A cage fight on the White House lawns.
CAGE FIGHT
Now that’s not something I would have foreseen 10 years ago. At that time I remember the conversations were always about Diwali in the White House. Or Chinese new year. It was about taking pride in America as a nation built by immigrants. Of course there were anti-immigrant sentiments too and pitched political battles on Capitol Hill about illegal immigration but the image America wanted to put forward was of an amazing technicolor dreamcoat, a patchwork of many hues.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
THe martial arts fighters might have been of different ethnicities but Donald Trump chose the spectacle to send out a message about what he chose to celebrate as the real America.
This should not come as a huge surprise. The rhetoric around immigration had been one of the issues that galvanised his base.
But it reminded me of a conversation I’d had with the designer Prabal Gurung when he was in Kolkata talking about his memoir Walk Like a Girl.
Gurung is an immigrant from Nepal. He is gay. someone who never quite fits in anywhere- a girlish boy not at home in an all-boys school in Nepal, an Asian man sticking out in the gay scene in USA and a Nepali designer in the very white boardrooms of high fashion in New York.
PG1: unbelonging becomes your power eventually.
He has harnessed the power to become the ulitmate immigrant success story. He’s dressed the likes of Michelle Obama. His gowns are all over the Met Gala. He has his own eponymous label. he became vice chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America
But he is in many ways the poster boy of the kind of vision of America that’s no longer in vogue.
PG2: if you look at all the fashion runway shows that's happening right now, and there have been certain shows that have completely put people like and made people aghast, like, okay, my God, this is it feels like the 80s, you know, you know, like where people didn't care about any kind of representation.
Gurung knows a thing or two about representation.
When Donald Trump first became President h Gurung sent models down the runway with t-shirts that read “I am an Immigrant” and “Love is Love”. At the end he ran down the runway in a t-shirt that declared “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like.” He was told to not mix fashion and politics and just stick to making pretty dresses. He was called the most woke designer out there, labels he shrugs off.
PG3: I don't pay heed to it because, you know, those are words. You know, those are like labels that they want to box you into.
But it had made me wonder how some like him survived in America when much of what he had pushed for seemed to have been discarded.
He was sanguine.
PG4: I always say progress is never linear. You one step up, ten steps back, one step.
PG5: in these times you really see who was performative and who was not.
Because while what is on the runway is important, what’s even more important is the makeup the people who DECIDE what will be on the runway, on the cover, in the centerspread.
PG6: I felt was the idea of Americana was a very myopic idea of what was represented. And that is still true. Like, you know, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, you know, like all of them were like, you know, the the idea of Americana, which is the real truth.
He wanted to tell a different story of an America built by many different kinds of people. But He knew real change needed to happen beyond the runway. In board rooms. In editorial rooms. Within those who held the purse strings. Otherwise its all too easy to throw it all away and go back to business as usual.
In that sense the issue isn’t really about the cage fight on the White House lawn and the image that projects to the world about what America at 250 looks like. The issue is really about whether that’s the only image that should be out there.
Or can Prabal Gurung also be part of the same American story?
PG7: What I want to do is showcase a world of different possibilities. I'm an impossible dream that happened, right?
To dream the impossible dream. Wasn’t that always the real American dream?
THis is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW.