Why Comfort And Style Not Go Hand-In-Hand?

We all wish to look stylish at all times but today, most of the stylish stuff available in the market lacks comfort. But can style not bring comfort along? Why?

  • Tanya Malik
  • Her Zindagi Editorial
  • Updated - 2018-10-22, 12:15 IST
choosing comfort over style main

Apurva Purohit, group President of Jagran Prakashan Ltd, who also happens to be the author of the national bestselling book 'Lady, You’re Not a Man – The Adventures of a Woman at Work', published in 2013, shares her take on comfort and style.

We all wish to look stylish at all times but today, most of the stylish stuff available in the market lacks comfort. But can style not bring comfort along? In my entire adult life I have struggled to find fashionable stuff to wear which is also comfortable or to put it another way, comfortable wear which is also the high fashion of the moment! The two however don’t seem to coexist anywhere in the world at all! For some reason being fashionable necessary entails suffering from discomfort of the extreme degree – think skinny jeans (in which both my breathing and blood circulation seem to stop, even if I do manage to struggle into them, that is) or high heels which immediately give me vertigo and severe palpitations since I suffer from a fear of heights in any case!

choosing comfort over style high heels or flip flops

All the clothes that are classified as high fashion expect you to first wear body shaping garment under them (for everyone reading this, body shaping garments are the equivalent of being mummified and wound up in a tight plastic bandage which prevents you from breathing while presumably also preventing any roll of flesh from making its presence felt). If you can get away from body shaping garments, you end up wearing clothes which have various wires surreptitiously and cleverly entwined in the outfit, to hold various parts of your anatomy up or down as the case may be; which embarrassingly start beeping loudly at every security check you go through! Since this obviously replicates the effect of a bomb strapped to your body which you are trying to smuggle into the airport, all the security personnel milling around immediately jump up and watch you with narrow eyed suspicion until you sheepishly wind your way through the entire proceedings!

choosing comfort over style skinny jeans

I thought I had finally found nirvana, at least with respect to the high heel problem, when I woke up one fine day to find out that while I was sleeping the erstwhile bathroom slippers had suddenly gotten invited to the top of the fashion world’s table! And everybody who was anybody was walking around in embellished flip-flops of all colors and designs, with quite a few having an entire flower patch or a fruit salad concoction decorating their feet! It was indeed a joyous moment for me and I broke the bank buying up slippers of all colors until just as I was swanning about feeling very cool and happening AND comfortable for a change, in a jiffy, women switched to strutting around wearing 10-inch heels!

choosing comfort over style flip flops

After being stared at snootily by the various stylish women in my office over several occasions, I had no choice but to replace my beloved flip flops (which had become even more comfortable through constant use by then) with footwear which vaguely resembled stylish heels. Cleverly I have taken to carrying the beloved flip flops with me to slip into at anonymous places like airports where you can very easily ignore the stares of Ms. Stylish standing next to you, but it’s not the same anymore I can tell you!

And of course when I gently ask people in the apparel industry; some of whom I know very intimately, as to when they will make comfortable jeans for women like me. I am told that ‘Mommy Jeans’ for middle-aged, overweight women like me are soon being made available! Mommy – jeans? Excuse me?

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It is time that all designers start exercising their creative brains, and marry comfort with style and then see their cash registers tinkling all day long! Till then we would urge them to at least not give rude names to the clothes, something like voluptuous variety wear!

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