I spent Tuesday sorting thrifted saris in a Bushwick studio and I have not stopped thinking about it since.
A vintage dealer I know off the L at Morgan Ave got a shipment — forty saris, sourced from estate sales and a couple of aunties clearing out closets in Jackson Heights. She asked me to help style a capsule for a small sustainable label. Six yards at a time, spread across a concrete floor.
Sorting thrifted saris is not like sorting anything else. Each one is a whole life. There was a Kanjeevaram so heavy with gold zari it felt like holding a sleeping cat. A soft cotton one, worn thin at the pleats, exactly where someone tucked it in a thousand times.
My job was to think about how these could live again. As jackets, as skirts, as something a girl on the L could wear to a gallery in Williamsburg without knowing it once wrapped around a grandmother at a wedding in Coimbatore.
And here's where I get quiet.
Because part of me loves it — sustainability, giving fabric a second act, keeping six yards out of a landfill. That's the whole point of the work I want to do. But part of me flinches. These weren't ours to cut up. Or maybe they were, exactly, if the woman who owned them wanted them gone.
Sorting thrifted saris in a Bushwick studio, I kept hearing my Nani's voice. She saved everything. A sari was never trash, it became a petticoat, a pillowcase, a dusting cloth. Nothing died. Everything transformed. Maybe that's the tradition I'm actually continuing.
I held one back for myself. A faded green with a mustard border, torn at one end. Not for cutting. Just to keep whole, on a hanger, so at least one of them stays a sari.
We reinvent things constantly in fashion. But some things I want to leave exactly as they were.
Tell me — what would you never cut up?
Love,