Is a signature sari drape really yours to claim?

It's 2026, and we need to have a conversation about who gets to wear a sari a certain way.

We're not talking about how to drape one, which pleats work best, or whether you really need a blouse, but who gets to claim a particular drape as their own. Somewhere between the tutorial, the Instagram Reel, and the algorithm deciding what counts as a signature look, a centuries-old garment has become the subject of an entirely modern debate about ownership.

Recently, content creator Natasha Thasan, accused the team behind Netflix’s Best of the Best, starring Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, of borrowing her sari-draping style. The exchange that followed, and Thasan’s subsequent deletion of the videos and apology, raises a bigger question other than who inspired a particular costume: when a traditional practice becomes popular online, does the person who helps bring it to a new audience get to claim it? Or are we confusing visibility with ownership?

A drape older than the discourse

The sari has never been a one-style-fits-all garment. Across the subcontinent, it has been worn in different ways depending on region, community, occupation, and occasion. The Maharashtrian nauvari, the Bengali drape, and the Coorgi style are just a few examples of how the same unstitched length of fabric can take on entirely different forms. Its versatility is not a recent discovery, nor is the idea of wearing it differently a social media invention.

Even the blouse-and-petticoat combination many now consider as standard has a more complicated history than we tend to acknowledge. Stitched upper-body garments existed in the subcontinent before colonial rule, but Victorian ideas of modesty influenced clothing norms during the British period. In nineteenth-century Bengal, Jnanadanandini Devi helped popularise a style of wearing the sari with a blouse and petticoat.

What we call tradition has always been shaped by regional practices, social change, and individual adaptation. Which is what makes the idea of claiming a sari drape particularly strange.

Women have been adjusting, improvising, and reinterpreting the garment for generations, long before anyone could package a tutorial into a recognisable online aesthetic. Creators who make these techniques accessible to a new audience deserve credit for their work. But the garment, and the many ways of wearing it, did not begin with them. There is a difference between introducing someone to a tradition and claiming to be its origin story.

Going viral isn’t ownership

Thasan drew attention to similarities between her sari-draping tutorials and a blouseless sari look worn by Ramakrishnan in the film, alleging that the team had borrowed her style. Ramakrishnan responded in the comments, pointing out that she had contacted Thasan during filming, a year earlier, about wearing a blouseless drape. She also said that the film’s costume designer and she had acknowledged Thasan’s work whenever they had the opportunity, and described the outfit as her favourite in the film because of the rich history blouseless draping has had among Tamil people for centuries.

The exchange highlights a distinction worth making: acknowledging a creator whose work has informed a look is not the same as suggesting that the look originated with them. There is a conversation to be had about how fashion productions draw inspiration from independent creators, particularly those without the backing of a major studio or fashion house. But that conversation also needs to account for the cultural practices that existed before social media made them discoverable.

After facing criticism, Thasan deleted the videos of the exchange and posted an apology, saying she heard the feedback. But the episode is a reminder of how easily the language of personal branding can turn cultural participation into a claim of personal territory. A creator can have an identifiable aesthetic, a loyal audience, and a genuine influence on how people dress. None of those things makes a centuries-old practice theirs to claim. The internet may reward the person who makes a tradition trend, but the tradition itself is bigger than the trend.

Whose sari is it, anyway?

The answer is not one influencer, one designer or one region. The sari belongs to a vast and varied cultural history, carried forward by the people who weave it, wear it, teach its techniques, and adapt it to their lives. Its meaning changes across communities and generations. To reduce that history to a single person’s signature drape is to mistake one visible interpretation for the whole story. No individual creator, however popular, can stand in for that collective inheritance.

This does not mean that every drape is without context or that the people who preserve less widely known styles should go uncredited. Regional techniques have their own histories, and the artisans, dressers, researchers, and women who pass them down deserve recognition. There is room to celebrate a creator for bringing a style to a wider audience without suggesting that the style exists because of them. Understanding where a drape comes from makes the story behind it richer, not less personal.

Social media encourages us to turn everything into a signature: a makeup look, a way of dressing, a recipe, an aesthetic. The more recognisable it becomes, the easier it is to confuse being associated with something for owning it. But the sari has never needed one person to make it relevant. Its longevity comes from the fact that people keep finding new ways to wear it, while carrying forward the many traditions that came before them. You can make a drape your own without claiming it as your invention. The sari was here long before the algorithm, and will be here long after the discourse.

Lead image: Netflix 

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