The sari is often positioned in Western imagination as static, a ceremonial garment rooted in tradition, symbolic of timelessness rather than change. The Offbeat Sari – a touring exhibition by the Design Museum, curated by Priya Khanchandani, and now showing at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham – dismantles that frame entirely. Here, the sari is reclaimed as a space of experimentation, one that can hold protest, play with gendered expectations, fold in hybrid identities, and articulate political dissent.
Khanchandani is no stranger to interrogating narratives of South Asian material culture. As she recalls when we speak, ‘I’ve worked in museums for quite a while, often with collections rooted in India’s colonial past… but I wanted to show an India that is contemporary, moving, shifting, at a pivotal moment and the sari became the perfect lens through which to tell that story.’ As well as her own longstanding relationship with India, Khanchandani carries out annual visits and extensive research trips, making her acutely aware of a shift in the garment’s cultural and design trajectory over the last decade. The exhibition was conceived early in the pandemic, at a moment when sari innovation was thriving online. Unable to travel, Khanchandani turned to social media, where hashtags surged and small Indian design houses began building global followings. She saw designers ‘pushing the sari in new directions’, redefining its materiality, its drape and its place in contemporary wardrobes. From there came the pitch to the Design Museum in London and after extensive audience testing, the exhibition’s title: The Offbeat Sari emerged.
MAC’s iteration retains the exhibition’s integrity while making spatial and curatorial adjustments. A ‘new materialities’ section spills out into the downstairs gallery where the Birmingham team have also added a new and welcome addition: a community-commissioned component engaging local British South Asian diaspora through oral histories – curated by Gugan Gill and Sampad Arts – called Sari Stories. The result is a layered presentation; the sari’s contemporary reinvention in India, shown alongside personal narratives of UK-based wearers, each holding its own weight without collapsing into reductive ideas of cultural continuity.
I think the exhibition offers an exemplary model of the archive as a living entity, making it fitting not only for the Design Museum but also for MAC as a contemporary art gallery; where this shift in context allows it to speak of the ways archives are rooted in the present and brought to life by those who encounter them, whether as viewers, wearers or curators. The ‘community gallery’ here is not an afterthought. It includes powerful photographs of trans folk and drag performers in saris alongside many other personal narratives. Yet, as is too often the case (here in the UK anyway), community spaces in public institutions remain the least glamorous, the least resourced, and the most precarious. I am sympathetic to the constraints of our increasingly problematic funding structures and the difficult financial decisions faced by galleries, but I believe participants should always be compensated for sharing their personal stories. While the images and accounts here have impact, I had hoped for more sensorial and/or material presence to mirror the physical vitality of the main exhibition in MAC’s upstairs gallery. I want better for these types of spaces and the communities they represent. Khanchandani’s curatorial vision in the main exhibition resists nostalgic reduction, showing decisively that the sari is far more expansive, innovative, and politically charged than a romantic drape passed down from our mothers, and I want to see that same ambition reflected in how we platform local voices.
Back in the main gallery, a selection of artifacts spanning the last fifteen years avoid a nostalgic reliance on historic classics and instead, privilege the sari’s capacity for reinvention. Abraham & Thakore’s black sequin sari, woven from recycled plastic bottles with sequins painstakingly cut from hospital X-rays, functions as a quiet provocation on sustainability and material reuse embedded into couture aesthetics. Little Shilpa’s brocade sari, draped to mimic a Scottish kilt and worn with a crisp white shirt, situates hybridity in the garment’s folds. Also on show, a distressed denim sari by premium label Diksha Khanna, reframes the sari’s form as streetwear, unsettling purist ideas of drape and occasion. Khanchandani frames this approach as a deliberate resistance: ‘Resisting the stereotype of the female body as passive, resisting the sari as restrictive or purely ceremonial. The capacity of the sari to carry meaning, political, personal, aesthetic, is huge.’ This political charge is explicit in the hot pink sari of the Gulabi Gang, a grassroots protest movement in Uttar Pradesh campaigning against violence towards women. It is equally present in more subtle gestures by the ‘gang’, such as the choice to use inexpensive fabrics historically deemed unworthy of prestige.
If The Offbeat Sari has a central proposition, it is that the sari is not fixed in time. Much like archives, they move as we move and are activated and morph through each passing decade. It is a garment of continuous negotiation, between wearer and cloth, tradition and disruption, personal expression and collective identity. This reading is strengthened by MAC’s community-engaged additions (even if they feel a little side-lined outside of the glamour of its main gallery space), which foreground diasporic relationships to the sari that are as emotionally charged as they are sartorially specific.
The exhibition’s strength lies in its tight curatorial scope and refusal to cover ‘everything’, a common trap when representing diasporic or national culture in a single exhibition. However, there is a tension here. The focus is on India in lieu of the wider subcontinent (where the sari is also an important garment), a limitation Khanchandani does acknowledge. ‘It’s challenging to do a show about the sari and focus only on India specifically… but India itself is the size of a continent. To do justice geographically was already challenging enough.’ This makes the Birmingham version’s additional diaspora section more significant and it gestures towards wider conversations without diffusing the exhibition’s original premise.
At its best, The Offbeat Sari expands the language of fashion curation beyond ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’, situating the sari within a contemporary design discourse while allowing it to remain rooted in tangible lived experiences. The garments on show are not just wearable; they are essays in cloth, archival interventions and manifestos. In Khanchandani’s words, ‘There are so many more stories I’d like to tell. This is just one chapter’ and if that chapter is anything to go by, the sari’s offbeat future is in good hands.
The Offbeat Sari, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, 28 June – 2 November 2025.
Sari Stories, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, 24 May – 19 October 2025.
Roo Dhissou is an artist and doctoral researcher based in Birmingham where she runs Jalebi Press.
This feature is supported by Midlands Arts Centre.
Published 29.08.2025 by Kevin Hunt in Review
1,195 words