The Gucci Gambit: Sorry, Not Sari

By Gurpreet Kaur

Alia Bhatt at the closing ceremony of Cannes Film Festival 2025

Alia's appearance at Cannes 2025 in what appeared to be a contemporary interpretation of traditional South Asian silhouettes, crafted by Gucci, represents more than just a fashion moment. It's a case study in how cultural aesthetics travel from traditional contexts to global luxury markets, and what gets preserved—or transformed—in translation.

Alia described the outfit as “Gucci’s version of a sari.” But if you looked closely—really looked—the garment was actually closer to a lehenga: a long, embellished skirt paired with a fitted blouse and what appeared to be a draped dupatta-style covering. Gucci, meanwhile, called it a "custom gown with embroidered crystals." Three names for one outfit, each telling a different story about cultural knowledge, commercial convenience, and the messy reality of how fashion travels across borders.

This linguistic confusion isn't new. A few years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker appeared on "And Just Like That" wearing what was clearly a lehenga but calling it a sari—a mistake that sent Indian social media into collective exasperation. Now we have the inverse: a garment that exists somewhere in the liminal space between lehenga and sari being sanitized into the culturally neutral territory of "gown."

The Gucci Gambit

Gucci's approach represents a different kind of cultural navigation—one that sidesteps the sari-versus-lehenga debate entirely by refusing to engage with South Asian garment categories at all. Their "custom gown" description is both accurate (it is custom, it is gown-like) and strategically evasive (it avoids any cultural specificity that might complicate the narrative).

This represents what fashion marketing expert would call"universalization"—the process by which luxury brands strip cultural specificity from traditional garments to make them more globally palatable. A lehenga becomes "a gown." A kaftan becomes "resort wear." A cheongsam becomes "a fitted dress with side slits." The strategy works because it allows brands to access the visual richness of traditional aesthetics while avoiding the cultural education that genuine appreciation would require.

Let's be precise about what we're looking at. A sari is six yards of unstitched fabric draped around the body in various regional styles. A lehenga is a fitted blouse paired with a flared skirt and often a dupatta. What Bhatt wore borrowed elements from both traditions but adhered strictly to neither. This kind of cultural blending isn't unusual in contemporary Indian fashion—designers like Sabyasachi Mukherjee routinely create hybrid garments. The difference is context: Indian designers working within their own cultural tradition versus international luxury houses mining that tradition for inspiration.

Fashion's Universal DNA

Clothing has always traveled, adapted, and evolved. The crop top silhouette that dominates contemporary fashion? The sari blouse perfected it millennia ago. The "Scandinavian scarf" trend? It shares DNA with dupatta draping techniques. Fashion is a conversation across cultures, and conversations involve borrowing, adapting, and occasionally misunderstanding.

There's an argument to be made that demanding strict adherence to traditional categories misses the point of how fashion actually works. After all, the garment Bhatt wore was beautiful, and it clearly drew inspiration from South Asian traditions without claiming to be an exact replica. But there's a difference between thoughtful fusion and careless appropriation, between evolution and erasure. The distinction often comes down to acknowledgment, education, and respect for the communities whose traditions inform contemporary design.

The Economics of Recognition

Part of what's at stake here is economic: who benefits when cultural aesthetics travel through global fashion systems? When Gucci creates a lehenga-sari-gown hybrid without acknowledging its cultural sources, the economic value flows entirely to the fashion house. Research by cultural economist Dr. Olav Velthuis demonstrates how cultural acknowledgment affects brand value distribution. When brands explicitly name cultural inspirations, they conceptually share credit with traditional knowledge systems.

Should We Be Angry?

So should we be pissed about the lehenga-sari-gown situation? The answer is more complex than simple outrage would suggest. There's certainly something frustrating about watching traditional garment construction get flattened into generic "gown" language, especially when that flattening serves commercial rather than creative purposes.

But anger alone doesn't advance the conversation. What might be more productive is insisting on better cultural education within the fashion industry, supporting brands that demonstrate genuine cultural collaboration, and recognizing the difference between respectful fusion and extractive appropriation.

Perhaps what the lehenga-sari-gown confusion ultimately reveals is that we need more nuanced frameworks for discussing cultural fashion in a globalized world. The binary between appropriation and appreciation doesn't capture the messy reality of how clothing actually travels across cultures.