This week I styled a thrifted sari for a Brooklyn shoot and it might be the proudest I've been of anything all year.
It started at the Brooklyn Flea in DUMBO on Saturday. Wedged under a table of cracked vinyl and someone's dead grandmother's teacups, there was a sari. Coral, gold zari border, a little damaged at the pallu. Twelve dollars. The seller had no idea what he had.
I did. I always know.
The shoot brief was "summer in the city, secondhand only." Sustainability is not a trend for me, it's just how I was raised — nothing in an Indian household gets thrown out, everything gets reincarnated. My mother's petticoats became my dupattas became cleaning rags became who knows what.
So here's how I styled a thrifted sari for a Brooklyn shoot without it reading as costume, because that was my whole fear.
First, I refused to make it a "look at the exotic garment" moment. I draped it half-untucked, worn with a plain white men's tank and beat-up Doc Martens. The damaged pallu I turned inward and pinned so it fell like a scarf, not a flag.
We shot under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, that spot on Washington Street everyone Instagrams. The coral against the rust of the bridge and the gray cobblestone was the entire mood. Golden hour did the rest.
The model was a girl from Jackson Heights, Punjabi, who told me her mother would lose her mind seeing a flea market sari in a real editorial. That's the point, I told her. We are allowed to be casual with our own beauty.
Styling a thrifted sari for a Brooklyn shoot means honoring the garment and refusing to treat it like a museum piece. It has to breathe. It has to move on a girl running for the F train.
We wrapped as the light died over the water. Twelve dollars. Reborn.
Everything old was somebody's whole world once. My job is just to remember that.
Love,