The Clothes I Was Too Shy to Wear

Illustration by Duaa Shahzad

For most of my childhood, my closet seemed to have an invisible line. On one side were the clothes I wore to school, to the mall, out with friends: the clothes I never had to think twice about. On the other were the pieces that felt unmistakably connected to where I came from: embroidered fabrics, colourful lehengas, stacks of bangles and jhumkas that moved when I did. I loved both sides of my closet, but somewhere along the way, I learned that one was easier to wear outside the house than the other. 

I don't think you have to grow up South Asian to understand that feeling. Most of us learn, at some point, how to edit ourselves for the room we’re about to enter. Maybe you change out of the outfit you actually wanted to wear because your friends are dressed more casually. Maybe you take off the accessory that suddenly feels like “too much”, or choose the safer option because you don't want to be the only person who looks different. We learn how to read a room before we even enter it, and sometimes we dress for the comfort of blending in rather than the excitement of wearing what we actually wanted to. 

For me, that instinct was tied closely to my culture. At an Indian wedding, I could wear a lehenga covered in embroidery, jhumkas brushing against my neck and bangles stacked along my wrists without giving any of it a second though. Surrounded by people dressed just as brightly, nothing about me felt particularly noticeable. But take those same details outside of that environment and suddenly I became hyperaware of them. The bangles sounded louder. The earrings felt bigger. The embroidery felt brighter. The clothes hadn’t changed, but the room had. 

It wasn't that I was ashamed of being South Asian. I loved getting dressed for weddings and family events, loved watching everyone arrive in colours and fabrics that transformed an ordinary room, and loved how much detail could exist within a single outfit. I just became conscious of what it said about me before I had the chance to say anything myself. 

That was the strange part: I was never ashamed of my culture. I was just sometimes afraid of being the person in the room who made mine visible.

So, without ever consciously deciding to, I created two wardrobes. There were my everyday clothes, influenced by the Western fashion I saw around me, then there were my “Indian clothes”. I never consciously decided they couldn't exist together. They simply didn't. One version of my wardrobe moved easily through school, dinners and everyday life; the other came alive in spaces where everyone already understood it. I never questioned why a pair of tiny gold hoops could go anywhere with me while jhumkas somehow felt like they needed context. 

The older I got, and the more interested I became in fashion, the less sense that distinction made.

Fashion was the place where I was supposed to experiment. I could try, and start questioning why I had created such strict rules for myself in the first place. Silhouettes I had never worn before because I saw someone style it online. I could suddenly decide I loved a colour I had ignored for years. I could buy an unusual accessory and call it a statement piece. Yet, somehow, I was more hesitant to experiment with pieces that had existed around me my entire life. 

Eventually, I started asking myself a very simple question: If I like it, why am I taking it off?

The change didn't happen through one big moment. I didn't wake up one morning with a completely different relationship with my culture. Instead, I started small. I wore the jhumkas with jeans. I stacked bangles beside the jewellery I already wore. I became more interested in embroidery, draping, colour and the details I had grown up seeing, and started thinking about how they could exist within the way I already dressed. 

At first, I still noticed when I was the only person wearing something. The difference was that I stopped treating being noticed as proof that I had made the wrong choice.

That shift changed the way I thought about personal style altogether. I had spent so much time thinking of my South Asian and Western wardrobes as opposites that I hadn’t considered the obvious: both belonged to me. Why should expressing one part of myself require temporarily putting the other away?

I still have moments when I stand in front of the mirror and wonder whether something is too much. I still occasionally imagine what everyone else will be wearing before deciding what I should wear. I don’t think that instinct disappears completely. The difference is that now I recognize it for what it is. Feeling noticeable doesn’t automatically mean feeling out of place.

Today, there isn’t the same invisible line running through my closet. My wardrobe looks much more like my life does: mixed. Western and South Asian influences sit beside each other, overlap and occasionally show up in the same outfit. The pieces I once worried would make me stand out have become some of the easiest ways to make an outfit feel like my own.

I used to think developing a personal style meant constantly discovering something new, another trend, another aesthetic, another version of myself I hadn't tried yet. Instead, some of the most important pieces of mine were there the entire time. 

I wasn't learning how to wear them. I was learning that I never needed permission to.