How India’s Cotton Cloth Forever Changed Fashion and the World

Name: How India’s Cotton Cloth Forever Changed Fashion and the World
Start: 2025-03-28T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-03-28T20:00:00-07:00
Location: 675 Belleville Street, Victoria, BC, Canada, British Columbia V8W 9W2

Schedule

Fri Mar 28 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

675 Belleville Street, Victoria, BC, Canada, British Columbia V8W 9W2 | Victoria, BC

By Design: A Journey Through Arts and Culture Talk Series
As no other cloth in history, the painted and printed cottons of India–known today as “Indian chintz” - changed the fashion, economies, and relations of people around the globe. Join Dr. Sarah Fee to learn how for thousands of years, India “dressed the world” with its vibrantly patterned, painted and printed cotton cloth coloured with natural dyes. Delving deeper into objects and stories featured in the exhibition Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz, we will explore how from the 18th century Indian chintz inspired global fashion and later sparked the industrial revolution and intensified cotton slavery in the US. We will contemplate contemporary environmental legacies and how today artists and fashion designers in India are again revitalizing this ancient textile art.
The Details
- Coffee, tea and light snacks included.
- Buy a ticket for a single talk or save by purchasing the entire series!
- Limited pay-what-you-can (PWYC) tickets available for individual talks.
- Members receive 10% discount.
Tickets: $25
Meet the Speaker: Dr. Sarah Fee
Dr. Sarah Fee is Senior Curator of Global Fashion & Textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. She holds graduate degrees from Oxford University and the School of Oriental Studies (Paris) and is today affiliated with the Art History Department of the University of Toronto. Sarah stewards the ROM’s renowned collection of 15,000 textile works from Africa and Asia. For over thirty years she has carried out research on the fashions and textile trades of Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean world, which reaches from eastern Africa to India. From 2018–2020 she led an international team to study, exhibit and publish on the ROM’s world-famous collection of painted and printed Indian cottons, aka “Indian chintz.”