To trace India's contribution to Western fashions, stop by at two exhibitions at London's V&A Museum this autumn
It might be subtle as a pattern of stitching or eye-catching as a burst of glitter. It might be a vivid combination of blue and green that suggests peacock feathers or the foliage of a pleasure garden. But when it comes to the most sought-after clothing and jewellery produced by designers in Paris, New York or Milan, there is nearly always an Indian element.
Adding new words to the language of adornment
Bejewelled Treasures, the second autumn show at the V&A, reveals the direct link between Indian traditions of ornament and the evolution of European jewellery design in the early 20th century. Paris’s creative industries drove the trend. Jeweller Jacques Cartier went to India for the first time in 1911, bringing back a wealth of impressions as well as contacts in the gem trade. As a result, there was a huge increase in both the number and type of precious stones imported from India to France in the following decades. Carved Indian jewels had a particular impact.
Fashion designer Paul Iribe chose one of these gems, a large carved emerald, to be the centrepiece of a brooch that became a prototype for the Art Deco style. “He used all the colours of Mughal and Iranian book painting and drew on elements of Chinese art as well to create a hybrid Oriental aesthetic that became the taste of the age,” says Susan Stronge, curator of Bejewelled Treasures. “Paul Iribe was the first person to do that.”
One of Iribe’s collaborators, fashion designer Paul Poiret, also took inspiration from India. Poiret is credited with ushering in the craze for turbans that swept Europe and America in the 1920s. Worn by women as well as men, these ready-to-wear turbans were often decorated with the same kind of feathered or jewelled ornaments seen on the heads of the Indian princes who were the era’s most fashionable party guests. Meanwhile, the long pearl necklaces favoured by maharajas migrated to the necks of flapper girls, thereby becoming one of the decade’s signature accessories.
(This story appears in the Sept-Oct 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)