The Offbeat Sari at MAC, 2025. Courtesy of the Design Museum, London. Credit Tegen Kimbley

The Offbeat Sari – Indian Fashion Unravelled

Sat 28 Jun – Sun 2 Nov | First Floor and Arena Galleries | Open daily, 11am – 5pm | Free entry, donations welcome

A major exhibition celebrating the contemporary sari, showing how designers, wearers and craftspeople are reshaping the ways in which the sari is understood, designed, made and worn in contemporary urban India. It unravels the sari in its numerous forms, demonstrating it to be a metaphor for the layered and complex definitions of India today and a site for design innovation, an expression of identity and resistance, and a crafted object carrying layers of new materialities.

Exhibition highlights which explore the sari’s connection to nature include the Pollution Sari by AKAARO (2017) and a sari worn by members of the Hargilla Army wildlife conservation group.