The decade that dressed itself in contradiction
The 1970s Indian woman did not dress for a mood board. She dressed for a power cut, a bus commute, a college corridor where being noticed too much was its own kind of problem. The silhouettes that came out of that decade were not accidents of taste, they were solutions.The most worn garment was still the saree, but the 1970s saree was not the wedding-circuit silk of the previous generation. Women working in government offices, schools, and the new wave of public-sector companies reached for cotton. Chanderi from Madhya Pradesh, Mangalagiri from Andhra Pradesh, Ilkal from Karnataka, these were not heritage purchases. They were Monday-morning clothes. Affordable, washable, and dignified enough to walk into a room and be taken seriously. The handloom saree was the decade's working uniform, and it carried no self-consciousness about being so.
