Synopses & Reviews
This is the first truly comprehensive book on Indian textiles, featuring stunning examples from all over the country. Lavishly illustrated, it begins with an in-depth exploration of the different materials, techniques, and dyeing processes used in the creation of these sumptuous fabrics before exploring the central importance of cloth to Indian life and culture from ancient times to the present day. Special features focus on objects of historical importance, including a Kashmir map shawl, Tipu Sultanandrsquo;s tent, and a remarkable 18th-century temple hanging from South India.
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While many are familiar with Mughal velvets, western-market chintzes, or rural embroideries, for example, this book will surprise, inspire, delight, and inform with an extraordinary range of material, much of it new. Along with presenting great historical masterpieces, the importance and variety of the basic fibersandmdash;silk, cotton, woolandmdash;from which Indian textiles are traditionally made is emphasized, and the remarkable techniques of weaving, printing, dyeing, and embroidery that have made them prized across the world are illustrated in specially taken photographs.
Synopsis
Over the past hundred years, and#147;chintzand#8221; has come to mean any floral printed furnishing fabric, usually made of cotton, and often glazed. Its origins as a hand-drawn and dyed fabric from India are often forgotten, but it is with these rare earlier chintzes that this book is concerned. This stunning album explores in detail the background and development of this beautiful technique and looks at the use of chintz in Europe from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, first as bed curtains and wall hangings and later for popular menand#8217;s and womenand#8217;s fashions. The Victoria and Albert Museumand#8217;s collection, published for the first time in glorious color and including close-up details, will interest interior designers, textile students, and those involved in fashion.
About the Author
&&LDIV&&RRosemary Crill is senior curator in the V&A's Asian Department. She is joint editor of &&LI&&RDress in Detail from Around the World