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Architects: Studio MUTT
- Area: 325 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Andy Stagg + Tian Khee Siong
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Manufacturers: Dufaylite, ECOBoard
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Lead Architects: Graham Burn, James Crawford, Alexander Turner, Emma Loughnane | Studio MUTT
Project Overview. The Offbeat Sari, at the Design Museum 19 May - 17 September 2023, explores the radical 21st Century overhaul of the sari, shedding a rare spotlight on contemporary Indian fashion for UK audiences. Curated by Priya Khanchandani and designed by Studio MUTT with Sthuthi Ramesh and Beam LD, the show presents the sari as a site for design innovation, an expression of identity and resistance, and a crafted object carrying layers of new materialities. Around 60 examples of trailblazing saris from the last decade are shown in an exhibition asserting one of today’s most important global fashion stories, the true nature of which is little-known beyond South Asia.
Studio MUTT’s design explores the shifting social and political contexts of contemporary Indian fashion, removing the sari from traditional domestic environments and placing it in the new urban sites of the festival, the street, and the workshop. The journey through the 3 distinct spaces is created through characterful compositions of color, material palettes, graphic design, and lighting, and divided by monumental block-printed fabric walls. The Offbeat Sari treads lightly environmentally, maximizing the use of natural and regenerative materials such as honeycomb cardboard, simple cotton fabrics, and unfinished eco-board sheet material, and has been designed to be completely dismantled and re-assembled for future touring venues. It is one of the first exhibitions designed with the museum’s emerging sustainability toolkit in mind and as such has become a prototype and testbed for guidance.
Context and Process. The first section, Transformations, highlights designers in India who have fuelled the experimentation with the sari in recent years, pushing boundaries through the creation of new genres and embracing it as an object of playful expression. Festival stages and flower garlands are referenced in the design - tiered plinths with visible lattice construction utilize the tall gallery spaces for dynamic mannequin displays, while colorful LED strips and soft gradient environmental lighting add moments of intense colors to a pastel-toned space. The role of the wearer is examined in the second section, Identity + Resistance, showing how the sari can become a vessel for conveying individuality, empowering the female body, and how it can be worn as a tool for protest. A facsimile street scene constructed from honeycomb cardboard references ad-hoc urbanism and creates alleyways to frame views of the content. New Materialies, the final section in the show, looks at the sari as a textile, showing how the weave, texture, color, and surface form a rich canvas for the incredible creativity of craftspeople. Shown in a tactile workshop setting, the saris are hung democratically from a continuous rail without reference to the body.
Post-colonial Indian Design. Shown in the Design Museum, the former Commonwealth Institute building in London, The Offbeat Sari is an important part of the discourse of decolonizing the museum program and reinforcing the global recognition of post-colonial Indian design. Creating a sense of Indian design without resorting to pastiche or pandering to stereotypes was a key part of the brief and at the heart of the discussions in the year-long design period. Studio MUTT has worked closely with designers, curators, and researchers from India, South Asia, and the diaspora to collaboratively create a space that celebrates the uniquely Indian in a recognizable but offbeat and characterful way while leaving space for visitor interpretation and for the content to take center stage.
