Why we stopped calling it 'ethnic wear'

The first time I noticed the word was on a department-store website in Sydney, sometime in 2014. There was a category called "Womenswear" and then, separately, another category called "Ethnic." Almost everything in "Ethnic" was Indian.

I thought about it for a while. The word "ethnic" presupposes a default. A jumper is just a jumper. A kurta is ethnic. A pair of jeans is workwear. A pair of churidars is ethnic. The very word does the work of marking some clothes as Other and some clothes as Normal.

What we say instead

On this site you will not see the word "ethnic." We say what the piece is. A saree is a saree. A lehenga is a lehenga. A kurta set is a kurta set. The category is the garment, not its perceived foreignness.

When we need a higher-level term we say "Indian wear" — descriptive, geographic, neutral. Or "Indo-western" for the fusion pieces. Both of these acknowledge the heritage without exoticising it.

Why this matters at our scale

We are a small atelier. We are not going to change Australian retail vocabulary by ourselves. But every site that uses "ethnic" as a category teaches its visitors a small lesson. Every site that doesn't, teaches a different one. We would rather teach the second lesson.

Words shape perception. Perception shapes purchase. Purchase shapes the next collection. Small choices made early, repeated daily, are how culture changes.