4 min readMay 24, 2026 07:07 AM IST First published on: May 24, 2026 at 07:07 AM ISTWatching the Miss World/Miss Universe competitions live on television in the mid-1990s was an exercise in entertainment — hours of visual spectacle with multiple elimination rounds, fashion parades, a Q&A and the final crowning of a Cinderella amidst tears of joy. Sushmita Sen, Lara Dutta, Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, Yukta Mookhey et al “represented” India. We were all in our 20s, them, me and my friends. We were happy for the winners as we thumbed the glossy pages of Femina a fortnight after, but thought nothing of the representation bit. It was merely girling the girl, with pageants being sponsored by cosmetic brands looking for a foothold in India. Many of us who were not even 5 feet tall, were not eligible to participate in such pageants in the first place.Thankfully, it was just once a year. The scarcity added value by following a simple economic law. Over the past fortnight, Met Gala happened. Before anyone could recover, Cannes was underway. It was high fashion, drama, movies, paparazzi, parades, poses, and photography for magazines and digital platforms that left one wondering about the modern-day hyperreality that Baudrillard famously talked of. As self-styled celebs walked the red carpet, a bored audience got exhausted with the unending #BTS, #grwm and the glib talk of being representatives of the country and its culture.AdvertisementIn the global stage, where openings and galas have become an everyday affair, walking the red carpet and calling it representation has become tiresome. It sure is a personal milestone, but to self-appoint oneself as cultural ambassadors, robed in bushy velvets studded with twinkling diamantes seems vapid in a world that is ridden with wars, sex scandals, scarcity and gaping inequalities.There is the heritage-vintage axis, handcraft and handmade, for the perfect pirouette that makes one’s head dizzy with pigeon-blood rubies, vivid green emeralds and other rocks that are deliberately meant to stun. And even as social media zooms in on the details of the clothes and jewellery, there is also equal visibility to people standing in queues for fuel and children begging for food amidst war. We have flung out decency through the gilded windows of capitalism a while ago, as an unwanted distraction.Art and culture has an intellectual heft. Ever since interdisciplinarians looked at body, politics and fashion through the lens of postmodernism, the paradigm of fashion has become a crisp currency of the leisure class to carry. Add to it the rise of social media and the discourse of aesthetics, there are now oil barons, influencers, pop culture icons and tech billionaires, who now want visibility, respectability, and acceptability as patrons of art and culture.AdvertisementAnd so what unfolds on a daily basis is an airbrushed vulgarity — in the practise of fashion as seen on Meta platforms, where photoshop and AI tools compete for a lazy perfection and the 1,000-word caption journalism that evaluates who ‘nailed it’, ‘ate it’ and ‘left no crumbs’. The horde of influencers who lip sync to handcraft, the collective chest heaving when a heiress points to her mom’s jewels — a Nizam’s sarpech that had crawled down to the thoracic spine from head. It all reminds one of the title of a 16th century essay by Montaigne “that the soul expends its passions upon false objects, where the true are wanting”.you may likeWe are all participants of this great Foucauldian panopticon where we are not only looking at each other but there is data surveillance too. But are we representative of a country and a culture that is as vast and varied as ours? Are the auric embroideries and anorexic pouts inside voluminous capes paying obeisance to Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings representation?The writer is a career bureaucratEditor (Planning & Projects) Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column