Festive Dressing Should Not Hurt

By Ramola Bachchan, Founder, First Resort  ·  18 October 2026

Every October the same thing happens to a great many women in India. The festive calendar fills up, the cupboard is opened, and out comes an outfit chosen for how it looked in a mirror, not for how it will feel four hours into an evening.

By the end of the night the blouse is cutting in, the fabric is heavy and hot, the dupatta has needed rescuing a dozen times, and the woman wearing it is counting the minutes until she can go home and change. Then she does it again the following week.

I have never understood why we accept this. Festive clothes are judged at minute one and worn at hour five. I think they should be designed for hour five.

The tyranny of the one-night outfit

A lot of festive dressing is built around a single moment: the entrance, the photograph, the first compliment. Everything is optimised for that moment, and the rest of the evening is something to be endured.

But the festive season is not one evening. It is weeks of them. Pujas, card parties, family lunches, a wedding or two, the long nights around Diwali, Karva Chauth for those who keep it. A woman who dresses for each of those as though it were the only one ends up with a cupboard of clothes she has worn once and a body that is tired of being punished for celebrating.

I would much rather a woman owned fewer festive pieces that she reaches for again and again, styled differently each time, than a rail of outfits that each had one good hour.

Being seen twice in the same outfit was once treated as a small social failure. I think that idea has had its day. Wearing something you love to three different occasions is not a lack of imagination. It is knowing what suits you, and it is a far kinder way to treat both your wardrobe and the people who made it.

Festive clothes are judged in the mirror at minute one and worn at hour five. I would rather design for hour five.

Weight is not the same as worth

There is a belief, never quite said out loud, that a festive outfit has to be heavy to be serious. The more zari, the more layers, the stiffer the fabric, the more occasion it carries.

I don't agree. Some of the most beautiful work I know is light: hand embroidery on silk that still moves, a velvet that drapes rather than stands up on its own, a neckline worked so carefully that it catches the light without weighing the garment down. Richness is in the craft and the cloth, not in the kilograms.

A garment that lets you breathe, sit cross-legged at a puja, dance a little, eat properly and still look composed at midnight is not a lesser festive garment. It is a better one.

Every size is festive

Too often, festive ranges are designed for a narrow band of bodies and then stretched, reluctantly, for everyone else. The larger sizes arrive as an afterthought, with less of the detail, a different cut, sometimes a different price. The message is clear enough: this celebration was not really planned with you in mind.

That is one reason we make our styles from XS to 8XL, at the same price, with the same work on them. A woman in a size 8XL is going to the same Diwali party as everyone else. She deserves the same embroidery, the same silk and the same care in the cut.

Ease is not a concession to larger bodies, either. A silhouette that falls from the shoulder, a kaftan or a relaxed co-ord, flatters almost everyone, and it is the women who have never been offered it who are often the most surprised by how good it feels.

Tradition can travel

None of this is an argument against tradition. I love the rituals of the season, the colour, the gold, the sense of a household dressing up together. What I question is the idea that honouring a festival requires discomfort.

The modern festive wardrobe can be both. A kaftan in a jewel-toned silk with hand-worked detail at the yoke is festive. So is a velvet jacket over a simple kurta, or a co-ord that goes from a morning puja to an evening party with a change of earrings. For women celebrating far from India, in colder weather, at a community hall or a friend's house, that flexibility matters even more.

What I want, every October, is for a woman to come home after the last guest has left and realise she never once thought about her clothes. That she spent the evening with her people, not managing her outfit. That, to me, is what festive dressing is for.

Ramola Bachchan is the founder of First Resort, a size-inclusive Indian resort wear label sized XS to 8XL.

Also shop: Festive Wear  ·  Kaftans

Also read: Diwali 2026: A 5-Day Outfit Calendar  ·  What to Wear for Karva Chauth