Blog

As we publicly embark on our cultural documentation of the sari through short film, I would like to share why Border&Fall decided to participate in an ongoing conversation about its relevance with a project of this scope and magnitude.

The terms ‘relevance’ and ‘cultural documentation’ are charged and bear weight (as does ‘sari’ … or is it ‘saree’?). However, in order to have a conversation about the future, a documentation of the past is equally important, as knowing where we come informs where we are headed. We are increasingly seeing the sari worn for occasion wear and moreover in a single draping style. The Nivi drape is the most commonly associated drape of sari while in fact, there are over 100 that exist.

As with all the sari drapes in the past, we believe the sari must continue to adapt to reflect our current lives  – in which a floor length sari with a blouse, petticoat and 15 safety pins may seem cumbersome to everyday living. The irony remains that most of the drapes do not have a petticoat, are often worn without a blouse and always without safety pins.

In fact, the sari drapes we have (but don’t wear) happen to be very relevant to today’s context – whether for the sake of style, sustainability or India’s rapidly changing culture.

Perhaps part of the reason is because there is no easily accessible place where one can understand how to drape them with ease. As such, our intention is to produce a series of how-to drape films that document the sari drapes, with our eyes looking towards the future. These will be available free of cost across multiple digital platforms. In addition, we will produce three independent short films that speak to the sari’s past, present and future. This is a complement to the how-to films, engaging in the same dialogue with three distinct filmmakers.

Many have worked for decades to champion the sari; Chantal Boulanger wrote An Illustrated Guide to the Indian Art of Draping in 1997 and Rta Kapur Chishti Saris: Tradition and Beyond in 2010. Both of these books are a compilation of over 100 sari drapes and a testament to decades of laborious work by their authors. Our first collaborator for this project was Rta, considered India’s leading authority on the sari and its drape. Fortunate for us that she joined this project as our Sari Advisor, lending her expertise to ensure correct representations of the drapes and continuing to sharing her wealth of knowledge to new audiences and across new mediums.

This project is not only documentation, it is an opportunity to further develop our aesthetic – allowing for a visual representation of the sari that does not come across as either traditional or ‘contemporary’ (or worse – appropriated). Those of us working with India’s design communities are acutely aware of the burgeoning aesthetics that still lack a representative set of visuals and language to accurately express the changes taking shape, many of them over the last few decades.