The seven-decade long militarised conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, India, has ushered in a dramatic shrinkage of public life. Emergent spaces of consumer culture in the region have attempted to address this shrinkage, facilitating the formation of a Kashmiri subjectivity that remains under-theorised in scholarly literature. Within this geography of a developing consumer culture, cafes occupy a significant space. This article, based on our ethnographic research in Srinagar, the capital of the erstwhile Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, analyses how young affluent women in the city imagine and participate in the consumerised public spaces of these cafes. In the narratives of these women, cafes are often represented as spaces that are relatively insulated from both the everyday restrictions of militarisation and norms of indigenous patriarchy, and are frequently imagined as spaces of respite that allow expressions of individual agency within a conflict-ridden social environment. We argue, these cafes are sites of profound socio-political contradictions which create and reinforce an exclusionary class culture, and signal the emergence of an affluent and middle-class post-globalisation subjectivity in Kashmir which, while critical of government policies, stays away from organised movements. Through an examination of our informants’ narratives, we argue that gender comes to be deployed strategically in this matrix, reinforcing and rendering invisible the class-based inequalities that constitute such geographies of consumerism in urban Kashmir.