Chintz opens at V&A South Kensington on Saturday 18 September 2027.
Chintz is a printed or painted cotton, floral, on a pale ground, and it came out of India — Golconda and the Coromandel coast — where dyers had worked out how to fix bright colour to cotton in a way Europe could not manage. The East India companies shipped it back from the seventeenth century and it took over: light, washable, cheap and beautiful, at a moment when Europeans wore wool and linen. The domestic weavers reacted as domestic industries do. France banned it in 1686. Britain banned it in 1720. The bans lasted decades, were widely ignored, and are among the clearest cases in economic history of a protectionist measure aimed at a fabric.
The word now means something small and suburban. That is the joke: chintzy is a term of contempt for a textile that was once contraband. Indian dyers used a mordant process Europe could not replicate for a century, and reverse-engineering it was one of the drivers of the industrial revolution in textiles.
The V&A opens Chintz at South Kensington on Saturday 18 September 2027. It is the furthest-out exhibition the museum has announced and neither a closing date nor a price has been set. September is when the London design and art calendar restarts, and the V&A’s Indian textile holdings are among the strongest anywhere, which is presumably why it can plan this far ahead.