The effort gone into making Paithani or Zardosi is the real luxury, says Ritu Kumar

Fashion designer Ritu Kumar is called by some as the textile queen of the country. It is a lazy title. Kumar’s relationship with fabrics is on a higher, sophisticated plane, with base notes of real passion. It shows in her eyes.

They shine when she speaks about the objects that define luxury for her – like an item in her collection of around 5,000 textiles, an embroidered, 200-year-old men’s coat she bought for Rs 2.5 lakh in Barmer. She also speaks with feeling about a royal lehenga she saw which was so intricate it needed ten men to carry it.

“How long has that tradition been there, how many man hours has it taken over generations for that thing to be recreated… that to my mind is real luxury,” Kumar says, sitting in her room at a plush hotel in Central Mumbai, her makeup put on just minutes ago. “If you got something that you can get done overnight, yes, of course, it’s modern and has got a different feel, but things like Paithani, which has come down to us over 2,000 years, is something I really find luxurious.”



While visiting different royal families for her book some years ago, she got to see a fuschia lehenga in possession of the Bharatpur royal family. “I was stunned to see it,” Kumar says. “It was worn by one of the daughters and I kid you not, if you put the lehenga flat in this room, it would have taken up the whole room and more. When she wore it, 10 people had to carry it. It had around 190 narrow kalis, each one woven in Benaras. Twenty looms must have woven this one lehenga for close to a year. It was luxurious in terms of scale.”

Zardosi attire belonging to the Nawab of Pataudi’s mother from Bhopal also had grandeur. “The intricate embroidery work on the poshaks (clothes) were made of pure gold,” says Kumar.