How do you prepare for a nose job? After you’ve cried thinking that it’ll go wrong, after the doctor reassures you that it won’t, and just the night before the 9am appointment to have your nose surgically altered — what do you do? I would choose a night of praying to all the gods I never believed in. Mita (a pseudonym), a 19-year-old model in Manjima Bhattacharjya’s “Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry” went a different route. She spent the night partying.

Morning brought with it the nose surgery, and a host of inconveniences post-surgery. You have to breathe through your mouth, you have to be on painkillers, and like Mita exclaims in the book, “My eyes were all bloodshot and the area under both my eyes became black and blue and yellow. It was like I had been boxed in both eyes.” But change was inevitable. Mita was a part of an international modelling agency where she was told she had potential, but her nose didn’t. She looked at her career, she looked at her nose, and a decision was made.

For years, fashion has been seen in direct opposition to feminism. Public debates about beauty pageants pit models against feminist activists and ask them questions that further define this binary – “Shouldn’t a woman be more than a perfect body walking down the ramp?” “Don’t pageants objectify women?” “Shouldn’t we look beyond beauty when we see women?”

And while these questions emerge from a real point of consideration, especially when it comes to women and the pressure of the “perfect body,” they miss a crucial point. The woman walking down the ramp is not just a perfect body. She’s an independent, working woman. Earning her money, navigating a brutally competitive industry, and creating a sense of identity that’s all her own. If we were to follow the woman on the ramp away from the arc lights, we would see conflicts in her life that are not very different from a woman working in a cubicle in an office. Feminism acknowledges this and pushes for conventionally “feminine” work like beauty, childcare, and sex work to be recognised as labour. Bhattacharjya’s book takes this argument and asks, where can women like Mita find herself in feminism?  

Bhattacharjya interviews thirty women from all ages, and backgrounds, from 2003 to 2007. The book which emerges from this research is a sociological analysis of the fashion industry and argues that the industry is a space where many core feminist issues play out every day – of work, of desire, and of identity. 

The biggest stage these issues are in conflict with each other, is the fashion week. My favourite chapter of the book is the gleefully titled “A Feminist at Fashion Week.” In this chapter, Bhattacharjya goes backstage and finds that the actual fashion show is the smallest part of the whole week. The biggest chunk, she writes, is the waiting which she describes as having the important function of “being seen at Fashion Week and establish oneself as relevant participants in the industry.” It is in this waiting, that networking takes place, codes of conduct between “senior” and “junior” models are established, and the economics of retail selling and buying occur. The book makes it a point to look at the women, and their stories through the context of labour and economics. 

Nowhere is that better described than in Bhattacharjya’s description of a “lobby” at fashion week – a space where aspiring models mingle with retail specialists, handloom experts, and fashion journalists. She writes, “Standing in the lobby, I was reminded of labour ‘chowks’ in Jaipur: a road crossing where daily wage labourers stand early every morning to be picked up by contractors, mainly for construction work. The lobby was a chowk of a different kind. These ‘models’ (some never having actually modelled before) came diligently every morning, and sat cooling their heads till the evening, unable to access most of the event…but knowing that somehow they had to be there.”

The bodies might be stunning, and the make-up perfect, but as we keep getting reminded, it’s bloody hard work.

And because it’s work defined exclusively by the body, it’s work that is not sustainable when you become a mother – or get old. In a chapter titled “Curtains,” Bhattacharjya tackles the question of what happens to models when they get pregnant or age out of a notoriously young business. Some do find themselves back on the ramp. But most women she talked to reveal the anxieties of losing their identity as a model, even if they are working as entrepreneurs, teachers, or in other professions.

Reading the book, I kept thinking of this word “mannequin.” How quickly we use this word to dismiss women, who might be interested in what we think of as “silly” and “glamorous” fields, like modelling and fashion. And yet, how the mannequin remains in our psyche as the reference point for a perfect body. But the thing is, mannequins, however we may think of them, have one distinguishing feature. They are often headless. Or when they do have faces, they are devoid of expression. If a mannequin could go scrunch up a stony face, could frown, could speak, what would she ask? 

My guess? I think she wants better wages.