Chintz, the Indian cotton once banned outright by France and Britain to protect their own weavers, gets its own V&A show on the trade that shaped it.
Chintz, the painted and printed cotton of India’s Coromandel Coast, is the subject of an exhibition opening at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 18 September 2027.
Dyers on the Coromandel Coast and around Golconda drew it by hand, floral on a pale ground. They had fixed bright colour to cotton in a way Europe could not manage, using a mordant process Europe could not replicate for a century.
The East India companies shipped chintz back from the seventeenth century. Light, washable and cheap, it took over at a moment when Europeans wore wool and linen. Domestic weavers pressed for protection: France banned it in 1686 and Britain in 1720, and the bans lasted decades and were widely ignored.
Reverse-engineering the dyers’ process was one of the drivers of the industrial revolution in textiles. The word now means something small and suburban, and chintzy is a term of contempt for a textile that was once contraband.
The show spans four centuries of that history. It opens on a bed hanging painted and dyed on the Coromandel Coast around 1700, and sets the museum’s archive beside pieces borrowed from the textiles collector Karun Thakar.