Serge

Serge

Serge is blanket-like woven wool - thick, heavy, warm. It is itchy, hairy, usually gray or black. Nobody would dare dye it pink. Not even for a feminist prank or World Aids Day. Serge has come back, with double-breasted lapels, a profusion of plastic buttons reminiscent of the old bone or tortoiseshell ones, or over-the top shiny disco ones, and epaulets. Serge, bold as brass, is impossibly retro in 2012.

So what prompted its use in the minds of so many designers both mass market and exclusive? Could it be the yearning for a time before a modicum of too-clever-by-half human “efficiency” painted us into a dehumanised corner?

And that’s not all, the Serge we see is contrived into three-quarter length trench coats, ready for sleep-outs or is it pass-outs, designed to make you feel snug as the proverbial bug in the rug (with rug-like bulkiness thrown in for free), even if you’d probably have a time of it steering your car with it on.

Or, sitting in an economy class airline seat for that matter, trying to eat off those little trays designed for contortionists. Now you’d know, with your Serge jacket on, what it must feel like to be fat, that loss of mobility that being too wide brings on, unless of course it is your job to walk along the watchtowers on the Great Wall, clapping your leather mittens together, stamping your boots on the cobbles, and rarely sitting down at all.

This despite the Red Guards highlights on the coats with occasional Darth Vader sartorial exuberances.  But it’s Serge you see, and not some muscled, moulded, indescribable new-age fabric. It’s age-old, woven centuries ago by those persecuted peeved Huguenots; and it’s disconcerting to see it hung there afresh in mall show windows.

You haven’t really seen these coats outside teak heirloom wardrobes. If they don’t exist any longer in fact, it’s because those man-size wardrobes have vanished too. Now it’s all in your mind’s eye, huge carved-wood wardrobes and Serge suits both, probably untroubled since Central Heating came in.

But now there they are again, Serge double-breasts, three-quarter length, in every place selling branded clothes. Serge is back, done up in shoulder-padded imitations of Jinnah’s Saville Row suits from the forties, but mercifully there are no fur hats in accompaniment, not even the Red Guard style ones or the Quaid-e-Azam teepees from Astrakhan.

The other item from the thirties and forties adorning many of the same mannequins are Fedora hats. Lots of them suddenly, smart snappy things, disappearing as fast as they are put out on display, though you still can’t see many people wearing them outside nightclubs, out on the streets, in broad daylight. Except the ones worn by visiting Hollywood actors with the necessary chutzpah, doing Agra and Rajasthan, and several photo-ops.

Note how they are indeed in Fedoras, and not Indiana Jones outfits in khaki complete with battered bush hats. Hollywood actors have figured out that here we call them Sahib, John Masters style, and not Bwana. So the Indiana Jones and the Swahili patter is best saved up for Nairobi. Ah so, a shrinking world makes us all politically correct to a lesser or greater extent.

But the photos are really very intriguing; just T shirts in the Delhi cold, some kind of sports body warmers thrown over ever so casually, designer stubble or a little more perhaps, sound-byte comments on peace, spirituality, friendly Indians and Gandhi, a little amazement, and Fedoras for visuals.

2012 is kicked off, maybe with a new season in fashion, and the world seems to be Frank Sinatra smart, with or without the accompanying loss of hair. There may even be a Rat Pack in the making, but none of the Serge or snappy hats with the trim rims in the shops are necessarily aimed at women.

Frankly, nostalgia apart, Serge wouldn’t make it outside of minus twenty and the stereotypical heavy-body USSR matron queuing up in the cold for a loaf.  You won’t catch a Dubai-tripping Babushka or Uzbek showing the blindest bit of interest and rightly so. Vanity demands you ignore it.

So cover up in Serge at your peril if you’re young, curvy and restless. And forget ever leaving the ice rink. Imagine doing slow circles around it for eternity like a portly Marlon Brando in Serge three-quarters. Except you’re a fox from Russia remember, and not a hamburger eclipsed icon cum once a “contender” but now a ruin.   

But with so much thick wool in the shops, it probably means they are donning it in colder climes and not just selling us a surplus of carpet underlay. That’s how it percolates down to us here, in Delhi, via the brands we can’t get enough of.

But this 2011 winter, segueing into winter still in 2012, has us potentially making a meal of thick cloth. Though, once again, I don’t see Serge on people that much, just the mannequins, and in my head.

The wry thought is bound to come to someone who has watched a black and white James Cagney “take that you dirty rat” film, that many who are contemplating the Serge and donning the Fedoras have no idea that this is not brand new fashion seen for the first time.

And the new, light, created fabrics and their brand masters must be scratching their heads. Here is this chunky apparatchik from the Russian Revolution of 1917, who actually stood up in a full overcoat made of the stuff, rather than this bulky driving jacket meets double-breasted Chicago mobster in Fedora. But here in North India, we are playing at winter, and hardly letting it shape our character.   

What is this Serge then? Recession putz? Something to embrace your upper half in a wrap as enveloping as a confidence-building buddy? Pessimism in your heart and optimism in your head?  

Why does a young circa 2011-12 designer fall in love with this fabric? It doesn’t exactly drape well, and has a texture only a mother could love, so it must be the warmth. This is a blanket that you walk away in on your pins. Any goat-herd can tell you about its efficacy.

But in fashion philosophy terms, its arrival could represent the return of amorphousness, vagueness, shapelessness- the non-committal, uncertainty. It is de-glamorised, girded, epaulleyed, but hardly splendid.

Serge is the Russian soldier trudging through the snow without his boots. But at least there’s Serge on his back and sides. And a Fedora on his head to remind him of all the fun he isn’t having just yet but still could be before long.

(1,102 words)

13^th January, 2012, Lohri

Gautam Mukherjee