We got a donation last week. Fifty saris, boxed and shipped from an aunty network in New Jersey to our little studio off the Morgan Ave L stop in Bushwick.
My job this weekend was sorting fifty donated saris for an upcycling project. Which sounds glamorous. It is not glamorous. It is dust, and the smell of old naphthalene balls, and pins you find with your fingertips.
But oh, the stories.
A red Banarasi with a wine stain near the hem that someone clearly danced too hard in. A pale green cotton so soft it had gone almost transparent from washing. A gold-bordered one still smelling faintly of a perfume I couldn't name but somehow recognized.
Sorting fifty donated saris is really an exercise in imagining fifty women. Who wore this to a wedding. Who wore this to a funeral. Who folded this away and never wore it again.
My grandmother had a rule: you never throw away a sari, you turn it into something. A quilt, a blouse, a petticoat, a rag, a dust cloth. It lives seven lives before it dies. That is the most sustainable fashion philosophy I know, and she never once used the word sustainable.
We are cutting these into panels, turning them into structured jackets and patchwork skirts for the fall line. Nothing wasted. Even the borders get saved, coiled up like little golden snakes in a jar on my desk.
I took my lunch break sitting on the studio floor, surrounded by silk, eating a samosa from the halal cart on Flushing Avenue with orange fingers I was terrified to touch anything with.
Sorting fifty donated saris took me nine hours. My back is destroyed. My heart is somehow bigger.
Everything old wants to be worn again.
Love,