Miniature showing a woman wearing shalwar trousers in fine painted or block-printed cotton © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

A large cotton square, currently framed up in a Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) exhibition in London (1), is in the dark greens and blacky-browns of a lacquer screen, with distinctively Japanese pine trees. It isn’t printed, but hand-painted in one of the areas of India where such textiles have been a craft industry for two millennia. When it was made in the 17th century, the Dutch had exclusive western trading rights with Japan and a taste for Japanese design. Operating as import-export agents from a chain of ports across the Orient, they traded between them, and back to Europe — a stylistic as well as geographic exchange. Japan was at the time almost closed to the outside world, and the Dutch transported Indian cloth in brilliant designs meant for the Siamese market to their waterfront warehouse in Nagasaki to sell to the Japanese as exotic. (There’s a dazzling kimono in the show that features this stuff.) In the other direction, Dutch factors handed their Indian subcontractors Japanese design samples — sketches, perhaps a lacquer box — and the Indians produced for the domestic Dutch market not an exact copy on cotton cloth, but a witty hybrid informed by the tastes of all the cultures involved in the transaction.

For the first century of its arrival in the West — till about the 1660s — the painted cotton cloth had been an amazement in itself. What people wore was then derived directly from the landscape they lived in, so Europe kept sheep for wool, which slurps up dyes, woven into warm, weatherproof outer clothing. It couldn’t be washed, because its fibres then felted into inflexible solidity. The other European textile, linen, spun from the fibre in the stems of flax and hemp, could be scrubbed, even soused in vicious lye bleaches. However, linen does not dye easily. Some silk was imported — and later produced in the Middle East and southern Europe — which dyed beautifully but wouldn’t wash. All these could only be patterned on the loom or, marginally less expensively, by embroidery.

Europe had encountered cotton from the Indian subcontinent as far back as the 1st century BC; in Rome, Pliny grumbled that rich Romans paid far too much for a white muslin so fine it was called “woven air”. In medieval times, small supplies of raw cotton were imported through Fustat near Cairo — the word cotton comes from the Arabic qutn. It was then shipped further north, and spun and woven locally into a cloth in which the long, strong warp threads were linen, and the shorter, softer, side-to-side weft threads were cotton. The fabric, called fustian (after Fustat), was durable, and became the ancestor of the moleskins, corduroys and jeans we still use for workwear on our backsides. Fustat was also the centre for a trade in ready-woven Indian cloth across the Islamic world. It was patterned with the familiar sprigs or geometrics, many of which still turn up (especially on men’s ties).

The designs were printed with wooden blocks, not just stamped the way children make potato cuts: since the colours were dyes not inks, colouring meant soaking the whole cloth in vegetable dyes. (Indian dye expertise goes back 3,000 years, with knowledge and skill passed down through families clustered where soil and water favoured the right plants.) Patterns were applied through a sequential process of repulsion and attraction. Any part of the pattern not meant to be coloured blue with indigo was coated with wax or mud before dyeing the whole cloth, then these were melted or chipped off to reveal uncoloured cloth. Red madder or chay dyes would only take on areas soaked with a mordant, a chemical that bonds a dye to the fibres. Most of the cheap block-printed patterns were executed in one or maybe two colours, but more upmarket cottons, delicately hand-outlined and with the resists and mordants brushed in, added yellow and over-dyed to create greens, purples and neutrals. Before each new stage, the cloth was bleached: the standard Indian bleach was the dung of goats or buffalo diluted in water, a production process probably not mentioned in international sales pitches.

Circle of trade

And there were international markets for the best-painted cloths, particularly desired as trade goods for the Indonesian archipelago, where for centuries there was no monetary economy. Indian, Arab and Chinese merchants bartered them there for spices to sell globally for payment in gold; they reinvested in more painted cotton — a perfect circle of trade, intertwined with a seasonal system of winds that blew the hefty cargo vessels in the right directions. It was so perfect that the Portuguese — the first Europeans to sail the same waters in search of spices and aromatics — copied it, bringing gold and silver mined in the Americas into the payment system. Portuguese traders returning to Europe with their spices occasionally brought back curiosities to sell to Europeans newly excited by objects from alien cultures, and they soon understood that the large-scale cotton panels used as hangings and coverlets in the Orient could do the same job in the West. Better, because of cost-of-living differences between East and West, even top-quality, specially-commissioned pintadoes — the Portuguese name for the cloth, meaning spotted or flecked — were far cheaper in materials and labour than Europe’s woven tapestries or embroideries.

Europe first encountered painted cottons through the pintadoes sold on in France and the Low Countries, with high mark-ups for profit and state taxes, although the English usually acquired them through piracy. Among the 900 tons of treasure aboard a huge Portuguese carrack, the Madre de Dios, captured in 1592 by privateers working on commission for Elizabeth I, were splendiferous pintadoes. Within 20 years the English and the Dutch had made sound investments in reliable trade with the Orient, forming East India Companies that operated the old circular route — gold and silver bullion for cotton, cotton for spices, spices for bullion.

Their entrepreneurial captains also occasionally brought home painted cottons, mostly for bed or wall hangings, which were much admired since it was evident that each involved many hours of handiwork, and were all the more glamorous as their process of manufacture was unknown; moreover, laundering did not destroy the colours and patterns. Their novelty did wear off, as the traditional colours, especially the dark red backgrounds popular in the oriental sun, looked sad and gloomy in northern European weather. Agents of the English company were instructed to request white backgrounds for the fantasy flora that covered the cloths, its flowers and foliage synthesised from Persian and Indian imagery, with a touch of Chinese. Then, as oriental merchants had long done, occidental traders started to order designs specifically suited to current Amsterdam, London or Paris tastes. They shipped out illustrated herbals and engraved prints to inspire Indian draughtsmen, who crossbred the flowers (many oriental or American in origin) with their own imagined hybrids. Western people and fauna were also adapted from prints, and both sides viewed the fantastic results as excitingly exotic. By the 1670s, the ever-professional Indians also supplemented large, pictorial artwork for furnishings with all-over designs scaled down to a wearable level.

The moment fashion was born

This was more or less the moment at which fashion as we understand it was born — when rapid changes in surface design were applied through sophisticated techniques to a simple material manufactured cheaply, far away, by unknown people. The Dutch first adopted the elementary T-shape of the Japanese kimono into an informal coat, the banyan, tailored in patterned cool cotton for warm climes; in Europe, the banyan became smart male at-home wear, father to all dressing-gowns. (The V&A has covetable banyans in its main collection, as well as in the current show — pop one on over a sweatshirt and jeans, shove your hands in its pockets, and you could nip out for a carton of milk without anyone knowing you were garbed in an antique.) The English and French soon saw the fabric’s potential for women’s gowns, skirts and casual jackets, and within a decade were importing millions of pieces annually. Commentators griped that it was attractive, clean and cheap, and dangerously eroded differences in status, as female servants could afford gowns of as good quality, if not as many, as their mistresses.

The turnaround in new designs was unprecedented. Images might be sent out from London, and variants on them painted on thousands of pieces in Bengal or the Coromandel Coast, and, despite long voyage times, the finished cloth would arrive back for sale at reasonable rates in London as fast, perhaps faster, than a costly patterned wool, silk or linen could be loom-woven. Middling buyers began to discard garments before they wore out, and buy fresh ones for novelty’s sake. India easily obliged differing national tastes in fashion. English preferences have always been for semi-naturalistic flowers in modest sizes and subtle tints on light backgrounds — and so evolved the fabric we call “chintz” from chimt, Hindi for spattered — which could be padded and quilted for warmth. France demanded its Indiennes boldly patterned on strong-coloured backgrounds, and trimmed them with shiny metallic laces: there are fans from Versailles illustrating grandes dames who seem to be dressed in hippy bedspreads with added sequins. The Dutch liked their imports neat in pattern and sober in colour.

By the end of the 17th century, as Daniel Defoe (2) complained, the inexpensive Indian goods had arrived in such quantities that they had put many local producers of economic wool or linen cloths out of business, made their craft workers redundant, and worsened northern Europe’s always shaky balance of trade figures. The French, soon followed by the English, banned imports of these lovely things around 1700. There followed a century of invention in which both countries struggled to discover how to produce comparably patterned cotton cloth at the same low price, or even lower, through machine-spinning and roller-printing (eventually steam-powered), and the encouragement of cotton plantations in the United States. But that, and its crucial formative effect on the industrial revolution, is another story.