In March 2022, a Dalit man named Jitendra Pal Meghwal was killed by upper-caste men in Rajasthan for sporting a moustache. News of similar lynchings and harassment of Dalit individuals are frequent, for wearing jeans, for riding fashionable bikes, for owning expensive phones, for wearing collars in ways that denote non-subservience. This follows a historical pattern of how caste has been enforced not just through labour, purity politics and exclusion, but as a fantasy of absolute biopolitical control, of control over depictions, self-fashioning, and aesthetic choices one gets to make.

Those who transgress caste norms of dressing and style are punished, humiliated, or killed, while upper-caste aesthetics are presented as refined and deserving of reverence. Moustaches, turbans, gold jewellery, footwear, certain fabrics, and even colours have historically been denied to oppressed castes. Brahmanical legal and religious texts like the Manusmriti explicitly codify sartorial hierarchy as a means of social control. The text restricts who may wear fine clothes, ornaments, or use perfumes, while repeatedly emphasising restraint and “humility” for Shudras — an injunction that functions to enforce visible inferiority. Shudras are forbidden from imitating the dress, speech, or bodily markers of upper castes; any aspiration to upward mobility is seen as a punishable offence.

Regional histories bring new dimensions to this relationship. In Kerala, caste dictated not only what one could wear, but how much of the body could be covered at all. In prohibiting lower-caste women from covering their breasts, brahmins in Kerala created a visible marker of caste. 

Fashion designers and studios carry on this legacy unthinkingly. The material production of fashion has overwhelmingly relied on the labour of Shudra and Dalit communities. Weaving, spinning, dyeing, leatherwork, metalwork, jewellery-making, growing cotton, harvesting silk — are caste-based occupations. The people who make clothes have historically been denied the right to wear them with dignity. The asymmetric rift between the lower-caste ‘kaareegar’ who survives on pittance while providing the technical expertise, and the Savarna designer/brand owner/’visionary’ who gets the critical and financial acclaim is no closer to being redressed than it was two hundred years ago.  On the other end, the lower-caste artisans continue to struggle with precarious markets, often to the brink of extinction. 

In parallel, globalised manufacturing has turned India into a hub for garment production. In factories across the country, workers — predominantly from lower-caste backgrounds — labour under precarious and often brutal conditions to sustain the global fashion economy. Caste, class, gender, and migration are starkly visible factors that shape who bears the cost of fashion.

For the third issue of Fourteen Magazine, titled “Caste and Fashion”, we invite pitches and submissions that critically examine these entanglements.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Caste and clothing in history, religion, and mythology

• Manusmriti, Hindu scriptures and sartorial law

• Sartorial rules, punishment, and transgression

• Regional histories of caste and dress

• Aesthetics of caste supremacy and resistance

• Gender, sexuality, and caste in fashion

• Weaving communities and handloom economies

• Visual and material cultures of indigenous communities

• Metalwork, jewellery, and handcrafts

• Leatherwork and caste

• Fashion brands, appropriation, and caste capitalism

• Garment workers, factories, labour conditions, and unions

What are we looking for?

• Ethnographic writing, articles, photo essays, personal essays, and other forms of non-fiction that speak to the theme from different perspectives, geographies and disciplines. We also welcome multimedia submissions, writing that uses previously collected data to write a new piece, or previously unreleased work that you think fits the topic.

• The final piece should be 1500-2500 words long.

• We prefer previously unreleased work, but are also open to accepting previously released work as long as the authors own the copyright and provide appropriate attribution.

How to pitch

• Send your pitch as a Microsoft Word file in an attachment to fourteenthemagazine@gmail.com

• Text should be in a readable 12 point font (such as Arial/Times New Roman/Calibri/Georgia) with 1.5 - double spacing.

• Emails should be titled “Issue 03 pitch - Your Name”.

• Please tell us a little about yourself in the body of the email, along with your background and what led you to write this essay.

• Two writing samples, preferably in the same category of non-fiction writing or using similar methodology.

What to include in your pitch

Your pitch should be up to 300 words long, and include the following:

• Background/context on the topic chosen

• What will you be exploring within the topic

• What is the methodology you will use and what form will the final piece take

• What perspective do you bring to this topic that is especially important

Remuneration

We pay selected contributors between INR 10,000 - 15,000 depending on the form and length of the piece.

Deadline for submitting pitches is 8th Feb 2026