Save the Saree project, Sabyasachi tends to keep his design inputs to a minimum. “I only curate or give inputs into aspects such as color, etc., and not more. The idea is to keep it authentic and traditional. There is a lot of cross-pollination of weaves taking place due to commercial pressures and fusion has slowly started to overtake purity. I want to make tradition more important than fusion once again, and provide longevity to traditional weaving practices.”
Don’t agree with him at all. “Keeping tradition more important than fusion” is stagnating, is bound to fail.
I point at Kimono as an example; that’s what they did. They kept tradition more important than the fusion and now there is hardly any kimonos that you see on the streets of Japan.
Another thing that I hate, this pseudo concept of tradition. When you ask people about the tradition, it is already a fusion. Many of the sarees that we talk about as traditional sarees didn’t come about until the Industrial Revolution. So why draw a line there?
Let the saree be fluid, let it follow the time, let it be fused with the person that is wearing that saree..
But I don’t want to detract from the basic principle of the campaign of “Save the Saree”. Thanks to Indian Day Time TV, the saree is here to stay, so I am not concerned about its loss as I was five years ago.
And once you know that something is not going away, you can afford to take more chances with it.
