Abstract
This paper reads Indian influencer Urfi Javed as a paradigmatic case of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) celebrity, arguing that her notoriety is a processual enterprise rather than an accident. Situated at the intersection of subversive creativity and platform capitalism, Javed's DIY fashion functions simultaneously as aesthetic dissent and a strategic mechanism for converting structural precarity into viral capital. Drawing on qualitative analysis of her output and press coverage, the paper identifies three mechanisms: bricolage-based DIY as low-cost, high-impact visibility labour, algorithmic amplification produced through paparazzi co-production and engineered controversy, and a postfeminist performance that alternately enacts empowerment and attracts patriarchal scrutiny. Her trajectory reveals how attention economies facilitate the monetisation of ‘subversive frivolity’, potentially challenging Bollywood's class-gender hierarchies while contributing to the commodification of selfhood in digital culture. Ultimately, this study underscores how Javed's blueprint – transforming affective labour into durable brand power – can reshape contemporary DIY celebrification, influence, and self-representation.
Introduction
Fame today is increasingly built through digital platforms, algorithmic visibility, and the manufacture of distinction in saturated media environments. Uorfi Javed (commonly Urfi) exemplifies this shift – a social media personality whose celebrity emerged at the intersection of digital labour, algorithmic culture, and the contested politics of identity in contemporary India. Her rise, propelled by viral DIY fashion, strategic paparazzi engagement, and a confrontational public persona, offers a case study for examining how visibility functions as labour, the body as capital, and frivolity as a potentially subversive act. This paper examines Javed's trajectory as she operates outside traditional fashion industry norms, navigating Bollywood's landscape through self-branding.
Born in Lucknow to a lower-middle-class family, Javed began working at sixteen, distancing herself from an abusive father. After a brief stint at a Delhi call centre in 2015, she relocated to Mumbai, debuting in Indian television in 2016. Her early career comprised supporting roles in TV serials and music video appearances, yet these roles did little to advance her career. Her trajectory shifted dramatically with her appearance as a contestant on Bigg Boss OTT, where she first ventured into DIY fashion. Though eliminated first, her garbage-bag dress went viral, establishing the template for her subsequent career. Since then, her fashion experiments have transformed Mumbai streets into her personal runway, recasting industry exclusion as defiant self-fashioning. She has simultaneously faced criticism for being ‘provocative’ and ‘attention-seeking’, receiving online threats and public condemnation (EtimesIn, 2022b). Rather than yielding to normative pressures, Javed strategically mobilises what might be termed ‘bad taste’ (Skeggs, 2004; Tyler, 2013) to command attention, distinguishing herself from aspirational influencers and fashion entrepreneurs.
While scholarship has explored influencer cultures (Senft, 2013), the political economy of fame (Turner, 2006), and fashion's symbolic economies (Lipovetsky, 1994; McKinney, 2014), limited academic focus exists on DIY fashion icons like Javed, who simultaneously create, perform, and provoke as a form of cultural labour. This paper situates Javed at the intersection of celebrity studies (Turner, 2010a), influencer culture (Abidin, 2016b; Duffy, 2017), and postfeminist media analysis (Banet-Weiser, 2021; Gill, 2007). It argues that her strategic self-branding, DIY acts, and visibility labour (Marwick, 2013) are not merely self-expression but are embedded in the promotional logics of platform capitalism. Positioning herself as a celebrity emerging from reality television rather than merely an influencer, Javed strategically harnesses media attention through unconventional outfits. Her persona provides a key case for examining celebrification as a process – how performativity, as cultural capital, facilitates entry into media celebrity discourse (Alexander, 2004; Grindstaff, 2012).
Driessens' (2013) concept of celebrification shifts attention from the celebrity as fixed ‘star’ toward the cultural and institutional mechanisms that produce fame. Celebrification operates as a discursive process –a dynamic interplay of media practices, audience engagement, and self-representation through which visibility is created, maintained, and contested. This process-oriented view extends Turner's (2010a) framework by emphasising the structural production of fame. Such an understanding is crucial for analysing Javed's trajectory, as her fame is not institutionally bestowed but continuously manufactured through algorithmic circulation and low-cost visibility tactics. Within this framework, her fashion can also be interpreted as a form of self-expression and empowerment – a form of power dressing that reclaims sexuality while simultaneously inviting a voyeuristic gaze (Mackinney-Valentin, 2017).
This paper argues that Javed's fame is not an accidental outcome of controversy but a constructed enterprise built upon a strategic progression from aspirational to affective labour, manipulation of media's ‘demotic turn’, 1 and a politically charged deployment of aesthetics that weaponises taste against established social hierarchies – a process in which dissent becomes indistinguishable from calculated self-promotion.
Rationale and methodology
While celebrity studies have traditionally relied on discursive and textual analysis (Turner, 2010a), the rise of social media necessitates methodological expansion. This study supplements traditional methods to address how digital platforms facilitate new routes to fame, arguing that understanding contemporary DIY celebrity requires a hybrid approach encompassing visual semiotics, platform-specific engagement tactics, and the symbiotic relationship between influencers and media ecosystems. This approach is necessary because scholarship often overlooks figures like Javed, who leverage social media virality and controversy for identity construction. This research addresses that gap by adapting established methods to examine how her DIY fashion, provocative self-presentation, and strategic media use contribute to celebrification in digital spaces.
The study employs a qualitative case study integrating content, visual, and discursive analysis to illuminate the socio-cultural mechanisms of her celebrification. The sample (2021–2026) consists of Instagram posts, media interviews, news articles, and paparazzi video interactions, selected through purposive and keyword-based strategies to capture high-engagement content and media discourse. Selection prioritised materials reflecting diverse career phases, significant public reactions, and instances where the subject articulates her own practice and public positioning. This case study contributes to broader understanding of how DIY practices and new media converge to subvert traditional fame hierarchies.
The study faces limitations, including a focused temporal scope that may not capture Javed's entire career trajectory, and data completeness issues given the exclusion of ephemeral content like Instagram Stories. Additionally, while direct quotes from Javed were utilised, primary reliance on publicly available media sources means interpretations of her strategic intent are based on inference rather than in-depth interviews. The study's single-case focus limits direct generalisability to other contexts or digital celebrities.
DIY and aesthetic dissent
The DIY ethic: A history of subversion and self-branding
DIY or Do-It-Yourself culture emerged as both a pragmatic response to economic conditions and a vehicle for self-actualisation, influenced by mass media's permeation of everyday life (McGee, 2005). Tracing back to early 20th-century homecraft movements, DIY has historically symbolised self-sufficiency and defiance of norms, particularly within anti-consumerist movements like the Beat Generation of the 1940s, the Hippies of the 1960s, and the Punks of the 1980s (Hall and Jefferson, 2006). This spirit of resistance found its most potent expression in the punk subculture of the late 1970s. Emerging from a lower economic class tired of the affluence of popular rock music, punk adopted the DIY ethic as its central organising principle, transforming mundane items into bold identity statements – manifested through ‘one-of-a-kind/DIY/vintage’ aesthetics and ‘distressed apparel’ (Sklar, 2013). This furnishes a historical precedent for techniques later adopted by figures like Javed, who repurposes everyday detritus into confrontational garments, channelling punk's DIY ethic to refuse Bollywood's polished, class-bound aesthetics. 2
Kanai (2017), citing social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, argues that DIY culture's rise responds to late modernity, where individuals are increasingly detached from traditional relationships and institutions that once structured their life trajectories. In this context, identity becomes fluid, constantly reshaped by shifting social norms, requiring individuals to actively manage this fluidity by curating highly personalised, adaptable learning trajectories to survive the unpredictable realities of the modern gig economy (Bhatia et al., 2024).
DIY culture spans fields from art and craft to home improvement, the alternative music scene, and the creation of new objects – such as toys or dresses – out of everyday household materials. Among them, DIY fashion is often romanticised as an expression of individual creativity that involves behaviours where ‘individuals use raw and semi-raw materials and parts to produce, transform, or reconstruct material possessions’ (Martínez-Jiménez, 2023; Wolf and McQuitty, 2011). This culture thrives on resourcefulness, repurposing materials and unconventional design ideas. However, the process of designing, creating, and assembling outfits is also labour-intensive. For creators like Urfi – dubbed the ‘DIY expert’ and endorsed as ‘the undisputed DIY queen’ (Verma, 2023) – DIY fashion is not merely a form of artistry; it is an expressive medium that demands time, skill, and a significant investment in resources, crucially serving as a direct form of self-advertisement and revenue generation. While Javed's unique aesthetic often positions her as an original, closer inspection reveals instances where she apes global designers like Viktor & Rolf, Harris Reed, and Jun Takahashi, subtly reinterpreting their avant-garde approaches through her DIY lens. For example, her handcrafted black-and-white look that recreated a Harris Reed silhouette – complete with a dramatic neckline featuring sculpted hands clutching the bodice and extreme side cut-outs – prompted direct praise and recognition from Reed (Sawhney, 2022). Her engagement with DIY fashion is a manifestation of how self-actualisation and identity construction are increasingly mediated and commodified within digital influencer and fashion landscapes.
Urfi Javed's DIY praxis: From necessity to spectacle
It was during her first stint on the reality TV show Bigg Boss OTT that Javed first went viral for a DIY creation – a dress made from a garbage bag – establishing the foundational elements of her future brand: unconventional materials and a flair for generating attention. The enclosed, high-pressure environment of the reality show became the crucible for her DIY experimentation, forcing her to create with limited resources and laying the groundwork for the persona that would soon dominate social media feeds. Although her time on the show was brief – she was the first contestant to be eliminated – she would launch her new identity and became known for her unique fashion sense (Khan, 2024) (Figure 1).
Urfi Javed's garbage bag dress, Bigg Boss OTT 2021 – picture source: x.com @BiggBoss_Tak.
Collectively, her fashion moments signal a shift in how creative resistance and fame intersect within India's digital landscape; a stylistic evolution with a growing ideological potency – each ensemble doubling as wearable protest, satire, or spectacle. A key aspect of her career is her journey from being an industry pariah to a celebrated figure courted by the very fashion establishment that once rejected her. Initially, she faced a situation where ‘no designer [was] giving her clothes’ as a significant professional hurdle. This rejection, however, became the catalyst for her DIY approach. As stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania, who later styled Javed for a magazine cover, noted, Javed's response to being shunned was to ‘set up her own workshop and create her own interpretations daily,’ embodying the idea that ‘fashion is for everyone’ (EtimesIn, 2023).
In this sense, her radical DIY fashion is a deliberate tactic – born of necessity – to recode exclusion into creative agency. Facing financial instability, she invested in her future by borrowing money for outfits and enlisting help from her long-time designer friend, Shweta Shrivastava, who not only designed and stitched many of her signature looks but also provided creative collaboration and personal support (Lalwani, 2022). In this context, her DIY project was not a hobby but an urgent investment in a future self, aligned with the creativity dispositif, which McRobbie (2009) identifies as a system that glorifies precarious labour under the guise of entrepreneurial passion. Her turn to DIY should be read not only as aesthetic rebellion but as an epistemological solution born of structural exclusion: like Alexander McQueen's early improvisatory practices – working without institutional sponsorship, mobilising precarious collaborators, and funding creation through informal means (Figueredo, 2024).
What sets her apart from other designers is her pronounced orientation toward publicity. When directly questioned about whether her fashion choices were driven by a desire for attention, Javed responded: ‘Those who say they don't want attention are lying. Who doesn't want attention? So why wouldn't I do more of it? I am not getting movies, but yet am I not doing well for myself this way?’ (Lalwani, 2022).
As a creative entrepreneur, model, and actor, Urfi manages multiple responsibilities to maintain viral relevance within the Indian digital landscape. Her work demonstrates how self-actualisation culture is deeply embedded in impression management, self-mastery, and self-realisation, culminating in what McGee (2005) terms the ‘belaboured self’ of modernity. While DIY creation and self-help culture are not new concepts worldwide – having long been associated with individual learning, creation, and knowledge-sharing (Kuznetsov and Paulos, 2010) – Javed's antics face minimal direct competition in India, as few engage in self-stylised, radical, and transgressive fashion like hers, having created hundreds of unique DIY dresses over the years. This may be partly due to cultural expectations favouring traditional and ready-made fashion, reduced economic viability from affordable alternatives, and global influences prioritising consumption over creation (Ghosh, 2021; Rahman and Kharb, 2018). Additionally, India's historical caste and class hierarchies have long associated clothing production with specific artisanal communities – such as weavers or washerfolk – rather than with individual self-expression, understood as a form of inherited labour (Roy, 2020). As a result, there is limited cultural capital or social prestige attached to self-making garments outside those occupational groups, while middle-class consumers increasingly prefer prêt-à-porter and branded fashion. This structural context further amplifies Javed's visibility as an anomaly within the Indian fashion landscape.
Media descriptions capture her approach: ‘Trust Urfi Javed to turn every kind of look into a sport and make every place her own personal runway. Her sartorial choices are beyond the ordinary, and recently, it was her comb attire that took bizarre to a new level. She gave risqué a new definition as she made a dress out of colourful combs. Her DIY skills have always surprised us, and this was just another addition to the list.’ (Sehgal, 2023).
Banet-Weiser (2021) contends that DIY self-production is frequently co-opted into commercial self-branding, collapsing the divide between authenticity and marketability. Urfi Javed embodies this paradox: her makeshift outfits crafted from everyday items signal subversive creativity while simultaneously functioning as calculated acts of self-promotion that can blur the lines between genuine dissent and commercial integration. Drawing from Banet-Weiser's observation on the gendered performance of authenticity, one can infer that digital creators like Javed are compelled to present their work as innovative rather than imitative, navigating a media economy where self-expression is inextricable from entrepreneurial labour.
Commodification and the promotional self
DIY fashion, in Javed's case, can be understood within the context of advanced capitalism, where competition is concentrated as monopolies and oligopolies dominate industries, shaping markets and limiting new entrants. As discussed in Hearn (2008), capitalism reinvented its ‘spirit’ in response to the economic and legitimacy crises of the 1960s and early 1970s. This reinvention led to a networked, flexible economic structure characterised by subcontracting, casual work, segmentation, work intensification, and job insecurity. Within this evolving economic architecture, creative labour became fragmented, informal, and increasingly entrepreneurial in nature.
In this neoliberal capitalist framework, traditional career pathways became increasingly unstable, making self-presentation a crucial strategy for achieving success. Individuals must actively brand and market themselves to ensure visibility and economic opportunities. Here, visibility becomes not just desirable but indispensable – a precondition for participation in creative economies. This promotional culture, in which individuals become commodities through self-branding, values the spectacular and deceptive appearance of success (Hearn, 2008; Sternberg, 2001). Within this context, the interlinked arenas of the fashion, celebrity, and influencer industries, with their inherent emphasis on aesthetics and visual communication, become powerful sites for the enactment of this self-branding. Even as aesthetics are central to economic calculations and are intertwined with cultural concerns, taste, and social relations (Entwistle, 2002), fashion research has traditionally focused on two extremes: high fashion, viewed as an artistic domain, and street style, seen as a subcultural or countercultural field. Both categories have been linked to the idea of a unified personality that expresses itself through distinct styles and the ability to assemble a look (Barron, 2017; Gibson, 2012).
Javed's DIY approach complicates this binary. Rather than aligning neatly with either high fashion or subculture, her work draws from diverse material sources and mediatic strategies, revealing a hybridised aesthetic that reflects both economic necessity and expressive ambition. Her approach challenges conventional notions of agency and creativity. She embodies the logic of the ‘Society of the Spectacle' – a concept theorised by Debord (1967) but artistically perfected by Andy Warhol. 3 In the world Warhol envisioned, where everyone could be famous for 15 minutes, survival requires becoming a spectacle, often through visually striking clothing.
Vinken and Hewson (2005) identify fashion as structured by three key conceptual articulations: the division between being and appearance, the division of the sexes, and – inseparably linked to gender – the division of social classes. Javed's DIY fashion disrupts these traditional divisions. As a person from a lower-middle-class background, she often references her upbringing through her style. Whether it's trash-bag gowns or leftover-denim ensembles, her creations foreground upcycling and jugaad – the Indian lower-middle-class logics of repair, recycling, and frugality – where she turns thrift and improvisation into her signature style.
Structural precarity and viral bricolage
Javed's systematic plundering of consumer culture's detritus – whether banana peels, garbage bags, safety pins, or combs – is an exemplary case of bricolage, 4 as theorised by Hebdige (1979), where ordinary materials are reassembled to produce new, often subversive, meanings. Javed's DIY practice thus exceeds aesthetic eccentricity; it serves as a low-cost, high-impact strategy for viral visibility, rooted in economic precarity but designed for affective shock value. This systematic reappropriation of consumer detritus is the essence of Hebdige's bricolage, which immediately converts aesthetic transgression into the affective labour necessary for commercial self-branding (Banet-Weiser, 2021).
Her dressing materials directly confront fashion's entrenched hierarchies of class, gender, and legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1979). The visceral disgust her creations often provoke exemplifies what Bourdieu terms aesthetic intolerance, a policing of taste that reinforces social boundaries. Yet, Javed weaponises this reaction, transforming aesthetic deviance into cultural capital. This conversion reinforces fashion's dual role as a site of regulation and also of resistance. While traditional sociological perspectives suggest that fashion reinforces existing gender and class hierarchies, Javed's DIY practice exposes these divisions as artificial, as her DIY bricolage serves as an entry strategy, generating viral capital through affective labour, and leveraging controversy to force industry recognition – a typical influencer monetising strategy. This process transforms an initial pathway to fame into a disruptive, fully commodified brand of DIY selfhood. But before this, the practice of bricolage as a tool for disruptive self-fashioning has clear historical precedents that extend beyond punk subcultures. Oscar Wilde's deliberate re-use and recontextualisation of Masonic and antique clothing, and the photographic mise en scène that crystallised his aesthetic persona, demonstrate how sartorial bricolage has long functioned as a coded, non-verbal critique of hegemonic norms; similarly, Brazilian couturier Dener Pamplona de Abreu staged out-of-time garments and posed portraits to generate cultural distinction through what amounted to DIY self-image production, showing that bricolage can operate as a strategic media technology for producing notoriety and alternative cultural capital (Bonadio, 2023).
The performance element of Javed's DIY is also inseparable from her mastery of visibility labour – the deliberate, often intensive work of self-presentation undertaken ‘so as to be noticeable and positively prominent among prospective employers, clients, followers and fans’ (Abidin, 2016b). While Javed has entered mainstream fashion circuits, her DIY ethos continues to resist full assimilation into Bollywood's traditional celebrity order. Therefore, the next section discusses how she leverages social media through visibility labour to convert ephemeral virality into durable brand power within the promotional and commodified landscape of contemporary entertainment.
Visibility labour and the co-production of DIY celebrity
Javed's rise to prominence has been fuelled by social media, where her viral content and online persona have garnered significant attention. This form of fame is no longer institutionally bestowed but achieved digitally; it is earned through the ability to generate influence and engagement online consistently. As Sternheimer (2014) observes, social media and the internet have enabled the rise of DIY celebrities, offering a space where self-made success is both facilitated and celebrated. This digital landscape fosters a culture of user-generated content, amateur expertise, and social networking, where everyday digital media creations dominate (Burgess, 2007). Echoing the ethos of today's digital creators, Javed believes,
The only thing that keeps you from being forgotten is consistency … Consistency is the key to stay in fashion, in conversations and in business (Roy, 2023).
Her emphasis on the critical role of sustained effort and deliberate self-presentation in preserving one's prominence within the transient realm of digital celebrity demonstrates the techniques highlighted by Marwick (2013): the strategic self-promotion required to sustain digital fame, reinforcing visibility as a cornerstone of modern celebrity culture.
Javed employs self-deprecating humour and confessional storytelling as forms of affective labour, embodying postfeminist ideals of authenticity and relatability. Rejecting polished, conventional femininity, she presents herself as carefree, fun, and open-minded, while actively orchestrating her visibility – scheduling appearances with photographers, directing them, and cultivating a symbiotic working relationship. This awareness is performed in real time through her reels and paparazzi encounters, where speech, gesture, and pose converge as visibility labour. In a widely circulated reel shared by Viralbhayani (2023), Javed engages in a spontaneous, performative exchange with a paparazzo, underscoring the casual interactions that shape her media presence. As she poses by the roadside, a paparazzo is overheard on a phone call saying, ‘Bhai, kam pe hu, call kardahu’ (‘I'm at work, I'll call you back’). Javed immediately intervenes, mock-chiding him: ‘Ye dekho, phone pe lage hua hai – koi izzat hi nahi hai, koi sharm hi nahi hai’ (‘Look at him, he's on the phone, he has no respect, no shame’). When the paparazzo, still on the call, asks ‘Kaha pe?’ (‘Where are you?’), she theatrically reaches for his phone, saying ‘Idhar do phone’ (‘Give me the phone’), before addressing the caller directly: ‘Kaam pe hai chotu, call kiya mat karo’ (‘He's at work, don't call him now’). Such playful and immediate exchanges allow Javed to momentarily invert the conventional celebrity–paparazzi hierarchy while also amplifying her visibility and engagement through her antics within platform economies.
These interactions exemplify Turner's concept of celebrification as a participatory, demotic process driven by visibility labour rather than institutional coronation. Positioned between the distance of traditional film stardom and the ordinariness of everyday life, Javed occupies an ephemeral, self-fashioned space. By embracing unfiltered encounters, she reframes fame as a strategic resource, transforming chaotic street moments into co-produced media events that sustain a steady flow of highly circulatable content.
Beyond algorithmic appeal, Javed's calculated self-presentation also operates within – and pushes against – the boundaries of gendered representation. In a ‘postfeminist representational environment,’ women are often positioned as benchmarks of femininity (Negra and Holmes, 2011). Urfi Javed disrupts this narrative by rejecting traditional moral and gender binaries and occupying a space that defies easy categorisation. As a woman, her fashion choices reflect ongoing tensions surrounding gender norms. And as an outsider to Bollywood, she remains on the fringes of mainstream entertainment but continues to carve out her own space.
Her bold fashion choices and confident self-expression challenge Bollywood's historical norms, which have long confined women to rigid ideals of virtue or rebellion (Nayar, 2021). Unlike conventional celebrities, Javed thrives in this ambiguous space, making herself ‘uncancellable’ despite intense criticism, having seemingly grown indifferent to the constant trolling. Her defiance has sparked feminist debates, pushing discussions about female autonomy and expression into the mainstream (Zainab, 2023). Critics amplify her visibility, but their disapproval only underscores her resilience and agency. One scribe attests:
Urfi's nonchalant approach towards her detractors invites more trolling. Trolls become riled up, while she rarely gives in. Instead, she responds in the funniest way possible. Outspoken and with a couldn't-care-less body language, her attitude is one to watch. (Toppo, 2022)
Central to this process is her tactical use of what Abidin (2016a) terms ‘subversive frivolity’ – a strategy where objects or practices dismissed as frivolous (often feminised, such as fashion or selfies) generate cultural power precisely by being underestimated. Javed's ‘bizarre’ DIY outfits are framed as silly stunts by the mainstream but operate as acts of cultural resistance, as she weaponises the aesthetics of the trivial and the performative to contest gendered hierarchies of taste and legitimacy, but it simultaneously feeds platform architectures that monetise aesthetic contestation.
Bollywood's evolving landscape often penalises women who challenge societal norms, but Javed has broken this pattern. By refusing to seek validation or conform, her controversial aesthetic choices have become a focal point in conversations about female empowerment, even as this individual agency may operate within the constraining parameters of neoliberal and promotional cultures. Her radical authenticity – whether strategic or sincere – foregrounds tensions around gender, taste, and visibility, positioning her as a symbol of feminist defiance in modern India. By rejecting communal and patriarchal dress codes to claim bodily autonomy and individual freedom, she sparks debates about feminism's push to expand the limits of respectability and reclaim public space for women.
As she herself notes: No brand wanted to collaborate with me initially. Neither designers nor brands showed interest. But the numbers I started bringing in became impossible to ignore. Now, I'm working with Amazon, Netflix, and big designers want to partner with me. Even music companies have approached me. It's clear that, in the end, it all comes down to numbers, numbers, and more numbers. (Roy, 2023)
Therefore, her fame is not just a product of creativity but also of relentless effort and strategic image management. She presents herself as an unassuming individual, unfamiliar with the nuances of Bollywood, which contributes to her relatable persona. She states: ‘I don't think filmmakers want me in their projects. I don't have anybody in my life who's connected to the industry. I don't have a producer dad. I don't have friends in Bollywood. I really don't know how to go about it.’ (Lalwani, 2021)
This duality underpins the entertainment industry, where, in the name of performativity, the external persona – 'myself for others’ – is carefully curated for public consumption (Morrison, 2014). Her ‘raw’ self, which she claims to be unapologetic and bold, doesn't appear to contrast with the amplified, performative persona crafted for social media and paparazzi interactions. Thus, it is her hyper-visible persona that allows her to control, reshape, and market her persona effectively, regardless of whether she is in her avant-garde outfit mode or not.
While Javed does not project her persona as separate from herself, her public image functions as a promotional brand, seamlessly integrating personal expression with marketable spectacle. Her unapologetic rhetoric underscores this self-awareness. As she declares, ‘I will dress how I like. Even if my dress pleases the people, they are going to troll me’, (India, 2021) signalling not indifference but mastery over visibility as a form of power. These are not just forms of self-expression but also mechanisms of capital circulation, positioning her as both subject and tool of the entertainment industry's promotional economy.
Thus, DIY celebrity like her, unlike traditional celebrities with professional teams, can independently manage their careers by acting as their own stylists, marketers, and managers. In a way, her self-representation becomes an entrepreneurial act, as she transforms ideas into tangible expressions of imagination (Burawoy, 1979). Urfi's ability to constantly innovate and resourcefully create with everyday objects for public fascination (see Karki, 2024; Masand, 2023; Rawat, 2022, for examples) further cements her as an entrepreneurial self – one defined by self-reliance, risk-taking, and personal responsibility, traits highly valued in contemporary society (Gay, 1996).
But this trajectory also glamorises her precarities and unpaid labour as entrepreneurial self-expression because self-actualisation can also serve as a mechanism of predatory capitalism by reinforcing existing power hierarchies within consumer communities (Kennedy, 2020). Her early struggles, therefore, reveal how the rhetoric of ‘self-made’ success romanticises precarity and masks the sustained vulnerabilities of the attention economy.
Challenges, impact, and beyond
Urfi Javed's distinctive DIY oeuvre directly confronts the exclusionary boundaries of India's post-liberalisation fashion canon, which is defined by Bollywood's alliance with global luxury brands and an aspirational, elite ‘filmy’ style. By constructing her garments from low-brow, everyday materials, she offers a radical alternative rooted in accessibility and resistance, subverting established hierarchies of taste within a stratified culture industry.
This subversion triggers a public backlash that exemplifies Bourdieu's ‘aesthetic intolerance,’ where class-based anxieties are expressed through disgust and mockery. However, as stated above, Javed weaponises this very criticism, converting aesthetic deviance into cultural capital. Her presence in digitally mediated spaces traditionally dominated by elite representations disrupts Bollywood's homogenous ideals of femininity and glamour. As Banet-Weiser (2021) notes, while DIY is often framed as authentic, it necessitates commercial professionalism. Javed's practice aligns not with the traditional trickle-down of trends (Simmel, 1971; Veblen, 1994) but with Polhemus's (1988) concept of styles ‘bubbling up’ from the margins – a dynamic underscored by claims that her work has inspired international designers (EtimesIn, 2022a; Sethi, 2024).
Beyond fashion, Javed's visibility is a pointed challenge to India's patriarchal moral codes. She embodies a postfeminist sensibility centred on empowerment and self-expression (Gill, 2007), yet this agency is constrained by relentless scrutiny. Her confessed vulnerability –‘The constant bullying, trolling sometimes makes me go crazy’ (Keshri, 2022) – highlights the emotional labour required to navigate the paradox of digital self-made fame. This policing was made explicit when a casting director told her that her attire had ‘ruined’ her image (Tiwari, 2022), revealing how postfeminist rhetoric can disguise renewed patriarchal authority (McRobbie, 2009).
This disciplinary dynamic is exemplified by public figures who cast Javed's creative agency as moral deviance, thereby enacting a Foucauldian logic of regulatory power over the female body. A notable episode occurred when Hindustani Bhau, a social media influencer, released a video denouncing her outfits as ‘against Indian culture’ and called for police action, while Chetan Bhagat, a famous writer, publicly criticised her visibility on social media as distracting youth from national concerns such as the military (Mishra, 2024). Such critiques enact a gendered regime of visibility that commodifies her presence while invalidating her autonomy (Marshall, 2021). Compounding this, her Muslim background often subjects her to intensified, bigotry-laced bullying, and attempts to institutionalise control, such as the legal complaint accusing her of ‘promoting obscenity’ (Express, 2023).
Javed's career unfolds within a digital ecosystem where platforms like Instagram act as ideological apparatuses, enabling her to bypass traditional gatekeepers. Yet, as Wissinger (2015) argues, the body under such regimes becomes an ‘affective commodity’. Javed's laboriously curated and hyper-visible body exemplifies this logic, serving simultaneously as a site of empowerment and commodification.
Her success lies in navigating these contradictions with deliberate irreverence. By rejecting traditional beauty standards, she redefines cultural legitimacy and destabilises what Viswamohan (2014) identifies as Bollywood's ‘filmy modernity’. Urfi Javed forces a re-evaluation of contemporary celebrity in India – crafted not through pedigree, but through subversive aesthetics, strategic partnership, and a calculated resistance to the structures that seek to exclude her. Her success – for instance, securing a film deal for her Bollywood debut in Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024) – represents an institutional co-option of her DIY celebrity, yet her continued self-styling resists total absorption into traditional celebrity hierarchies. This success is sustained by a symbiotic relationship with the media (both old and new), where her low-cost, high-return distribution partnership ensures her creations are constantly circulated, feeding the algorithmic and media cycles that underpin her entire economic enterprise. Ultimately, Javed's success lies in her calculated manipulation of controversy, converting public and media attention into predictable, monetisable connections with her audience, reclaiming power over media framing and illustrating how emotional labour and public persona work intersect in the influencer economy.
Conclusion
Urfi Javed's career offers more than a spectacle of controversial DIY fashion; it provides a definitive blueprint – a replicable model for leveraging aesthetic dissent and digital labour to manufacture celebrity against the grain of established power. Her trajectory demonstrates how the margins can be transformed into the mainstream through a calculated mastery of the attention economy's core logics. By weaponising her own precarity, monetising moral outrage, and performing a radical, albeit strategically calculated, authenticity, she appears to have forged a new pathway to power that bypasses traditional cultural gatekeepers, prompting critical reflection on the ethical implications of such a fame model. For her, entry into institutions like Bollywood represents a significant milestone, but not the final destination of her disruptive project. Her story is not merely about one woman's rise to self-made fame. It is a critical, and importantly uncomfortable, mirror reflecting the fundamental contradictions of our time: where empowerment is entangled with exploitation, where dissent is commodified and integrated, and where the most potent form of rebellion may be to unapologetically claim and control one's own spectacle in an algorithmically governed world. Her paradigmatic status within Indian and South Asian celebrity culture is evident in its resonance with predecessors such as Rakhi Sawant, who pioneered paparazzi co-production and provocative visibility but operated in a pre-algorithmic era that limited conversion of notoriety into durable brand power (Gulati, 2024), and with emerging DIY creators who are now adapting the same low-cost bricolage and affective labour tactics amid structural precarity (Sahuji, 2025).
This case redefines the boundaries of ‘celebrity’ particularly in non-Western contexts, and complicates understandings of ‘subversion’ within commercialised digital spaces. Within influencer labour's political economy, Javed assimilates into platform logics while reworking them through DIY aesthetics and visibility labour. This duality signals a shift in Indian digital culture: marginalised creators like her are using the attention economy to challenge Bollywood's class-gender hierarchies, creating pathways others now follow. However, the effectiveness of this model depends on specific platform architectures that reward affective intensity, media ecosystems that enable paparazzi co-production, and cultural contexts where gender and class norms remain contested and thus generative of controversy. Such strategies may operate differently within tightly regulated media environments or saturated attention economies. These remain important areas for further investigation and fall beyond the scope of this paper. For the Javed blueprint, if extended to different social, political, and media environments, would allow for the development of a broader theoretical framework of platform-based insurgency and destabilise cultural hegemonies worldwide. Her style asserts a complex, individualistic identity, defying prescribed categories, by leveraging clothing's power to allow individuals to ‘play – temporarily or permanently – with identity and self-image’ (Suthrell, 2004).
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the quality of this manuscript.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.