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Dries Van Noten’s luxurious 2022 spring-summer collection drew on his impression of visiting Kolkata just after Holi and seeing splashes of colour in unexpected places.These are just a handful of the instances of India’s impact on global style. Anthropologist and fashion scholar Phyllida Jay’s Inspired By India: How India Transformed Global Design (Roli Books) is a compendium of clothes, textiles, jewellery, material objects, photography, paintings

In Napoleonic France and through the novels of Jane Austen in Regency England, we see how wearing fine Indian muslin denoted the consumer’s status, taste and connoisseurship. Such was the popularity of textiles like the brightly-painted chintz, that France and England placed decades-long bans on their import in the 18th century in order to protect their own silk and wool mills. However, the desire for

“Can you define cultural appropriation and explain how it differs from cultural appreciation? One of the things the book sets out to explore is, how do we navigate within this complex moment in post-colonial image production, material manufacture and the crafting of identity? What are the parameters for deciding whether something is homage, pastiche, or ignorant and even racist cultural appropriation?”

In Louis XIV’s France, Indian calicos and chintz were so widely coveted that the government was forced to ban their import and sale. Yet French aesthetes continued to wear them indoors, privately flouting the law. Fashion history is replete with similar anecdotes of Europeans’ fascination with Indian fabrics and design. In Inspired by India, fashion researcher and journalist Phyllida Jay charts a compelling narrative of

Inspired India chronicles the rich and complex history between the fashion industry in the West and Indian culture, revealing which western fashion icons drew from it in their looks. This list includes people like Audrey Hepburn, who wore a sari-inspired dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Mick Jagger, whose beaded and patterned styles in the sixties can be linked back to traditional Indian design. High