From Bronze Age to the Met Gala: The evolution of the sari

A sari woven from hair-thin metal wires stitched together and artfully draped across a form. A cotton lurex sari inspired by Y2K-era hip-hop, designed to be worn with Nike Air Force 1 sneakers. A distressed denim sari draped over a white shirt. A cloth handwoven in fine silk shot through with copper and steel to make a shimmering and delicate fabric. The dramatically ruffled and pearl-encrusted sari worn by Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone on the Cannes red carpet. And a cloth dyed with ink made from particles of pollution collected from the New Delhi air.

This is the sari, but not as you know it.

The garments form part of the collection of the exhibition The Offbeat Sari, which takes South Asia’s most iconic outfit and showcases it in its most contemporary and creative iterations. The exhibition, which was initially produced by London’s Design Museum in 2023, is opening at Melbourne’s Bunjil Place Gallery. It presents 54 saris on loan from some of India’s top designers, as well as those that showcase innovation in design and production, or that speak directly to social issues.

The exhibition is the brainchild of London-based curator Priya Khanchandani – at the time, the Design Museum’s head of curatorial – who wanted to highlight how the garment has been reinvented, reshaping how it is understood and worn, and what it says about modern India.

While living in New Delhi a decade ago, Khanchandani noticed that young women were wearing saris, but with a difference. Instead of silk – worn as a marker of wealth or for special occasions – they were wearing cotton or linen saris, draped over T-shirts or button-down white shirts instead of the traditional choli blouse. And they were accessorising with trainers, chunky tribal or Western jewellery, even piercings and tattoos.

And instead of sticking to the popular Nivi drape, young women were experimenting with different drapes from across the country, such as the style popular with the Koli fisherwomen of Mumbai and Goa, where the sari cloth is wrapped to create pants, giving the wearer ease of movement.

For Khanchandani, who’d grown up in a London family that rarely wore saris, it was a revelation,. “It was cool. I really enjoyed it,” she says. “The way they were accessorising [saris] differently made me excited to try it too. And there were a whole bunch of emerging design studios that were experimenting with the materiality of the sari, and I started following their work.”

This experience sowed the seeds for The Offbeat Sari, which seeks to explore the contemporary movement and context around saris from political, cultural and emotional perspectives, also showcasing experimental fashion and street style, and high-end couture seen on celebrities and at weddings.

“We usually see South Asia represented [in galleries] through a colonial or post-colonial lens, particularly because many of the museums in the UK have significant colonial collections – because so many items were taken during the 19th century,” Khanchandani says, speaking from London. “But I know India differently and I know it as a kind of dynamic, evolving, shifting, changing place, and I want to represent that for audiences.”

The sari is, perhaps, the garment most readily synonymous with South Asia, where it has been worn since Indus Vally Civilisation times, dating further back than 2000BCE. It is a long piece of un-stitched fabric – between three and nine yards in length – that is wrapped around the body in different ways.

It consists of different parts: the border, the fall, which runs across the bottom to weigh the fabric down, the pallu, the section that rests over the shoulder, and the pleats, which are formed by hand in the midsection. Most saris come with an extra piece of fabric from which a blouse, or choli, is sewn, but it’s acceptable, even fashionable, to wear a mismatched blouse.

Far from being a simple piece of cloth, the sari is imbued with so much: region, class, occupation, identity, even political leanings. Also, history, kinship, notions of femininity and body image. Saris adapt to the wearer, whether through the choice of drape, the width of the pleats or the style of blouse. It also adapts to different body shapes and it can be tied to be revealing or conservative, sexy or regal.

Saris are passed down through generations: to receive and wear a grandmother’s sari is an act of love and filial respect. Writer Sunil Badami wrote about his mother’s sari collection for the ABC: “[They] were sewn with the golden thread of our family history, tying me and my children to Mum and her mother, and the place she once called home.”

But at the same time, the sari can be difficult to wear. Politician Shashi Tharoor famously – and controversially – insisted that Indian women should “save the sari” in a 2007 newspaper column. Critics lashed out, angrily asking whether Tharoor knew what it was like to run for a bus in a sari.

His call was not unfounded, however: women across South Asia increasingly turned to stitched garments, particularly in the 1980s and 90s, for comfort and practicality, leading to fears that the sari was indeed dying out. It was against this backdrop that Kanchandani noticed the shift in sari-wearing among young Indians.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, partially due to the acceleration of digital media – and India has such a young population – designers have been experimenting with the form of the sari, the drape, the materiality. Wearers are wearing it in new contexts, embodying it in different ways, accessorising it differently, allowing it to empower themselves, to express themselves,” she says.

Some of the designers featured in The Offbeat Sari are household names. There are two pieces from Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the Kolkata-based designer at the top of every bride’s wish-list, who dressed Shah Rukh Khan for the Met Gala in 2025. There are pieces from top couturiers like Tarun Tahiliani, Anamika Khanna and Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla. Then there are the contemporary, more cutting-edge Indian designers represented such as NorBlack NorWhite, HUEMN, Bodice, Akaaro by Gaurav Jai Gupta, Rimzim Dadu and Raw Mango.

Saris were selected for display for their aesthetic value, but also for the designer’s commitment to craft, innovation in materiality or technique, or statements they make about sustainability. Some have been worn by actors and Bollywood celebrities: the Tarun Tahiliani foil jersey piece is a recreation of one worn by Lady Gaga when she appeared at Delhi’s F1 in 2010.

Another on display is by Delhi-based duo Abraham & Thakore, who took used X-ray films from hospitals and cut them into sequins that they sewed onto saris made from recycled PET fabric, speaking to sustainability and circular economies against a backdrop of fast fashion production in South Asia.

“It’s interesting to see how we perceive ourselves now in India in terms of our own culture,” says the label’s David Abraham, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian clothing and textiles. “All these questions are emerging, playing out in contemporary culture, which I find exciting. I see it happening in music. I see it in dance, in fashion, in art. I think there’s much more confidence now in what is Indian.”

That confidence in homegrown Indian culture is perhaps the most marked societal shift in India over the past decade. Previously, the long tail of colonialism produced a society obsessed with the West as the ultimate marker of success and taste. But now, for reasons both economic and political, there’s much greater value placed on “Indian-ness” across the spectrum, from language to culture.

There are also saris in the collection that point to political or social movements. One is the pink sari worn by Sampat Pal Devi, who founded the Gulabi [Pink] Gang, a vigilante justice movement in rural northern India that forcibly opposes domestic violence, child marriage and injustices faced by women, particularly in cases where the police response is weak. The movement now has hundreds of thousands of members.

Other garments showcase experimentation in different ways. Delhi designer Rimzim Dadu is known for experimenting with non-traditional materials and, in particular, a sari spun from hair-thin steel wire, which has become unusually popular with brides wanting something unconventional. “They look like armour, but move like fabric,” says Dadu. She, too, has noted the uptake in sari-wearing on the streets of Delhi. “What I find beautiful is that despite all these shifts, the essence hasn’t changed. It’s still six yards of fabric. The evolution lies in how each generation chooses to wear it.”

Another garment is the Sari Dress by Toronto-based artist and designer, and the exhibition’s associate curator, Rashmi Varma. The dress has a contemporary silhouette with the same draping, blouse and pallu as a sari, but stitched together. It was initially pitched as a little black dress alternative for a younger, globally focused clientele, but it quickly found a vibrant market in Indian high society.

“It can be worn in Delhi, Bombay, London or New York, and you could wear it with a pair of heels, boots or chappals,” says Varma. (I own the dress in its original black: it looks stylish and sleek, but undeniably like a sari.) Varma was also involved in creating The Sari Series, a series of videos demonstrating more than 80 different styles of drapes from across India.

The Offbeat Sari is a collection of garments that, when taken as a whole, have important things to say about contemporary Indian society.

And yet, for all the X-ray sequins and alternative materials, the thing about the sari is the invisible thread that reaches back millennia, to a time when woven un-stitched cloth was draped exactly as it is now.

The Offbeat Sari is at Bunjil Place, Narre Warren, from March 22 to August 30. Curator Priya Khanchandani will give a talk on April 16 and Liverpool Powerhouse from November 7 – 4 April 2027.