Wedding Shopping in Pune

I stayed in Pune for 5 (grown up) years and didn’t buy a rag from there! But I bought the most important saree of my life from Pune. As per my mother’s and MIL’s recommendations – Pune is a great place to buy silk saris. Yes! Better than Mumbai they say. Being a loyal Mumbai girl it is difficult for me to digest the fact that there is something that you don’t get in Mumbai (Not that I dislike Pune. I love it so so much. It is small, cozy and always close to my heart).

 The men (including the guy) in both our families run miles away when they sense any sort of shopping activity in the agenda. But I and my MIL insisted them to take a break and come with us! For the first time we (both of us and our parents) went out wedding shopping like a typical Maharashtrian family. Way less dramatic though as I saw the stores were filled with huge families including distant relatives just to buy 1 bridal saree.

All I had shopped for my wedding trousseau till Sunday was the Lehenga’s mentioned here which of course are hand worked!  I wanted my wedding to have a feel of Maharashtrian wedding and the ‘colours & bling’ of a Punjabi wedding. So, decided to have at least a few traditional hand woven silk saris to get along with the heavy lehenga’s. So off we were to Pune with a meticulous list and lots of hope!

Why Pune?

Traditional hand woven saris sold in Mumbai/Pune are sourced from the same place. As for the cosmopolitan culture of Mumbai, Maharashtrian brides have started wearing worked upon saris rather than silk ones. Having stayed in Pune for long, I know that a Maharashtrian-Pune bride prefers a silk sari over the worked upon one. Also, the hectic Mumbai life does not permit women here to buy silk saris often when compared to Pune. So, what I observed is that the saris in Pune looked new and fresh when compared to Mumbai. (This is just what we feel)

This was just a day excursion. So we could only visit 3 stores in Pune (Store reviews coming up):

1.       Kasat Exclusive (Near Karishma)

2.       Tathastu (Kumthekar road)

3.       Vama (Laxmi road)

Things to remember:

I am now done buying silk saris! I am so surprised how quick I have finalized my wedding trousseau. I bought 3 lehengas in three days flat and 3 saris in one day. This is so not me! I guess you know from within that this is the one; it’s an instant feeling that makes it easy to decide. (Generally, for functions like a cousin’s wedding you have a tight budget and hence difficult to select stuff from that range). What we concluded while sari shopping in Pune is that if you take an unusually long time to decide whether to buy the sari, its probably not all that good!

It was a fun Sunday. Surprisingly the men helped! I was stunned when they sometimes pointed out the right flaws. We bought 15 saris in total (including some wedding favor saris) and might need to go again to buy more saris for my mom and MIL. Any highly recommended stores for wedding shopping in Pune?