The Offbeat Sari: A Living Garment in Motion
Image credit: The Quilted Sari from the HUEMN Fall 17 Collection, 2017, Photo: Pankaj Dahalia. Model: Rachi Chitakara
The Offbeat Sari at Bunjil Place Gallery offers a vivid reconsideration of one of the world’s most enduring garments, and a challenge to the ways it has too often been fixed in the Western imagination. Rather than treating the sari as a static emblem of tradition, the exhibition presents it as a supple cultural form: intimate, political, experimental and insistently contemporary.
For curator Priya Khanchandani, the project has been more than a decade in formation. “I’ve been wanting to curate an exhibition about contemporary Indian design since around 2011,” she explains. The idea sharpened while she was living in Delhi, where the sari appeared not as ceremonial dress or nostalgic signifier, but as part of the texture of everyday life. “Women were wearing it on their commutes, at galleries, at cocktail parties, women I identified with,” she says. “It felt completely different to the way I’d seen it in Britain.”
That shift in perception became the foundation for The Offbeat Sari, first developed at London’s Design Museum before touring internationally. The exhibition traces the garment’s reinvention in the 21st century, attending to the speed and breadth of its recent transformation. Its histories may reach back thousands of years, but here the sari is shown in a moment of renewed urgency, reworked through material innovation, visual wit and social change. Designers including Abraham & Thakore, Raw Mango and NorBlackNorWhite recast the form through contemporary silhouettes and textile experimentation, while others test its limits in denim, stainless steel and X-ray film.
Image credit: The Offbeat Sari installation view Bunjil Place Gallery, 2026. Photo: Christian Capurro.
The exhibition’s range is deliberately expansive. Couture pieces worn by figures such as Lady Gaga and Deepika Padukone sit alongside works that draw the sari into streetwear, performance, activism and design research. Yet Khanchandani resists allowing the designer to dominate the narrative. “Fashion is often positioned as being about the fashion world or the designer,” she notes. “But it’s also about the wearer.”
This insistence on the wearer gives the exhibition much of its force. Unlike stitched garments, the sari is completed through the act of draping; it is made and remade each time it is worn. That openness allows for gesture, attitude and improvisation, turning the body into an active site of design. Digital culture has amplified this elasticity, with Instagram and TikTok giving global visibility to a new generation of sari wearers. Hashtags such as #sarinotsorry and #sareelove frame the garment through images of confidence, experimentation and self-possession. “They’re empowered, individual, often quite sassy,” Khanchandani says.
The exhibition gathers this energy in a “wearer’s wall”, a montage of street-style imagery sourced from social media and photographers across India. The result is less a decorative aside than a visual chorus: an assertion that the sari’s meanings are produced not only in studios and ateliers, but in streets, workplaces, homes and online spaces, across generations, regions and communities.
The sari’s expressive charge also extends into politics and protest. Across The Offbeat Sari, the garment appears as a marker of solidarity and resistance, a surface on which public and private identities meet. One section considers movements such as the Gulabi Gang, a women-led activist collective in rural India whose members wear bright pink saris while protesting gender-based violence. Other works look to the ways the garment can unsettle expectations around gender, body image and cultural belonging.
Image credit: The Offbeat Sari installation view Bunjil Place Gallery, 2026. Photo: Christian Capurro.
For the Australian presentation, this conversation is extended through a new sari dyed with pigments derived from lantana, an invasive plant introduced to South Asia during British colonial rule. The work transforms a colonial residue into material possibility, linking histories of extraction and ecological disruption with contemporary craft and repair.
Shown in the City of Casey, home to one of Melbourne’s largest South Asian communities, the exhibition carries a particular local resonance. For diaspora audiences, it may offer moments of recognition, but it also unsettles inherited assumptions. “In diaspora contexts, it’s often seen as formalwear or something from an older generation,” Khanchandani says. “But in South Asia, it’s a living garment, it’s still evolving.”
What emerges from The Offbeat Sari is a portrait of the sari as neither relic nor costume, but as a cultural language still being spoken, revised and contested. Through fashion, craft and lived experience, the exhibition reveals a garment capable of holding memory while refusing stillness: a form in which histories, identities and futures remain in motion.
The Offbeat Sari
Bunjil Place Gallery
Until August 30 2026
Open 10am-4pm Tuesday-Sunday
Free entry
