sourcing handloom fabrics directly from weavers, naming collections in Tamil, and drawing design inspiration from the common people.
Suit as a weapon
The Manusmriti prescribed dress codes that the dominant castes enforced through violence. The Chanar women of Travancore (classified as OBC) fought for the right to cover their upper bodies in the Kallumala Samaram, and it took more than a century after they won for Pulaya (classified as SC) women to secure the same rights. That logic has not retired. People from marginalised communities are critiqued and tortured for their personal choices.
Jay, who comes from a Dalit community with a generational history in weaving and embroidery, developed his Anti-Caste Textile Design project drawing on African textiles, Black Dandyism, and Buddhist iconographies. He produces fabrics featuring Dr Ambedkar, Savitribai Phule, Jyotiba Phule, and the Buddha. He says, “Wearing Dr Ambedkar’s image openly comes with a lot of judgements and even a threat to life.”
Sartorial manifesto on screen
Cinema arrived before fashion brands did, with greater reach. Pa Ranjith has done more than any runway to shift what a Dalit body is allowed to look like on screen, shares Purushu. He describes watching Kabali as an inspirational moment. He says, “I was really mindblown how he presented it — the Malaysian workers, the styling of Rajinikanth’s character, the women.” In the film, Rajinikanth’s character tells his community, “Our clothes are our resistance.” His daughter Yogitha, played by Sai Dhanshika, wears a leather jacket, jeans, and combat boots and saves her community without a male hero. In Kaala, Ranjith placed Rajinikanth in a black lungi, usually Tamil cinema’s garment for drunks and goons, while dressing the antagonist in crisp white, reversing the moral geography of Tamil style.
Costume designer Aegan Ekambaram extended this into period cinema through Thangalaan, set in colonial-era Kolar Gold Fields, researching fifth-century tribal accessories and dyeing every garment with natural colour. Purushu points to the scene where women from marginalised castes wear blouses for the first time, against the documented history of upper-caste violence used to deny Dalit women the right to cover their bodies.
Jay names the directors celebrated for progressive politics who fail this test. In Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan, the character Kachra — whose name means rubbish — appears half-naked before a village that openly discriminates against him. Shyam Benegal’s Ankur, celebrated even in progressive circles, shows its character Kishtayya as mute, mentally unwell, and drunk, publicly humiliated while his wife sleeps with an upper-caste man. “Those are really stereotypical ways of showing Dalit characters,” he says. He also critiques Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15 for brownfacing and Subhash Kapoor’s Madam Chief Minister for its sterotypical choices. Mari Selvaraj’s Pariyerum Perumal and Karnan offer the counter, his rural men wear lungis and Madras checks as everyday self-expression, not as signifiers of poverty.
Purushu highlights the structural problem with representation, “The real money lies in the curation and distribution rather than the production itself. India’s elite fashion industry has commodified Bahujan karigars’ work. When Prada appropriated Kolhapuri-inspired designs, the outrage pointed at Western exploitation — but the Kolhapuri was historically made by Mochi, Dhor, and Chamar communities (all classified as SC) discriminated against for precisely that craft. Cultural appropriation has been happening in India for a long time and nobody was offended because here they were able to enjoy the profits,” says Purushu, adding that Madras checks follows the same arc they are stitched by Muslim and fishing communities in Tamil Nadu valued by Western buyers who exported it as luxury.
Keeping the movement on
Jay draws on the 15th-century poet-saint Ravidas’s vision of Begumpura, a city where everyone is equal, as the destination this movement is stitching towards. Purushu’s Sempozhil fashion show at YMCA Grounds in August 2025 staged a sequence called Theru Mozhi — drawing from Chennai street style, Madras checks, Pullingo subculture, and Madras baashai — with live gaana music by Dhamma The Band, the first known intersection of a fashion runway and the genre. “The idea was to look beyond and depict Chennai culture from the streets, from the gaze of common people,” Purushu says.
Sudheer’s message to young designers who want to participate in this movement of politically assertive clothing is, “They should educate themselves about who the maker is, where it is coming from, and why it is made. There is a pure intention behind this. It should not be selfishness.” That infrastructure for assertive dressing already exists, apart from the designers we have interviewed, there are also brands like Zero Plus, founded by Dalit entrepreneur and political commentator Chandrabhan Prasad, and Rupali Jadhav’s label Roots, which makes anti-caste clothing. The designers ask us to look beyond the narrow gaze that we have been nurtured with and see the real life and make choices while also critiquing them to uphold the responsibility that Dr Ambedkar has bestowed upon us. Style and fashion are political and being anti-fashion, annihilating the popular choices of fashion is also political.