For a time in Europe, a floral dress could get you detained. Between the late 17th and the end of the 18th century, chintz – the exquisite hand-drawn or printed cotton textile from India – became so wildly popular that Britain and France tried to ban it. Wear it, and you risked more than turning heads: your dress could be ripped from your back. So feverish had chintz mania grown across Europe that domestic wool, silk and linen industries, alarmed by its allure, successfully pressed for protectionist bans on both the import and imitation of Indian textiles. For others, such as the novelist and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe, the fabric appeared as a threat to both national pride and religious faith: it was devilish and part of a Mughal plot to conquer the Christian world.
Prohibition and denunciation did little, however, to diminish the consumer passions of Europe’s status-chasing elite. Instead, it made chintz seem even more seductive: an exotic commodity that signalled worldliness and refinement. Smuggling flourished and legal loopholes were exploited as consumers sought to cover their beds and bodies in a textile whose lightness, vivid hues and remarkable colour-fastness were radical for the time. Chintz illuminates the extraordinary global reach of this craze. The book draws on the treasures of Karun Thakar, a discerning collector who has spent much of his life amassing and supporting scholarship on the earliest and finest examples of this fabric. Spanning the 14th to the 20th centuries, the pieces encompass lavish French bed canopies, Dutch children’s bonnets and Japanese pouches, establishing the many ways in which chintz was commercialised, repurposed and domesticated across cultures.
The design revolution described by the authors owed much to the technical mastery and creative sophistication of India’s artists and artisans, many of whom worked along the Coromandel Coast. Their extraordinary aesthetic agility allowed chintz to be adapted for audiences with vastly different tastes, beliefs, traditions and means. Even within this collection, the visual repertoire extends far beyond the fly-away florals now most readily associated with chintz. The Virgin Mary, cradling Christ in one hand and presenting a model ship in the other, presides over an 18th-century ruby-red banner made for South Indian or Sri Lankan Catholic communities converted by Portuguese missionaries. Mary stands within a mandala radiating celestial beams – a striking example of the way the textile generated a cross-pollination of styles that reveal as much about religion as they do about colonial politics, economics and cultural identity.
This historical richness is perhaps why Indian chintz deserves to be re-established as a precious textile. The scholarship gathered here represents a compelling reclamation of a reputation that has suffered repeated assaults in the past, most recently from Ikea’s mid-1990s ‘Chuck out your Chintz’ advertising campaign. ‘That flowery trimmage is spoiling our image,’ it declared. The book’s sumptuous pictures make a persuasive case for reconsideration: regal military jackets painted with the protective Thai deity Kiartimuk; Indonesian wall hangings with blazing red centres; and countless other objects that demonstrate the textile’s extraordinary range.
Coveted by kings, smuggled across borders and banned by governments: that is no ordinary history for a fabric.
A version of this article appears in the October 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
