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Ten cities, ten ways to get dressed

Street fashion in India is not one thing. Mumbai dresses for humidity and a train door. Delhi gets four months of layering and uses every day of them. Lucknow has one signature and knows how good it is. We wrote up ten cities to start with.

Yours next?

Same country, different wardrobes

A linen shirt that makes sense in Chennai is a mistake in a Delhi January. A quilted jacket from Jaipur would be unwearable in Kolkata in June. The weather decides half of what a city wears. The rest comes from its markets, its festivals and whatever its college crowd has decided this year.

So each guide here is written by hand, about one place: where people shop, what the climate allows, which weeks of the year everybody dresses up, and the local labels and crafts worth knowing. Streetwear stores sit next to block print and handloom, because that is how people dress. Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Lucknow are on the list beside the metros, because good dressing in India was never a metro thing.

City against city is also how the weekly city battles on Vybemo work. Read your own guide, then read the one for the city you argue with.

  1. MumbaiMaharashtraDressing for the humidity, the local and the after party, all in one fit.
  2. DelhiDelhi NCRA big city with a proper winter, and it dresses like it knows.
  3. BengaluruKarnatakaTwenty six degrees most days, so the jacket is a choice and not a need.
  4. HyderabadTelanganaOld city craft and Hitec City salaries, often in the same outfit.
  5. ChennaiTamil NaduCotton, linen and a silk tradition nobody else can touch.
  6. KolkataWest BengalFive days of Pujo, five new outfits, and a whole year spent planning them.
  7. PuneMaharashtraA student city, which means big ideas on small budgets.
  8. AhmedabadGujaratNine nights of Navratri, and textile history on every other street.
  9. JaipurRajasthanBlock print capital of the country, with a sneaker store now too.
  10. LucknowUttar PradeshChikankari on everything, and it turns out that works.

Your city is not here yet

Ten is where we started, and it is nowhere near the full picture. Indore, Surat, Kochi, Chandigarh, Guwahati, Shillong, Coimbatore, Patna and Bhubaneswar all dress in ways nobody has written down properly. If you are from one of them, you know more about it than we do.

The way to add a city is to post from it. Pick your city when you set up your profile, and it can field a side in a battle once enough people there are posting. You can also see how a fit gets rated.

Any city counts

Dress for your city

Get the app, pick the city you dress in and post a fit from it.

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