The whole six yards

The saree covers many sins — the excruciatingly thin, the uncomfortably obese, the tall, the short are attractively packaged and given a beauty and dignity that would perhaps be denied to them in other kinds of clothing. The saree enhances and mitigates. It can do casual; it can do ceremonial and there’s little chance of wardrobe malfunction. However, I see the saree slowly being phased out of the wardrobes of the young and the upwardly mobile, from workplaces and educational institutions. It has been pronounced inconvenient. It is now confined to party wear, and special occasions.

I am surprised at the notion that the saree is not really for the young, with the result that middle-aged housewives and ageing grandmothers are fighting to fit into jeans and skirts or the salwar kameez. Yet to me, who has grown up and lived in a saree since leaving school, I have been my indomitable self always in a saree. The saree is ultimate power dressing. Never did I feel remotely inconvenienced. On the contrary it was a pleasure to go through my extensive wardrobe of sarees — cottons, silks, embroidered, diaphanous, printed, plain.

Of course, there are hints that the saree may be staging a brave comeback with fashion designers turning it out in various avatars. The saree had also to change, to innovate and break out of the mould to go contemporary. Whether it retains its original grace is a matter of debate.