A little over 150 years ago, over 30,000 hand cut and mounted samples of Indian textiles were painstakingly organised into an album series to educate and inspire commercial and design industries in India and Britain. Its creator, John Forbes Watson, called them ‘trade museums’.
Watson would have been pleased to walk around the ‘India in Fashion’ exhibition at the newly-opened Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai, which documents the country’s impact on global fashion in modern times. The exhibition starts off with a magnificent armadillo dress and a striking pair of shoes, notable for its unconventional shape and covered with scales of iridescent paillettes, designed by the late British designer Alexander McQueen for his Spring/Summer 2010 show, Plato’s Atlantis. The costume is juxtaposed against a large framed visual of a jewelled beetle, the Sternocera ruficornis — its shiny greenish-blue wings used frequently in exclusive embroidered textiles in India since the 15th century.
