07 January,2025 07:00 AM IST | Mumbai | C Y Gopinath
One wonders if a chairman would command less respect if he showed up to work wearing mid-thigh boxer shorts with a business shirt and double-breasted coat. PIC/Illustration by C Y Gopinath using AI
You may have heard of the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen and his jeans. On December 28 at the Rapid World Chess Championship, he was fined $200 by the International Chess Federation for wearing them even though it went against the tournament's dress code. Carlsen, 34 now, became the world's top chess player at age 13 and has retained the Grandmaster title five times since then.
But he wasn't having any jeans nonsense. He'd been out at a lunch meeting and had barely had time to change his shirt and jacket. When his jeans became an issue, he doubled down and just walked out of the tournament rather than change out of them.
"I'm too old at this point to care too much," he said at an interview with Take Take Take, a chess magazine." I'll probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here."
All this pother over clothes got me wondering why a chess tournament even needs a dress code. After all, the objective is to crown the superior chess player, not admire them for their sartorial elegance. Yet, somehow my colonised mind cannot imagine Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand of Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, showing up for the game like a true TamBram, in a veshti, nothing but a punool to cover his torso, and three lines of ash on his forehead from evening prayers.
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As you can imagine, with an overactive mind like mine, one question led to others. Why is a veshti unacceptable within a chess tournament's dress code? Why should it matter if a girl wears a hijab to school? Would a chairman command less respect if he showed up to work wearing mid-thigh boxer shorts with a business shirt and double-breasted coat (one of the official approved fashion statements for 2025)?
At moments like this, I like to strip down, so to speak, to the basics. There are two moments in life that have no dress code: when you are born and when you go to the great beyond. We arrive and depart naked.
Everything we became coy and demure about as we grow older is in plain sight at the beginning and end of life. It's not till school that you first learn that in certain places you have to dress exactly like someone else or else face consequences.
As you grow older, this becomes a recurring theme. Managers must wear ties. Women must dress like men, in business suits, because it's a man's world. You should be able to tell a janitor apart from an account executive by their clothes. Clothes are prescribed to set the rich apart from the not-so-rich, the manager from the clerk. The poor can wear whatever they want.
For example, the dress codes for different ceremonies at the recent Ambani wedding were Indian Traditional, Indian Formal and Indian Chic. Invitees were expected to hire stylists and designers (usually expensive) to interpret those codes and craft three sets of garments, each of which could cost anything upward of R50 lakh, what with gold zari thread, inlaid pearls, diamonds and so on. The dress code assumed that the invitees came from privilege and wealth.
Now there's a dress code that rules me right out of the picture.
While an Ambani wedding dress code might signal how cringingly wealthy you are, most dress codes are designed to tell you that you are not unique or one of a kind. There's nothing special about you, and don't you get uppity. A dress code is a uniform to keep you in your place.
The most spectacular and brazen affront to dress codes was by a famous Indian, and he pulled it off in the land of dress codes, England. In 1931, attending the Second Round Table Conference in London to negotiate India's independence from British rule, Gandhi arrived in the garb he had made famous: a homespun cotton dhoti, a shawl over his shoulders and open sandals. Normal dress code at the House of Lords, especially for such momentous meetings, was a three-piece suit at least.
Britain was scandalised. Winston Churchill dismissed Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir". But Gandhi's fashion statement was deliberate and remains an iconic moment in anti-colonial resistance. It stated clearly: we don't need you and your textile imports, we're quite self-sufficient with our homespun khadi. When he said, "I am wearing this because this is how the poorest in India dress", he called attention to the abject poverty the British had inflicted on the country.
Above all, Gandhi's attire was an act of peaceful resistance and nonviolent protest. He had the moral high ground and it wasn't long before many Britons began to appreciate his principles.
As for Magnus Carlsen's fashion principles, they continue to pay him dividends. When he withdrew from the Blitz World Chess Championship of December 30, the International Chess Federation finally buckled and modified its dress code to allow jeans. Meanwhile, G-Star Raw, a jeans brand already in collaboration with Carlsen since 2010, triumphantly decided to revive its contract with him.
"Magnus made his position clear: denim is for everyone, always and everywhere - even on the chessboard," the brand exulted.
Magnus Carlsen will be featured in the G-Star Campaign launching in the second quarter of 2025.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.