Body image in fashion and the return of the sculpted hip

The perception of body image in fashion is shifting, and the change is settling just below the waist. For decades, the hip was largely treated as a problem—flattened or disguised in an industry built around vertical lines. It broke the line of an outfit and carried an awkward truth fashion preferred to ignore: women’s bodies are meant to do many things, not just look good. They age. They change. They bear children. 

Now hips are in full view—enlarged and emphatic on runways and red carpets, more often engineered than embraced. Built with padding, panniers, corsetry, and shapewear, they arrive as part of a new lucrative silhouette, as bodies are urged to shrink through fad diets and pharmaceutical shortcuts like Ozempic. Fashion reconstructs curves while managing the body. What appears like progress is shaped by the same old anxieties, simply rearranged.

Indian fashion’s negotiation with the hip

This contradiction is beginning to sharpen in Indian couture. The hip is suddenly everywhere—named, shaped, and debated—even as the bodies beneath stay slim. 

At Tarun Tahiliani’s 30th anniversary show in Hyderabad in January 2026, the hip made itself known. The opening looks drew on the lineage of nautch girls, courtesan-dancers whose voluptuous curves once symbolised power and social presence. Models channelled Tilly Kettle’s Dancing Girls—a 19th-century series of paintings that exoticised Indian courtesan bodies—their silhouettes pushed outward in crushed muslins, metallic sheens, and bronze brocades. Low on the torso sat a detachable, boned hip cage—the tashreef bustle (a structured frame designed to exaggerate the hips)—an addition, not an extension of the body itself.

“I wanted to put that shape back into view,” says Tahiliani. “In India, sensuality and structure have always existed in dialogue. If you don’t show it clearly, how do you even begin to talk about it?” In the West, curves had to be engineered through bustles, farthingales, and corsetry. “Here, the body already had the curve.”

Tahiliani is candid about the pressures shaping this moment: the Ozempic era, celebrity bodies, Kim Kardashian. But his sharper irritation is closer to home. “I see Indian women constantly squeezing themselves into Western-cut clothes that don’t suit their bodies. Wear a salwar kameez to dinner and you’re labelled a behenji, so women pick tight clothes for themselves even when it doesn’t feel natural.”

The bustle, argues Tahiliani, made the point without tokenism. “It makes a stronger statement than placing one ‘bigger’ model in a show,” he says. In that sense, the exaggerated hip works like the padded shoulder once did: power, built-in—authority through construction rather than autonomy. Only now, that authority sits lower, closer to the body’s most charged meanings.

If Tahiliani externalised the hip, Gaurav Gupta contained it. In his collection for Paris Couture Week 2026—The Divine Androgyne—the body was held taut. Waists tightly corseted, almost immobilised; from a narrow centre, volume unfurled at the hips.

“For me, this contrast is about tension and release,” explains Gupta. “The corseted waist holds the body in a moment of stillness, almost discipline, while the sculpted hips carry movement, power, and expansion.” He frames the body as “architecture of emotion”—not to correct, but to hold contradiction. 

The idea originates from Advaita, an Indian philosophy of non-duality, which sees existence through interdependence, not opposition. “Softness versus strength, structure versus fluidity, vulnerability versus control” are not binaries to resolve for Gupta. They coexist, sometimes within the same seam. The hip here is not a reference to a decade or an outside idea of femininity. “It is a sculptural choice,” he insists, one that lends the body presence, not instruction.

“WEAR A SALWAR KAMEEZ TO DINNER AND YOU’RE LABELLED A  BEHENJI,  SO WOMEN PICK TIGHT CLOTHES FOR THEMSELVES EVEN WHEN IT DOESN’T FEEL NATURAL”– Tarun Tahilaini

However, not everyone wants to amplify the hip. At Chorus, Karishma Swali resists isolating any one part. “We approach the body as a living landscape,” she says, shaped by movement, memory, and sensation. Volume emerges through drape, embroidery, and slow construction. “Structure supports expression rather than directing it,” explains Swali, keeping garments fluid.

The history of hips and body image in Indian fashion

Indian culture has never lacked ideas about what the hip signifies.

Art historian and curator Deepthi Sasidharan, founder-director of Eka Archiving Services,  places the current conversation within a much longer visual history. In early Indian art, female forms were governed by textual systems like the Shilpa Shastras and the Agamas, which codified proportions between the torso and hips. Fertility goddesses, Yakshis, and apsaras appeared with generous hips and soft bellies. “Leanness was never an ideal,” she says. Skeletal bodies meant fear, austerity or something monstrous.

Indian clothing followed these bodies. Drapes, drawstrings, and wraps adjusted to age, season, and pregnancy. “There is no traditional Indian garment that comes with a fixed waist size,” adds Sasidharan. The anxiety around hiding or squeezing the hip, she argues, is a colonial inheritance, shaped by Western tailoring and imported fashion and beauty standards.

In Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 60s, actresses like Sadhana and Asha Parekh wore padded structures under saris to create the era’s sanctioned curve. “They were literally called fake bottoms,” recalls Sasidharan.

“WE’VE GONE FROM ONE IMPOSSIBLE STANDARD TO ANOTHER. BE SMALL HERE, EXTRA-LARGE THERE” - Neelakshi Singh

What really shifts are the fashion and beauty standards used to frame it. “Fashion is a collective agreement,” says Sasidharan. “It is a group of people deciding to dress the same way for a moment in time.” What seems progressive on the runway rarely reaches lived reality. “This trend is never going to percolate into a working woman’s life.” 

Unrealistic body image in fashion and the pressure to conform 

From her clinical practice,  Samindara Sawant, psychologist, trauma-focused therapist and co-founder of Disha Counseling Center, sees the psychological fallout most sharply among younger women. Thinness remains the ideal, now paired with curves in the right places—body standards in fashion that few can meet. “It’s a contradictory brief,” she says. “Regardless of body size, women end up feeling not good enough.”

More young women now arrive with fixed ideas about how they should look, shaped by fashion imagery and social media. Many respond with punishing diets, fitness regimens or clinical and cosmetic fixes. The result is constant self-monitoring, where appearance eclipses everything else. “Even as ideals appear to change, the pressure to improve never lets up. Visibility doesn’t bring acceptance. It just raises the bar,” adds Sawant.

Content creator Neelakshi Singh, who has spoken about clothes, shapewear, and unrealistic body image in fashion, knows the impact of these mixed messages. “I’ve been criticised for my body, so to suddenly see that shape celebrated on the runway feels strange. I understand the craft and I’m drawn to aesthetics, but the contradiction stays.” 

For Singh, it’s about engineering one specific shape most of us don’t naturally have. “We’ve gone from one impossible standard to another. Be small here, extra-large there,” she says. 

“THERE IS NO TRADITIONAL INDIAN GARMENT THAT COMES WITH A FIXED WAIST SIZE” - Deepthi Sasidharan

Singh is open about her own choices: shapewear, steel-boned corsets, lip filler. “I feel the appeal of these tools,” she admits. “And I resent needing them. Both things are true.” Some days her body feels like “raw material that needs an intervention to be right.” On others, she sees the problem more clearly. “The issue isn’t my body but the stories we’re being told about which bodies deserve to exist without modification.”

When that contradiction stops feeling personal and starts to feel collective, it loses the language of choice. Fashion may move its emphasis from shoulder to hip, from waist to curve, but thedemand remains the same: women must keep adjusting themselves to fit the moment—a cycle that continues to define body image issues in fashion.