Last year three very big things happened in the world of film and fashion.
1. Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture.
2. Hollywood stars began to show up at events in everything but a bhindi.
Well done, Helen Mirren
...Oh, Oprah
3. Saris were suddenly couture ...
And ruled the runways...
And Zazou introduced the Vintage Sari scarf.
These are some of our simplest scarves, but still my favorites. There's something magical about vintage fabric. You touch them and can almost feel a story buried in the fibers.
I often find myself in their little corner of the warehouse when I need a "shiny-things" break.
Anyway, I had to know where we got this fabulous fabric and pestered my bosses. It was hard to get them - Claudia Koch, owner and Christopher Carroll, designer - to actually cough up the story.
(The secretive Chris and Claudia.)
Turns out Claudia travels to India at least once a year. She walks the bazaars, haggles with vendors and - in the case of the GREAT SARI DISCOVERY, as I'm now calling it - once found a hidden warehouse of wonders.
Here's Claudia's account, excerpted from an e-mail I forced her to write:
"We liked to frequent a certain Chor Bazaar in Bombay. It was not until much later that we learned that 'chor' meant thief and that this bazaar had nothing but supposedly stolen merchandise in it. There was a certain 'sari wallah,' literally the sari salesman who ran a shop in this bazaar.
(Not actual Sari Wallah.)
"It was so hard to find that we had to pay a child to show us the way. Up narrow alleys, up stairs, down stairs, through a muddy area filled with cows, around and around until we came to a narrow ill-lit hallway where the sari wallah had his mountain of saris.
(I couldn't find a photo of a mountain of saris.)
"We were invited to 'climb the mountain' and pull out what looked like promising candidates. Many of the saris had obviously never been worn and were wrapped in plastic - undoubtably part of some woman's dowry. Some were really worn out with holes in them. And some were....
"... fine brightly colored silk with fabulous border work."
Claudia's story made me think of all those women - from different classes and walks of life in India - getting rid of their old saris either by happenstance, convenience or by choice.
Who were they and why did they do it?
Maybe they were affluent women choosing Western clothes near the end of the Century. Or middle-class women discarding their old saris and replacing them with new. Or poor women (who Claudia saw by the sides of the road) with their worn saris barely covering their breasts as they worked the fields or squatted and begged.
Women like us, yet not like us.
However saris make their way to America, manufacturers are still coming up with ways to recycle and market them.
Sari bedding
Sari skirts
Sari journals (Really?)
Claudia's first memory of a sari was at one of her mother's fancy parties - which I now believe is the first recorded instance of a wardrobe malfunction.
Take it away, Claudia:
"My mother had one which she wore to one of the fetes she liked to throw and which, sadly, fell off at her grand entrance."
But that is another story.
