Bandra, Mumbai
Priya.
The quiet radical rewriting the sari script
The Story
Priya Menon, in her own words.
For our first issue, we sit with the twenty-six-year-old textile revivalist rethinking what softness looks like on a modern Indian woman.
Why she's our cover girl
Because she wears her contradictions on the outside — Bandra and Palakkad, altar and Spotify Wrapped, a grandmother's sari and a petrol-pump t-shirt — and makes all of it look like the most natural thing in the world. She's not a brand. She's a girl who got dressed.
“I don't want to be styled. I want to be understood. There's a difference, and Indian fashion has been confusing the two for a long time.”
— Priya Menon
The photo essay
Shot in Bandra, Mumbai
In conversation
Ten minutes with Priya.
What did wearing a sari mean to you at nineteen?
— Costume. It meant costume — someone else's idea of me. It took me until twenty-four to realise a sari is six yards of anything you want it to be.
Bindee is a magazine for girls who feel between things. Where do you feel between?
— Between my Malayalam and my Marathi. Between my grandmother's altar and my Spotify Wrapped. I think that's the whole point of being twenty-something in India right now.
One thing you're romanticising this season?
— The three minutes it takes to pin a dupatta. It's meditation if you let it be.
Her festive memory
Onam at her grandmother's house in Palakkad — the specific blue of a kasavu sari after the monsoon, jasmine pinned in without asking, and being told to stop fidgeting while someone older fixed her pleats.
Her everyday ritual
The three minutes it takes to pin a dupatta. "It's meditation if you let it be," she says. She does it every morning, phone face-down.
Three Bindee objects
Her grandmother's jamdani sari
Worn to a wedding in 1974, now worn to the chemist.
A single gold jhumka
She lost the other one and refuses to replace the pair.
A petrol-pump t-shirt
Bought in Alibaug, the least precious thing she owns.
“A sari is six yards of anything you want it to be.”
“Softness is not the same as smallness.”
The Bindee Take
Priya's whole practice is a small argument we happen to agree with: heritage survives by being worn, not archived. The sari that goes to the chemist outlasts the one saved for one wedding album.
Credits
The team behind the cover.
- Photography
- Aarav Kapoor
- Styling
- Simran Bedi
- Makeup
- Nyla D'Souza
- Hair
- Zoya Sen
Read the full interview
Priya, in Blue
The Bindee Letter