WALK LIKE A GIRL: A Memoir
by Prabal Gurung
Viking. 320 pages, $32.
FASHION DESIGNER Prabal Gurung is only 46 years old: too young, one may think, to merit a memoir. And yet, in less than half a century he has experienced enough emotional and professional highs and lows to put any rollercoaster to shame. His name, according to Gurung, means “the strongest one.” In my native tongue, Bengali, “prabal” means “powerful” or “intense.” What these meanings have in common is the sense of power, and that power is palpable in his memoir, Walk Like a Girl.
In the foreword, he addresses the difficulty Americans have in pronouncing his name: “Do you have a nickname? Can we call you P or PG?” “No,” he protests, “My name is Prabal. Like ‘trouble’ with a P.” “Trouble” crops up at least six times in the first few chapters, before disappearing from the text, but Prabal continues to make trouble—one could say “necessary trouble”—all through the memoir, causing discomfort to homophobes, racists, conservative arbiters of taste in the fashion world, and his father. Slowly and quietly, Prabal navigates the choppy waters of life with a grit worthy of his extraordinary mother and ever-supportive siblings.
At times, the memoir reads like Shyam Selvadurai’s loosely autobiographical novel Funny Boy, especially when he talks of dressing up in his mother’s clothes, much to the disapproval of his father. His mother, Durga Rana, makes an early appearance in the narrative and stays, reassuringly, until the end. The reader sees the calm defiance of her character when she walks in on little Prabal trying to apply lipstick. She takes charge, applies the lipstick properly, and says: “It’s okay, leave it on. You look beautiful.” An average mom she ain’t.
While born in Singapore, where his father worked, Prabal moved to Nepal as a child and found out in school that his comportment was regarded as feminine and thus troublesome. At boarding school, he was subjected to hazing, and—at the hands of a teacher—sexual abuse. But what makes the narration of the incident troublingly honest, and therefore powerful, are his feelings of being both scared and aroused. Many who have been sexually abused would recognize this confusion.
At this time, he was also watching American television and poring over U.S. magazines, which gave him a taste of what life might be like in the country where he would eventually become a citizen. But before that he spent time in Delhi and Mumbai, India, where he observed that homophobia was combined with racism. But it was also in India that he got his first glimpse of the world of gay parties. He witnessed the hypocrisy of fashion designers who are on the surface rebellious and iconoclastic while simultaneously being classist and disparaging of people who don’t speak English well. In India he fell in love and had his heart broken by a young man called Abhiyaan (meaning “long journey”).
He began his own long journey when he traveled to the U.S. to study at Parsons School of Design. There he encountered more racism and homophobia, but also the opportunity to work at Bill Blass as a design assistant. What is moving about this period of his life is his feeling of connection with the humble seamstresses: “They reminded me of my mother and sister.”
Soon enough, Anna Wintour makes an appearance in the story, and we may expect her to behave like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Instead, she is full of sensible advice and encouraging words. Once he decides to branch out on his own, there follows a slow trickle of famous names beginning to wear Prabal Gurung designs: Oprah Winfrey, Demi Moore, Michelle Obama, and Sarah Jessica Parker, to name just a few.
Walk Like a Girl is an unflinchingly honest account of a life lived precariously, never accepted fully in any circle he moves in. His acknowledgement that even fashion design is political, his clear-sighted awareness of his own complicity in some systems of oppression, and his conscious attempts to challenge those systems makes this a memoir that may earn an important place in the history of fashion.
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Niladri Chatterjee is a senior lecturer in the English Dept. at the University of Kalyani, India.
