Fashion designer Prabal Gurung says the title of his memoir Walk Like a Girl is an act of reclamation. He sought to turn a phrase — once used to belittle him — into a statement of strength.
Speaking to Shefalee Vasudev on Day 4 of the Kolkata Literary Meet, Gurung said “walk like a girl” was hurled at him as an insult during his school years, particularly when he moved from a sheltered, female-centric upbringing into an all-boys boarding school environment.
“Anything feminine-leaning was considered weak,” he said. “It was meant to reduce my existence.”
Growing up in Nepal and later India, Gurung said his world was shaped largely by women — his mother, mythology, cinema and literature — where femininity was associated with power rather than fragility.
“I never thought walking like a girl was anything other than strong,” he said, adding that goddesses such as Durga, who shares his mother’s name, were central to his cultural imagination.
The memoir’s title, he explained, reflects his belief that softness, emotional openness and vulnerability are not liabilities but sources of strength, especially in a world he described as increasingly dominated by “brute force” versions of masculinity. “Look at the state of the world right now,” Gurung said. “We are a complete mess.”
Walk Like a Girl, Gurung added, is his “permission to people to embrace vulnerability, because it is power”.
During the conversation, Gurung also spoke about writing openly about abuse, sexual assault, body image and marginalisation. He said the memoir was written from a place of stability rather than crisis, allowing him to acknowledge pain without being defined by it. “You don’t need to make pain your ambition,” he said. “But you do need to acknowledge it.”
“How you show up in the world is the first arm of revolution,” he said. “And for me, that has always meant walking like a girl.”