There's a pretty stark difference in the clothing when it comes to my family. My mother who was born in India wears nothing but traditional Indian clothing. My sisters and I, on the other hand, are rarely seen sporting anything but jeans. However, even while I might not wear dresses on a regular basis, my closet is chock-full of dresses for various occasions.
My mother is a dress maker, and because of this, I get dresses made for occasions like holidays, birthdays, and events. All of the dresses that will be pictured below in this article are made by my mother in case you are wondering.
1. The Pants Make the Dress
What I find interesting about Indian clothing is that the name of a dress will depend upon the pants that you wear along with it. The pants I normally wear are churidars (which basically are leggings) and another type of pants are kameez (baggy pants).
a. Churidar
These pants are purposely made longer than your leg length so you can gather up the ends in creases just like you would see with leggings and skinny jeans. However, you want to make sure that the width of the bottom of the churidar can still go up your ankle, otherwise it can take an obnoxious amount of time jumping around trying to pull it up your leg (I am speaking from personal experience if you can tell).
b. Kameez
These pants normally possess many creases at the top so that it creates folds that go through the length of the pants, which can give a unique look to a dress.
2. Dupattas
This is term we use for scarves. They are usually my favorite part of a dress because fashion designers will normally go all out with crazy colors and patterns on this strip of material.
This scarf design below was made by my mother. This was made by sewing in the different colored material and putting these decorative borders as breaks between them.
And here are some more below:
3. The Dress Scheme
What seems to be the latest fashion in this type of clothing are knee-length dresses that flare out excessively, with leggings to pair. There are also predictable patterns when designing. By this I mean, they will either make the dress fancy and both the duppata and pants plain; make the dupatta and pants fancy and the dress plain;and for formal occasions everything will be heavily embroidered.
For this, I will show you the full sets of the dresses, that I gave you glimpses of previously:
And my personal favorite aspect about them are that they are extremely comfortable to wear, and you don't have to forgo comfort to look good. The only downside of course, is that it looks incredibly awkward wearing sneakers with them (trust me, I've tried to pull it off).
I hope you enjoyed looking at the pictures (I apologize for the quality of them) and I definitely had a blast digging through my closet trying to find which pants went with what.
