Chintz

Chintz opens at the V&A South Kensington on Saturday 18 September 2027, and it's going to be on for a while, running until 4 June 2028. It's a big look at four centuries of chintz, the hand-drawn cotton fabric from South India that's spent a few hundred years being one of the most coveted, copied and contentious textiles in history.

If you've only ever heard the word in the context of old-fashioned curtains, this is where the story actually starts. Chintz was made by dyers on the Coromandel Coast and around Golconda, who drew floral patterns onto pale cotton and fixed the bright colours with a mordant process that Europe couldn't replicate for a century. The East India Companies shipped it back starting in the seventeenth century, and because it was light, washable and cheap, it quickly displaced wool and linen. It became so popular that France banned it in 1686 and Britain followed in 1720 — bans that lasted decades and were widely ignored. The effort to reverse-engineer the dyers' process helped drive the industrial revolution in textiles, while the word eventually shifted towards something small and suburban, with 'chintzy' becoming a term of contempt. The exhibition reframes it as art rather than a consumer product, putting the Indian makers among the most influential artists in design history.

The show brings together works from the V&A's own collection and the Karun Thakar Collection, with an 18th-century bed hanging of painted and dyed cotton chintz taking centre stage — it's from the Coromandel Coast, dated 1700-25, and the maker is unknown (museum no. IS.2-1967). The whole thing coincides with the 50th anniversary of HALI magazine.

You'll find it at the V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL, opening on 18 September 2027 and running through to 4 June 2028.