Can you please talk a little about how women dressed in the Ramayana era if possible for you? I am seeing some criticisms of the blouse but I would like to know more.
Okay so we need to first note when Ramayana was composed, which historians roughly place around 8th-4th century BCE. Now basing the fashion solely on when the story happened is gonna be hard, because mythology-wise Ramayana happened even before the Mahabharata, so I'm just gonna go on the basis of when the epic was composed, rather than when it was set in.
So roughly the late Vedic period was going on. We barely have any sculptures from this period. It's only from the pre-Mauryan to Mauryan era when sculptures actually start showing up.
This is the statue of a woman from 3rd century BCE.
Some hairstyles from the Mauryan period (320-185 BCE). My FAV era of hairstyles look at em.
Here's a Yakshi statue from the same period.
And now here are two statues from the Shunga period (187-75 BCE)
But from what I've seen, women from the Vedic period probably roughly dressed like this.
Now the booming Mathura Art era (2nd century BCE - 12th century CE) was basically the 60s to the Mauryan and Shunga 50s. Everything grew shorter, extremely. This is the specific era most people usually think about when they refer to "ancient Indian sculptures".
Exhibit A -> Another Yakshi from this time period (Kushan era to be specific):
They give me ancient Scooby-Doo squad vibes. Don't ask why.
Also, this is the era of massive Greek influence, so the intermingling of cultures was huge.
The kamarbandhs (those chonky belts) were clearly the fashion statement. And we see it throughout the future eras, later paired with an antariya sometimes, which is basically this:
Now the beauty of adapting an epic is to be able to take so much creative liberty from these ancient Indian fashion trends and eras. Instead they go for what resembles 19th-century blouses, which take the "ancient" out of the time period.
There's a sort of beauty to not just the fashion of ancient and early-medieval India, but also the HAIRSTYLES. So many crazy hairstyles and they go with the most basic ones. Truly breaks my heart.
I'll also tag @sambhavami here if she has more input to provide in this context! But yea more or less this is what women wore back in the period around when Ramayana was composed.