About halfway through the 92nd Oscars last night, actor Utkarsh Ambudkar performed a freestyle on stage to recap the show — that performance had a little-known Toronto connection. Ambudkar, who is best known for his roles in The Mindy Project and Pitch Perfect, was sporting a Sandy suit by Toronto stylist Sandy Gill.
Gill took to Instagram to share how her work ended up on the 2020 Oscars stage saying, “We had a very short timeline to make it and get it into his hands in L.A. That meant late night calls, triple checking the measurements and a lot of praying that the international shipping would be reliable.”
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Gill also notes that she worked with Brampton retailer Sahiba Fashions to put the look together, as she often has for her Sandy suit creations in the past. Gill and Amar Singh of Sahiba Fashions created the Sandy suit in 2015 out of an idea to create a power suit for women in a powerful fabric. Both Gill and Singh are South Asian and felt the fabrics they saw their mothers, aunts and grandmothers in to be a perfect fit.
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Since then, the suit has popped up on public figures such as Humble the Poet as he accompanied Lilly Singh at one of Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra’s wedding events, Beena Patel (comedian Hasan Minhaj’s wife) at the NRDC Night of Comedy and entrepreneur Nabela Noor.
In her Instagram post, she also says, “What people wear to the Oscars means a lot and I’m so honoured Utkarsh chose my work to be in on stage.” She concludes the post saying, “This suit is my love letter to my heritage, my obsession with art, and my desire to make people feel great and more confident about themselves,” followed by information on how to get a made-to-measure Sandy suit by emailing thesandysuit@gmail.com.
