ABSTRACT
Fashion and beauty cultures have marked the convergence of the Indian nation-state and the diaspora in defining the terms of democratic citizenship since the 1990s. Despite these transnational trajectories, diasporic negotiations of Indian fashion and beauty have remained virtually unexplored within feminist scholarship on beauty, fashion, and globalization. This chapter focuses on visual cultural production such as fashion blogs, photography, and film, which exhibit strong affinities with cultural industries of fashion and beauty such as pageants, cosmetics, and women's magazines. It examines the diasporic aesthetic of "Sikh chic" in British Asian Pardip Singh Bahra's street style fashion blog, Singh Street Style. The chapter focuses on several diasporic feminist visual artworks—Unsuitable Girls, a collaborative photography project by Indian American feminist visual artists Swati Khurana and Anjali Bhargava; Upping the Aunty, a set of street style fashion photographs by Indo-Canadian Meera Sethi; and filmmaker Geeta Malik's short film, Aunty Gs.
