Naturally Tan Page 3

  It was definitely not what anyone else was wearing, but I didn’t care. Gay Tan was here to stay.

  It was by hanging at my granddad’s factory from a young age that I realized expressing yourself through fashion was even possible—that you can alter and make things that can serve as an extension of who you are. I truly believe that without that exposure, I never would have turned into who I am today. I needed that window into garment production to realize that I could create my own pieces. When I was fifteen, I got my first job at a store, and thus my first paycheck, and I used every penny to have clothes professionally custom-made for me. It was a time before Google, so I used my resources. I found an ad for a seamstress at a local newspaper and arranged to meet her at a tiny little storefront in the quiet part of the shopping area. Inside, the smell of Grandma’s house strongly lingered. Even she was surprised that this young guy wanted his clothes custom-made, but she told me she’d give me a fair price, as she was as in love with the clothes as I was.

  I was fifteen and getting my clothes custom-made! That’s how much importance I put on what I was wearing.

  The first thing I had her make me was a camel-coloured jacket (I got the fabric from the local fabric store), which hit just below my waist. It had a full sleeve and a bold, standing collar. It was detailed with brown leather buttons. Perfectly timeless. I had designed this jacket in my head months prior, and it was just as beautiful in person as I’d hoped it’d be. I loved it. I so wish I still had it, but I must have lost it in one of my many moves.

  When I was twelve, my granddad’s factory closed down, and in the years that followed, I didn’t see him as much. He was a typical older South Asian man from Kashmir, which meant he worked hard to provide for his family and was definitely not much of a talker. But once I started my own business, every time I went to his home, I talked to him about my work. My business really brought me back to him. I could tell he was proud of everything that I achieved, because he out of everyone understood how hard it was. He was so shocked that I ended up in this industry. He knew I loved visiting his factory and creating garments of my own, but he never thought I would turn it into a business.

  The rest of my extended family did regular jobs—working in fields like finance, for the local council, in HR—that I didn’t relate to on any level. They were respectable, but I had no desire to do any of that. I wanted a life that didn’t revolve around a nine-to-five that was the same job day in and day out. I wanted more excitement and, quite honestly, I wanted the potential to be wealthy and retire well, not just work to pay the rent and bills. It felt empowering that I had an example in my grandfather and that I was able to say, “I know you may not agree with this, but Big Dad [our term of endearment for him] did this, and it was something to be proud of.”

  PSA: JEANS

  My husband, Rob, is constantly on the hunt for the perfect pair of jeans. He’s been on the hunt for years. I have a body shape that lends itself well to jeans—I’m a standard size thirty, and skinny jeans work well on me. Rob, however, has different proportions. He works out a lot and has created a fantastic set of legs and a butt. Lucky me.

  He purchased a new pair of jeans every fortnight for like two years until I finally sat him down and said (barked), “There is no such thing as the perfect jean.” You can like the jeans, but they’ll never be perfect. I would love to say he listened and accepted that fact. He didn’t. He just purchases jeans less frequently now, still hoping that the new one will finally work for both his tiny waist and his thunder thighs.

  This is true for everybody. Clothes you buy at a retail store aren’t for everyone’s body. Jeans can be especially hard to find, so you wind up spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for jeans, only to discover they’re not working for you. To anyone currently hunting for the perfect pair: they don’t exist.

  But when it comes to jeans, my advice to you is to do it in person. Most things you can buy online, but for jeans, it’s better to go try them on and purchase them in real life. That’s the only way to make sure it works for you before parting with your cash. Also, take a bunch of options and sizes into that fitting room and get to work. This is not the time to be a lazy shopper. Get your arse into as many jeans as possible. They won’t be perfect, but they’ll be the best you can find, because you’ll have done all you can to whittle it down to that pair.

  If you are desperately struggling with denim, I think the biggest issue people have is the waist. If you’ve got hips and a bum, you’ll need to size up so it fits those parts, but then it won’t fit in the waist.

  If this sounds like you, then you can get your jeans altered, but it will cost you. You can reduce the size of the waistband or get darts, which will work to get them to fit you better. Go to a tailor who specializes in denim, and have them reduce the waist and keep everything else the same.

  If you want to be that hipster cool dude rocking raw denim, just know you’re never going to find that perfect fit, because it takes months or even years to break them in and take on your shape. That won’t be fruitful for you.

  When it comes to denim, as with anything in life, you have to be willing to compromise.

  DOS AND DON’TS FOR WEARING JEANS:

  DO

  •    Go for mid-rise, as it is universally flattering.

  •    Try high-waisted if you’re looking to push your style further.

  •    Go for a slim or skinny leg, which are the easiest cuts to wear.

  •    Go for darker washes, especially if you’re not confident with your style. Darker shades are easier to pair with other clothing.

  DON’T

  •    Low-rise jeans are the least flattering on most body types. Avoid them.

  •    Those boot-cut jeans make you look shorter and wider. Throw them out. You can thank me later.

  •    Super ripped or shredded jeans are a big statement, so wear sparingly.

  •    When it comes to harem / drop crotch, if you’re not confident with that style, these are a lot of look.

  MOUTHWASH

  It’s amazing how when you’re a kid, somebody can mention something once, and it stays with you forever.

  I spent so many of my younger years trying desperately to make other people comfortable. If I were in a predominantly Caucasian setting, I tried not to seem too South Asian. I was hyperaware of smells. I never said, “Ooh, let’s go for Indian food,” because people made fun of kids like me for smelling like Indian food. We couldn’t help it, doucheBs; that was what was cooked in our homes. But I was determined to avoid smelling of Indian food at all costs. (Also, side note for everyone out there thinking, Tan, you said you were Pakistani. What’s with the Indian food? Pakistan and India were the same country until the late 1940s, so our cuisine is one and the same.)

  Even though I was so aware of odors, hygiene was something that didn’t naturally occur to me. Once I hit puberty, a female cousin who was much older than I took me aside and told me, very casually and calmly, “You’ve hit a certain age, and you should probably bathe more and start wearing deodorant.” I took it to the extreme. I started showering twice a day, every day, and I still do.

  It also never occurred to me that oral smells were a thing.

  One day in class, a girl was making noise with a couple of her girlfriends, and the teacher told her to change her seat. “Go sit next to Tan,” she said.

  The girl mumbled, “Not next to dog breath.” She had a mean look on her face as she said it. I sat there working away, but I looked up for a millisecond, long enough to see it.

  I will never forget it—the way it was said, the exact words, the exact tone. It is one of a couple of things I am governed by today that I can never un-hear.

  I thought, Oh my god! I’ve got dog breath? I had never even considered what my breath might smell like. That next day, lord knows, I always had a fucking mint in my mouth. To this day, I use mouthwash a minimum of ten times a day. I always
carry mouthwash with me. It’s a small bottle that I carry around in my bag that holds enough for a good ten to fifteen rinses. If I can’t bring a bag with me, I bring along a spray to see me through until I can get home to my mouthwash. I will never, ever get to a place where somebody can say I’ve got bad breath.

  But emotions aside, that comment legit changed my life, and here is why. For most of my life, I was terrified of the dentist. I went as a kid, but I became so afraid that I didn’t go back for seventeen years. During that fateful visit, I had a tooth removed, and to do that, they had to inject the roof of my mouth. They didn’t use any nitro, so I felt every second of that intense pain. I was scared off for years. When I finally did go (just last year), I only had a couple of cavities. Because I used mouthwash so often, I had miraculously warded off any serious issues. So yes, “dog breath” was one of the worst things anyone could have said to me, but it also fucking saved me.

  That girl was the queen bee, but she peaked in high school. Go ahead, have that moment, Emma. She recently reached out to me on Facebook, telling me how she was so proud of how far I’ve come. I did not respond.

  That, dear reader, is the sweetest fucking revenge.

  BOLLYWOOD

  When I was a child, I was obsessed with Bollywood movies. Everyone from my community was obsessed with them, too. It’s often surprising to Western people, because Hollywood is so massive, but Bollywood is actually bigger. They put out more movies than any other country in the world.

  I came to understand the world through Indian movies. The thing I’ve always found fascinating (and still do) about Bollywood is that it provides a weird loophole in our culture. Growing up, we weren’t allowed to watch shows or movies that encouraged romantic love—what we called “love marriages.” (Now that I’m free from the bondage of my community, I see what a difference this is! As a kid, such marriages seemed taboo and like something only Caucasian people did.)

  But in Bollywood movies, the characters were allowed to have love marriages. And because they were brown people who spoke our language, it was okay to watch them. (If these exact same movies had featured white Western people, it wouldn’t have been allowed.) I bought these movies to get a glimpse into a world I didn’t quite understand—a world I knew we weren’t allowed to be part of but wanted to be.

  When it comes to Bollywood movies, every single one is a musical. Back in the ’90s, there was only one Bollywood movie that wasn’t a musical. It bombed and it bombed hard. They tried something different, and they realized that Indians go to the movies very, very regularly and they expect to see singing and dancing. Bollywood movies are always full of saturated colours and incredible backdrops that make the experience visually stunning for the audience. They definitely don’t cheap out—most of them are filmed in exotic locations (beaches, mountains, palaces) that transport you to the most magical moments imaginable. It was such a fairy-tale experience for young me, and I wanted to be immersed in it.

  More than anything, I wanted to be one of those people in those Bollywood movies. I think even as a kid I knew that I wouldn’t be the Bollywood actor who was trying to get the woman. Instead, I thought I would be the one to be saved by the Bollywood actor. And for whatever reason, it never occurred to me that that wasn’t an okay belief.

  I told everybody who would listen that I wanted to be a Bollywood actor. Now, in order to be a Bollywood actor, you need to be able to act and dance, which I could not do. And here’s the kicker—you also need to be able to read Hindi, and I couldn’t do that, either. Reading Hindi was the only way you could ever practice and memorize your lines. Yet somehow I convinced myself that I would be such a formidable actor that they would make an exception for me and find a way to help me learn my lines phonetically. Did I mention that I was also completely delusional as a kid?

  I remember my siblings taking the piss out of me, saying, “You know this is never going to happen, right, you idiot?”

  To which I would reply, “Shut up, man. I’m totally going to find a way to make it happen!”

  I was so deluded that when I was a teenager, I decided that when I went to sixth form (a two-year elective program that happens after high school but before university), I would take a performing arts class. Apparently, I thought our sixth-form performing-arts department was so killer that I could learn a new language and become an international superstar within a few short semesters. I clearly didn’t realize that it wasn’t just one step and then overnight I’d suddenly become the next Shah Rukh Khan (a.k.a. the Indian Tom Hanks).

  In the last few months of high school, every student had to go to career counseling to talk about their plans for the future. The counselor was a sinewy woman who looked like she really needed a good meal. She had long brown hair that hadn’t seen a brush in a long time, and she had one those faces where, even if she were in the US, you would see her and immediately think, You’ve got some strong British heritage going on there, lady. At the time, I thought she was forty-five or fifty, but looking back on it, she was probably around thirty.

  So I told my counselor I was going to be a Bollywood actor. I was sixteen—and I probably should have known better. But I very confidently told her, “I’m going to sixth form for performing arts, and then I’m going to move to India to be the next Bollywood star.”

  She squinted at me, very confused, and said, “Do you really mean this?” I told her I did. And then she tried to tell me how to make my dreams a reality. God bless that woman for not laughing in my dumb-arse face and telling me to plan a backup career. Instead, she started breaking it down for me. She said, “Sign up for performing arts class, then take this class to learn to read Hindi, then go to India and see if you even like being there…” She didn’t discourage me, which was probably a flaw on her part (I’m assuming she was fired shortly after that), because the next thing you know, I joined the gosh-darn performing arts class.

  Here’s the thing: performing arts class is not the same as performing arts school. An actual school sounds amazing—you’re doing theatrical shit all day, you’re working on your craft, you’re learning, learning, learning. But here, performing arts was just one of three areas I was concentrating on, and I took a class for one hour, three or four days a week.

  Beyond that, the entire endeavor was a bit, shall we say, challenging for me.

  You see, in performing arts class, you had to sing, dance, and act.

  As previously stated, I can neither dance nor act, and I most definitely can’t sing.

  Still, I thought this was a good idea. What the fuck happened to me as a kid, I don’t know. I’m positive somebody must have thrown me down the stairs one too many times, making me so stupid that I couldn’t see the absurdity of my grand plans.

  I used to sing Céline Dion in my bedroom. In particular, I used to sing both parts of the Céline Dion / Barbra Streisand hit track “Tell Him.” It’s incredible. I stood in my bedroom and rehearsed. “Tell him … tell him that the sun and moon rise in his eyes…” (Wait, have you heard this song? Do you know what I’m talking about? If not, take a break from this chapter to go find it on Spotify and enjoy the splendor of the song. But then come back to me because you and I are only just getting acquainted.) And I thought, I can hear myself, and clearly I’m great. How have I not been discovered by Simon Cowell or Usher yet?

  But when it came time to audition for the annual musical, the way it worked was that everyone in the class, all twenty or so students, had to sing all at once, and the teachers came and tapped you on the shoulder to sit down, which meant that you sucked. Sure enough, I was the first person to have their shoulder tapped to say, “Sit the fuck down, you dumb bitch.”

  I did not get cast in the play. So in protest, I didn’t go see it. I heard the guy who got the lead went nowhere in life, so there ya fucking go. JK, JK, JK.

  Anyway! Every time we had to sing, I would die a little inside, because I realized I couldn’t really hold a note.

  I also can’t dance, but I hid
e it well in public. What I mean by this is, when I’m dancing in the mirror—and really, who doesn’t dance for themselves in the mirror?—I know that Beyoncé would be impressed. I know she would say, “Tan, I didn’t even realize that was you and not one of my backup dancers.” Alone, I’m incredible. But when I’m dancing and I see other people, my limbs take on a life of their own and they insist on embarrassing me. “You should not do this publicly,” they say. So I stop.

  Every time we had to do something dance-y in class, I felt this burning, nauseous feeling. I still get that now when I have to do something I’m not comfortable with. Now I understand it’s the same embarrassment I felt when we started filming Queer Eye, which stems from the fear that people will think you’re an imposter. When it came to dancing, I maybe could have done it. But I didn’t have the confidence back then to be able to pull it off.

  For the final part of the class, in order to get our credits to pass, we had to write a six-minute monologue and perform it in front of the class. Six minutes is a long time to just sit there and talk. Also, again, I couldn’t act, which makes said monologue infinitely more troublesome. You know when you look at someone on TV and with every word they speak, you think, Ooh, that person’s terrible. They can’t act. Well, that’s how I act. Every time I had to talk, I’d think, Ooh, Tan. You fucking suck.

  For my monologue, I wrote a piece about a person who’d fallen in love and was trying to tell their best friend they were in love with them. It was so lame, but every kid goes through this, where they fall in love with someone they’re friends with. All throughout the monologue, it seemed like it was a girl I was in love with, and then at the end, I said something along the lines of, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to tell him.”