When Ali Sethi stepped onto the Coachella stage in 2023 wearing a flared angrakha styled by Fahad Hussayn, the outfit caused more disruption back home in Pakistan than it did in the Californian desert. Clothed in the language of princely courts, Sethi’s moment was meant as a reclamation of aesthetics, memory, and cultural fluency. But in Pakistan, it was instead widely read as provocation for the sake of it. What was he wearing? Why was he dressed like that? The mockery was swift, often vicious, couched in the familiar language of moral panic.

Garments like the flared angrakha and voluminous shalwars, with their exuberance, became symbols of everything the colonial mission sought to “correct.” It was more than clothing—it was a threat to the narrative of rational masculinity. To be trusted and modern, men had to look the part: tailored suits, buttoned collars, neutral tones.

This pressure was enforced not by law, but by access. South Asian men increasingly adopted colonial dress codes not always from aspiration, but strategy. To work in colonial administration or be seen as educated, one had to dress like the colonizer. Women remained mostly domestic and therefore largely sartorially untouched by European presence, but men negotiated colonial space daily wearing suits, sweating through ties, trading their sartorial legacy for a borrowed uniform. Male visual culture collapsed inward.

In the postcolonial era, national leaders cultivated looks rejecting both royal opulence and colonial mimicry. Nehru’s eponymous jacket was tailored, minimal, symbolic of self-discipline. These silhouettes embodied political ideals, not personal pleasure. Nationalism demanded decorum, not dazzle. With the collapse of royal courts and traditional patronage, there were fewer public spaces for male fashion as performance or art. The court musician, scholar-poet, landowning aesthete, all disappeared from daily life. With them, the clothing that animated them vanished too.

The same suspicion resurfaced recently when Abdul Rehman, founder of a small, sustainable fashion brand called Aangan, released hand block-printed kurtas for men—soft, flowing cotton pieces rooted in centuries-old craft. Instead of celebration, a vocal Twitter crowd dismissed them as “too effeminate.” What was meant as a return to indigenous print language and silhouette provoked anxieties about gender, aesthetics, and masculinity’s narrow bandwidth.

Abdul Rehman says: “Elements like florals, colors, and embroidery bring a sense of home and comfort to people’s eyes, something we’ve lost in the process of so-called ‘urbanisation’. My kurtas were not a novel statement, just a celebration of our non-colonised, non-institutionalised selves. I’ve worn such kurtas with flowers on them while travelling remotely for my textile research and never felt that weird gaze. In fact, people appreciated them, some recalled similar things they used to wear, and sometimes even showed me their ornamented clothes. This gaze only exists in cities. Among rural communities in Sindh and Punjab, clothes are still unimaginable without color regardless of gender. Our traditional garments have always spoken of weather, purpose, and passion (not gender) and were multifunctional and fluid. So yes, putting florals on a man’s kurta today could be political for some. Because it defies that fragile, colonially produced idea of a standardised masculine man.”

This points to a crucial gap in the discourse: why is it that ridicule for traditional or adorned menswear surfaces primarily in cities? Abdul Rehman’s observation that this kind of backlash doesn’t occur in rural areas demands deeper reflection. Perhaps it’s because people in urban centres more deeply embedded in postcolonial hierarchies of capital, social mobility, and aspiration are more invested in upholding colonial ideals of masculinity. The need to appear “modern,” employable, respectable - qualities once defined by European standards - still haunt city dwellers. In contrast, rural communities, while not untouched by these forces, retain stronger ties to forms of indigeneity where dress remains expressive, symbolic, and unburdened by colonial anxiety. Ironically, the desire to look progressive in cities has created a mindset more tethered to colonial ideas of respectability than those in villages often dismissed as “backward.”

More remarkable than the mockery, however, is the absence of memory. That we cannot recognize our own heritage unless flattened into costume drama speaks volumes about colonial reprogramming’s success. A traditional clothing item worn today is seen as performance, not lineage. A necklace on a man provokes anxiety, not curiosity. There is little room for self-expression within masculinity defined by caution. The trauma isn’t that the clothes are gone, but that we’ve been trained not to miss them.

Most point to the modern men’s kameez with its turndown collar, curved hemline, and cuffed sleeves as inherently South Asian and traditional. But that design is deeply influenced by 19th-century British clothing. Before colonial contact, kameez were flared, collarless or band-collared, straight-hemmed, and had gusseted sleeves. The cut we now accept as “authentic” with shirt collars and plackets has roots in British undergarments and military shirts from the 1850s onward.

Designer Fahad Hussayn, who dressed Ali Sethi in the Coachella look, sees this as a challenge worth engaging with. “I’ve never made anything for the public; it’s always a personal moment,” Fahad says. “It’s about acknowledging craft, honouring struggle, and creating a moment worth remembering. The reaction is inevitable, but the polarity of it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether fashion was able to serve its purpose. The discomfort people feel with volume or ornamentation on men it’s a colonized “gender” phobia, compounded by religious and political suppression. We’ve been terrorised into letting go of our visual heritage. And now, anything that doesn’t fit into the rulebook of buttoned-up masculinity is seen as a threat. But for some of us, fashion isn’t just for approval. Some days, it’s just for yourself.”

Rehan Bashir, who is an aesthete, a classical dancer and the Head of Womenswear Design at Sapphire Textiles, embraces traditional menswear and adornment to stay connected to heritage. “I am passionate about heritage and traditional craft and design. Dressing up a certain way makes me feel rooted and connected to our very glorious and rich past. The process of adornment is uplifting especially now with so much hate and destruction on our screens. It’s a privilege to explore and connect with my past through textiles, jewelry, and design.” He acknowledges that men often avoid ornamentation due to colonial influence and changing cultural identities shaped by religion and the Partition: “The pace at which people live their lives has radically changed… driving to work in an elaborate kalidaar and working a desk job was no longer viable.” For Rehan, reclaiming traditional flair is not resistance but a joyful celebration of culture.

But today, anything too beautiful on a man gets side-eyed. You can wear a kurta, sure—but keep it straight, sober, stiff. No frills, no fuss. Definitely no flair. We’ve taught ourselves that minimalism is masculinity. But if a man wears anything printed or flared, jokes and jibes follow. It’s not always easy to wear something dramatic in public when everyone’s stuck in basic pajama-kameez. But there’s power in reclaiming these shapes, especially with context and meaning. When did we become so obsessed with not standing out? Why is our idea of masculinity so fragile and starved for imagination?

We need to unlearn the reflex of labeling some things as inherently “ours”, and others as too foreign or feminine. The truth is, much of what we see as traditional is already shaped by Western influence. To move forward, we must first understand how we got here. But there is also a need to look more closely around us: inward and backward, yes, but also laterally to the rural communities that remain far more embedded in indigenous dress traditions. In their aesthetic confidence lies a lesson: the past is not a foreign country. It’s still very much part of our present. We’ve just trained ourselves to look away.