Polyester photos on Flickr

Skateboarding has always been seen as countercultural. Today, women and girls are building on this legacy by skateboarding in saris, expressing their freedom from outdated gender roles as well as their incredible skill. Oorbee Roy, known as ‘Aunty Skates’, learned to skateboard in her 40s. She wore this purple sari, chosen for its light fabric, in an inspiring video that went viral in 2021.*

Movement

Scaling a rugged rock face or sprinting across a cricket pitch: these may not be the typical activities you imagine someone carrying out while wearing a sari. Yet across India saris are worn while performing many activities, from farming and manual construction to complex dance moves and even riding a bicycle.

Drawing on these realities and the inherent strength of the sari textile, athletes today are donning saris for high–performance feats. Designers are playing with the aesthetics of leisure and streetwear, and brands are promoting their saris with active imagery and sports partnerships. In doing so, they are transporting the dynamism of the sari out of a high-fashion context to reframe it as something active and fun, able to be worn in casual ways.*

From the exhibition

The Offbeat Sari

(May – September 2023)

A major exhibition celebrating the contemporary sari. Curated by our Head of Curatorial, Priya Khanchandani, this exhibition unravels its numerous forms, demonstrating the sari to be a metaphor for the layered and complex definitions of India today. It brings together dozens of the finest saris of our time from designers, wearers and craftspeople in India.

Worn as an everyday garment by some and considered by others to be formal or uncomfortable, the sari has multiple definitions. Conventionally an unstitched drape wrapped around the body, which can be draped in a variety of ways, its unfixed form has enabled it to morph and absorb changing cultural influences.

In recent years, the sari has been reinvented. Designers are experimenting with hybrid forms such as sari gowns and dresses, pre-draped saris and innovative materials such as steel. Young people in cities who used to associate the sari with dressing up can now be found wearing saris and sneakers on their commutes to work. Individuals are wearing the sari as an expression of resistance to social norms and activists are embodying it as an object of protest.

Today, the sari in urban India manifests as a site for design innovation, an expression of identity, and a crafted object carrying layers of cultural meanings. The exhibition unravels the sari as a metaphor for the complex definitions of India today.

[*Design Musem]

Taken in the Design Musem

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