Banarasi Soft Silk Saree

A soft silk Banarasi worked the classic way: a plain body carrying nothing but zari butas — the small leaf-and-bud motif — spaced evenly across it, and then a pallu that does all the work. The pallu is dense paisley and floral zari in banded rows, with a jhallar of peacock and lotus forms along the edge, and the border repeats that peacock motif down both selvedges.

The restraint is the point. Because the body is quiet, the pallu reads as the event, and the saree carries a wedding without competing with the jewellery.

What you are buying

• Soft silk saree, approximately 5.5 metres, with a running blouse piece
• Allover zari butas across a plain body
• Rich paisley and floral zari pallu with a peacock and lotus jhallar
• Peacock-motif zari border along both edges
• Soft finish — drapes and pleats without stiffness
• Eight colourways, including two dual-tone shot-silk shades

Gold zari or silver

The zari is not the same metal across the range, so it is worth checking before you pick a shade to match jewellery you already own. Black, coral and rust orange are woven in gold and antique-copper zari. Red, magenta purple, bottle green, teal green and peacock blue are woven in silver-white zari. Silver-zari sarees sit better with silver, oxidised or kundan-and-pearl jewellery than with yellow gold.

About the running blouse

This saree comes with a running blouse piece — the blouse fabric is cut from the same roll as the saree body, so it matches rather than contrasts. If you prefer a contrast blouse, the zari in the border is the tone to pick up.

A note on the two dual-tone shades

The coral and the teal-green are shot silks, woven with one colour in the warp and another in the weft. They change tone as you move — the coral reads pink in some light and orange in others, the teal-green shifts towards blue. Photographs can only show one of those states, so expect more variation in the hand than the picture suggests. That is the fabric behaving correctly, not a colour mismatch.

Honestly about provenance

This saree is handwoven and curated by us — it does not come from our own Kolkata embroidery workshop. We also describe the fabric the way our weaver describes it to us, soft silk, rather than claiming a fibre percentage we have not had tested.

Care

Dry clean only. Store folded in cotton, and refold along a different line every few months so the zari does not crease into one permanent fold.