.jpg) Jacqueline Kennedy in a sari-inspired dress (3 June 1963) |
A sari-inspired dress incorporates attributes of the Indian sari into its design. This includes how it drapes, its embellishment and colours.
In 1917, a sari-inspired dress appeared in the silent movie The Gown of Destiny. Following Jacqueline Kennedy's goodwill tour of India and Pakistan in 1962, when she had brought back several saris with the intention to make them into dresses, for a short while the sari-inspired dress gained enough interest to inspire several designers including Wesley Tann and Oleg Cassini to design dresses based on the sari. Other designers that have produced variations of the design include Dolce and Gabbana, Catherine Walker, Valentino, Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen.
Kennedy wore Cassini's light-pink chiffon, sari-inspired dress to the opening of the Mona Lisa exhibition in Washington in 1963, and later that year wore it again when hosting a state dinner for Indian President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. When Princess Diana met the King of Thailand in 1988, she wore Walker's fuchsia and violet sari-inspired silk chiffon dress. In 1996 Elle supported their opinion of the sari-inspired dress by publishing an image of a woman looking down and stroking her embroidered black chiffon sari-inspired gown. In later years, other celebrities seen in sari-inspired dresses have included Jennifer Lopez, Freida Pinto, Sonam Kapoor, Jessica Chastain, and Archie Panjabi in a sari-gown embedded with colour changing LEDs.