#indian dressing

[samanthatrans999]

Waiting for a Indian Christian friend who is dreaming of Muslim alpha cock, so we can convert together.

[look-at-my-dresses]

Sari de Sabyasachi Mukherjee

Exposition Bollywood superstars, musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris

[justdavina]

Adorable East Indian Girl!. OMG.... she's so pretty!

[seonne]

"You look... woah"

For my fellow Bakusimps who wear dresses once in a blue moon, leaving necks cracked and jaws slacked.

You usually don't wear dresses and Bakugou knows that. He knows how dresses make you uncomfortable in one way or another; whether it be too stuffy, too frilly, too restrictive, too revealing, too non-revealing, too party-esque or too granny-style.

He knows if you had to pick between dresses and jeans, you'd go for the latter.

So imagine his surprise when he sees you wearing a dress.

Not only are you wearing a dress, you look like an absolute goddess in it.

You chose a simpler dress, showing off and highlighting your features in the best ways possible. The colour making your skin glow, the seams perfectly hugging your curves and edges, the longer part of the dress trailing behind you as you walk making it seem as if you're elegantly gliding across the room with the poise one would expect of a forest nymph or a princess.

You look ethereal and wide red irises follow your movements as you flit across the room, making sure everything's ready before leaving for your date with him.

You let out a sigh as you stand in the middle of your living room with your hands on your hips, your beautiful hair blowing slightly at the wind seeping in through the open window of the balcony.

"Okay, I think we're all ready to go!"

As you turn, taking one last sweep at everything, a pair of callous hands slide onto your waist that looks so pretty in that dress and you're spun around by your hunk of a boyfriend whose pupils are blown wide as he drinks in your form.

You laugh at his expression.

"What?"

"Nothing, princess, just... you look... woah"

You chuckle as you look up into his pretty eyes.

"I look 'woah'?"

He nods with a smirk.

"You look 'woah'..."

You laugh again as you plant a kiss on his nose.

"Shall we get moving, my 'woah' boyfriend?"

He returns your grin with one of his own as his hand slides into yours, leading you out the door.

"Yeah, let's go, princess. Gonna make everyone at that restaurant drool down their chins."

[jeannepompadour]

Photographs of men from the Assiniboine tribe;by Frank Rinehart;

Chief Yellow Boy giving a piece sign, 1890-1891

Four Bull and Chief Wets-It, 1898

[sophiarauss]

[dresshistorynerd]

How did cotton win over linen anyway?

In short, colonialism, slavery and the industrial revolution. In length:

Cotton doesn't grow in Europe so before the Modern Era, cotton was rare and used in small quantities for specific purposes (lining doublets for example). The thing with cotton is, that's it can be printed with dye very easily. The colors are bright and they don't fade easily. With wool and silk fabrics, which were the more traditional fabrics for outer wear in Europe (silk for upper classes of course), patterns usually needed to be embroidered or woven to the cloth to last, which was very expensive. Wool is extremely hard to print to anything detailed that would stay even with modern technology. Silk can be printed easily today with screen printing, but before late 18th century the technique wasn't known in western world (it was invented in China a millenium ago) and the available methods didn't yeld good results.

So when in the late 17th century European trading companies were establishing trading posts in India, a huge producer of cotton fabrics, suddenly cotton was much more available in Europe. Indian calico cotton, which was sturdy and cheap and was painted or printed with colorful and intricate floral patters, chintz, especially caught on and became very fashionable. The popular Orientalism of the time also contributed to it becoming fasionable, chintz was seen as "exotic" and therefore appealing.

Here's a typical calico jacket from late 18th century. The ones in European markets often had white background, but red background was also fairly common.

The problem with this was that this was not great for the business of the European fabric producers, especially silk producers in France and wool producers in England, who before were dominating the European textile market and didn't like that they now had competition. So European countries imposed trade restrictions for Indian cotton, England banning cotton almost fully in 1721. Since the introduction of Indian cottons, there had been attempts to recreate it in Europe with little success. They didn't have nearly advanced enough fabric printing and cotton weaving techniques to match the level of Indian calico. Cotton trade with India didn't end though. The European trading companies would export Indian cottons to West African market to fund the trans-Atlantic slave trade that was growing quickly. European cottons were also imported to Africa. At first they didn't have great demand as they were so lacking compared to Indian cotton, but by the mid 1700s quality of English cotton had improved enough to be competitive.

Inventions in industrial textile machinery, specifically spinning jenny in 1780s and water frame in 1770s, would finally give England the advantages they needed to conquer the cotton market. These inventions allowed producing very cheap but good quality cotton and fabric printing, which would finally produce decent imitations of Indian calico in large quantities. Around the same time in mid 1700s, The East Indian Company had taken over Bengal and soon following most of the Indian sub-continent, effectively putting it under British colonial rule (but with a corporate rule dystopian twist). So when industrialized English cotton took over the market, The East India Company would suppress Indian textile industry to utilize Indian raw cotton production for English textile industry and then import cotton textiles back to India. In 1750s India's exports were mainly fine cotton and silk, but during the next century Indian export would become mostly raw materials. They effectively de-industrialized India to industrialize England further.

India, most notably Bengal area, had been an international textile hub for millennia, producing the finest cottons and silks with extremely advance techniques. Loosing cotton textile industry devastated Indian local economies and eradicated many traditional textile craft skills. Perhaps the most glaring example is that of Dhaka muslin. Named after the city in Bengal it was produced in, it was extremely fine and thin cotton requiring very complicated and time consuming spinning process, painstakingly meticulous hand-weaving process and a very specific breed of cotton. It was basically transparent as seen depicted in this Mughal painting from early 17th century.

It was used by e.g. the ancient Greeks, Mughal emperors and, while the methods and it's production was systematically being destroyed by the British to squash competition, it became super fashionable in Europe. It was extremely expensive, even more so than silk, which is probably why it became so popular among the rich. In 1780s Marie Antoinette famously and scandalously wore chemise a la reine made from multiple layers of Dhaka muslin. In 1790s, when the empire silhouette took over, it became even more popular, continuing to the very early 1800s, till Dhaka muslin production fully collapsed and the knowledge and skill to produce it were lost. But earlier this year, after years lasting research to revive the Dhaka muslin funded by Bangladeshi government, they actually recreated it after finding the right right cotton plant and gathering spinners and weavers skilled in traditional craft to train with it. (It's super cool and I'm making a whole post about it (it has been in the making for months now) so I won't extend this post more.)

Marie Antoinette in the famous painting with wearing Dhaka muslin in 1783, and empress Joséphine Bonaparte in 1801 also wearing Dhaka muslin.

While the trans-Atlantic slave trade was partly funded by the cotton trade and industrial English cotton, the slave trade would also be used to bolster the emerging English cotton industry by forcing African slaves to work in the cotton plantations of Southern US. This produced even more (and cheaper (again slave labor)) raw material, which allowed the quick upward scaling of the cotton factories in Britain. Cotton was what really kicked off the industrial revolution, and it started in England, because they colonized their biggest competitor India and therefore were able to take hold of the whole cotton market and fund rapid industrialization.

Eventually the availability of cotton, increase in ready-made clothing and the luxurious reputation of cotton lead to cotton underwear replacing linen underwear (and eventually sheets) (the far superior option for the reasons I talked about here) in early Victorian Era. Before Victorian era underwear was very practical, just simple rectangles and triangles sewn together. It was just meant to protect the outer clothing and the skin, and it wasn't seen anyway, so why put the relatively scarce resources into making it pretty? Well, by the mid 1800s England was basically fully industrialized and resource were not scarce anymore. Middle class was increasing during the Victorian Era and, after the hard won battles of the workers movement, the conditions of workers was improving a bit. That combined with decrease in prices of clothing, most people were able to partake in fashion. This of course led to the upper classes finding new ways to separate themselves from lower classes. One of these things was getting fancy underwear. Fine cotton kept the fancy reputation it had gained first as an exotic new commodity in late 17th century and then in Regency Era as the extremely expensive fabric of queens and empresses. Cotton also is softer than linen, and therefore was seen as more luxurious against skin. So cotton shifts became the fancier shifts. At the same time cotton drawers were becoming common additional underwear for women.

It wouldn't stay as an upper class thing, because as said cotton was cheap and available. Ready-made clothing also helped spread the fancier cotton underwear, as then you could buy fairly cheaply pretty underwear and you didn't even have to put extra effort into it's decoration. At the same time cotton industry was massive and powerful and very much eager to promote cotton underwear as it would make a very steady and long lasting demand for cotton.

In conclusion, cotton has a dark and bloody history and it didn't become the standard underwear fabric for very good reasons.

Here's couple of excellent sources regarding the history of cotton industry:

The European Response to Indian Cottons, Prasannan Parthasarathi

INDIAN COTTON MILLS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMIC POLICY, 1854-1894, Rajib Lochan Sahoo

[madeleineengland]

Alia Bhatt in a saree dress for the Met Gala 2024 "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion".

[aadhiskanmani]

Dola re Dola...

[safije]

[helpallthenamesaretakensblog]

Nvm me, just internally praying for grover in a bridal lehenga

Ok but this is so naturey and green and if i were grover, id def weave this if i want to buy more time from a cyclops

From Chaitra Kulkarni on pinterest

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Beige Floral Cotton Robe à l’Anglaise, ca. 1760-1770, Indian (for the European Market).

Victoria and Albert Museum.

[kalhamamor]

My heart is yours to break…

[sophiarauss]

There's something about a Saree and I like how Red looks on me

[paletapessoal]

Woman's court dress in silk, gold and silver, 1830-1840, Lucknow, India

[jeanvanjer]

Y’all I found the inspo to that fugly dress Kate wears

Jokes aside, as an Indian I’m very insulted by this. Clearly no Indian designer or even a single South Asian mother nani or dadi was consulted for this.