HIGH
above Fifth Avenue in a duplex apartment brimming with Matisses,
Picassos and presidential autographs, the talk turned to saris.
Can Western women get away with traditional Indian garb and not
look as if they're wearing a bedspread?
"The only way is if we're in another country, and then at a
party," said Sarah Giles, the design editor at Harper's
Bazaar. "Bindis are fine, but not saris. We don't know how to
walk in them."
A woman with a tiny
diamond-shaped bindi dotting the space between her blue eyes
nodded.
"That's true," said the
woman, Maura Moynihan, who in addition to the bindi was swathed in
a diaphanous gold sheath. "And Indian women say the most
terrible things about you under their breath." She broke into
a flawless Hindi accent. "Look at that foreigner, how
ridiculous she looks in that! "
Maura Moynihan's latest
bohemian incarnation is as a dressmaker, in Kathmandu.
"A sari is the Indian babe's
fashion trump card," said Ms. Moynihan, who, throughout,
swathed herself in various garments from her collection.
"They're very sexy. But not for Westerners."
Ms. Giles turned to her and said,
" You can wear them, but the rest of us look idiotic."
Ms. Moynihan, who is 43, has been
wearing saris since the early 1970's, when her father, Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was ambassador to India. They lived in
New Delhi. Since 1999, Ms. Moynihan's adopted home has been
Katmandu, Nepal, where she founded a company called Choli, the
Hindi word for the shirt worn beneath the sari.
On Wedn6sday, she held a sample
sale at the Upper East Side home of Sharyn Mann, whose husband,
Steve, is the former finance chairman of the Moynihan for Senate
committee. "She used to lend me clothes for Dad's
fund-raisers," Ms. Moynihan said. "Now she's buying
mine."
Ms. Mann, a co-founder of the
Food Allergy Initiative, a nonprofit charity, purchased two
jackets and a pair of pants. " I love that her clothes come
from a different era," she said. "You get really tired
of designer clothes* This has meaning."
Over a four-and-a-half-hour
stretch, about 20 customers zipped in and out, while a uniformed
butler passed around silver platters of pirogis (he called them
Nepalese dumplings), fresh asparagus and lemonade in crystal
glasses. Many of the customers were friends Ms. Moynihan knew
through people who traveled in her father's circles.
She was inspired to import ethnic
Indian clothing, she said, because she thinks Western women could
benefit from the Eastern addition to their wardrobes.
"In Asia, women are allowed to age gracefully," she
said. "They
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