Online retailers making their presence felt offline is a concept that’s been gaining momentum. Jaypore.com has positioned itself as the go-to destination for all things that champion Indian craftsmanship since 2012. Needless to say, the website has a vast offering of saris. Given the millennial generation’s interest in handlooms, Jaypore will be hosting a sari draping workshop at their store in Bengaluru in an attempt to create an immersive retail experience.
Acclaimed textile scholar and author Rta Kapur Chishti is also the founder of label TaanBaan, which looks into the revival of Indian weaves and regularly hosts sari draping workshops to increase awareness and disseminate the history of Indian textiles. Chishti, who will be conducting the draping workshop, talks about the nuances of the drape, “The most popular sari drape that is worn is the Nivi drape, worn by nearly everyone in the 1860s. Everyone adopted the drape partly because people didn’t want to be identified for where they came from. Now that we are in a period where people want to personalise everything, why not adopt the regional drapes?”
Chishti aims to teach the basics of draping so that wearers are empowered to create their own iterations to contemporise the sari according to their needs. “The versatility of the sari is based on multiple cultural influences. So the idea was to introduce the Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do [the basics] so that everybody can wear it in a different way and not necessarily wear it in the traditional way,” she says. When we asked her about the rules of draping, Chishti had but one response. “There is no fixed rule, but the main principle of it, which makes all the difference, is that a sari should be worn without the aid of pins or needles. The moment it’s a stitched sari, it becomes a garment; it can’t be refashioned for wear, it has to be worn as it is—structured. An unstructured garment is can be recreated as per your need, the occasion, the time of the year and so on.”
The academic’s research on the origins of various drapes is unparalleled. On the topic of evolution of different identities, Chisthi quips, “We were looking at the country as a vast stretch that had its similarities and individuality from area to area. What was most surprising was that the sari didn’t belong to a community—it belonged to a region, so you couldn’t make out who was who except the region they came from. You couldn’t make out a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian except from little things within that area, because they all wore the same garments. Even the goldsmith’s wife and the cobbler’s wife wore almost the same designs—the cobbler’s wife wore something coarser, while the goldsmith’s wife wore something with very fine zari. It’s a prime area of learning how ingeniously people can adapt a garment for every occasion even with the financial constraints that they had, yet they could create something of beauty within in it.”
The workshops will be conducted at the Jaypore Bengaluru store on January 18 and 19; Address: 590, 1st Cross, 12th Main Rd, HAL 2nd Stage, Indiranagar, Bengaluru, Karnataka
The post You can’t miss Jaypore’s sari draping workshop in Bengaluru this weekend appeared first on VOGUE India.
from Fashion – VOGUE India http://bit.ly/2Djryvk
No comments:
Post a Comment