India led the fashion industry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Indian cotton fabric and design motifs swept the known world. From Africa to Europe and across the Atlantic, India became an influential player in the early modern textile market.
The key to India’s leadership of the early modern fashion world was cotton. Male and female artisans produced yarn and fabric—soft, finely-woven, colorful, painted, and printed. Savvy merchants sold it from Africa to Northeast Asia. Motifs of Hindu figures and indigenous Indian flowers became symbols of beauty and quality in Africa, Asia, and, somewhat later, in Europe and the American colonies.
Comments