by Avalon Fotheringham, Curator of South Asian Textiles & Dress at the V&A Museum.

In the vast landscape of the industrial revolution, the small French town of Mulhouse played an outsized role. Famed as the ‘city of a hundred chimneys’, Mulhouse was the industrial capital of the region of Alsace, an area which ‘played host to the most expansive and entrepreneurial cotton industry in continental Europe in the nineteenth century’ (Michael Stephen Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800-1930, 2006, p.137). Driving this industry was European demand for Indian cottons, and especially Indian chintz – cotton fabrics printed and painted with bright, multi-coloured patterns.
Alsace, and Mulhouse within it, capitalised on this demand by producing industrially-printed imitation chintz fabrics, known as indiennes. Shared here are swatches of Mulhouse indiennes taken from original sample books assembled by the firms of Schlumberger, Koechlin, Grosjean, Blech-Fries, and Hofer between 1827 and 1835, and now held in the Soane design library.

Initially, Mulhouse indiennes were made by hand using wooden printing blocks similar to those used in India. But by the early nineteenth century, new industrial printing technologies were transforming indienne production. Copper roller printing, steam fixing, chemical discharge and reserve printing (by which colours on fabric could be chemically removed, replaced, or selectively preserved), and early chemical dyeing were making it possible to produce indiennes faster and at far lower costs. These new technologies supported the growth of large-scale, industrial indienne production firms that protected and consolidated their businesses through intermarriage, transforming into dynastic powerhouses.

Early nineteenth century experiments in dye chemistry, by which organic and mineral dyes were strengthened, removed or modified using synthesised chemical compounds, was an area in which Mulhouse firms particularly excelled, allowing the city’s manufacturers to create wholly new kinds of designs. The swatches below, produced with cutting edge technologies, show just how experimental these new designs could be. Far from the kind of maximalist ornamentation usually associated with nineteenth century design, many of the patterns in Soane’s Mulhouse swatchbooks appear extraordinarily contemporary – featuring minimalist, abstract designs:





Others seem to evoke the kinds of scientific explorations that enabled the chemistry of their creation – their motifs seemingly resembling cellular structures under magnification:


While advances in printing and dyeing technologies allowed for a new wave of design experimentation, the Indian roots of Mulhouse cotton printing are still clearly visible. In addition to imitations of Indian hand-block printed cottons, the Indian-inspired Mulhouse patterns in Soane’s pattern books include designs clearly referencing Kashmir shawls, Gujarati trade embroideries, and Southeast and East Asian market hand-painted kalamkaris, among other categories of Indian textiles. What is remarkable about these patterns is the extent to which their designers committed to the imitation of their source material, seemingly attempting to replicate not only the designs but the physical characteristics of the Indian originals.
For example, the pattern of the swatch below left bears a striking resemblance to Indian-style butis, or small stylised floral sprigs, of the kind typically produced using hand-held blocks like those being used by the printers in the photograph below right. This resemblance is made more profound by what may be a deliberately off-set registration of the colours, evoking the inconsistencies typically found in fabrics physically printed by hand in India:


Similarly, the jagged angles, tone-on-tone outlines, and diagonally etched stripes of the sample below left imitates not only the aesthetics but also the structure of woven Kashmir shawls. Genuine Indian Kashmir shawls were woven in the twill-tapestry technique; each block of colour created by the hand-insertion and interlocking lengths of different coloured wefts. This technique created sharp lines and a diagonal weave structure, both elements imitated in the block-printed imitation, thus enhancing its connection to Kashmir shawls as source material:


Likewise, the halo-like effect produced by the preservation of white ground below the flowers of the chintz-style swatch seen here, echoes hand-drawn and painted Indian chintz produced using wax resists. Chintz artisans applied wax to designated areas of cloth to protect them from picking up colour when fabrics were submerged in dye baths. On pieces like the detail seen at bottom right, the red ground was created by fully submerging the cloth into a red dye bath, and the areas of cloth protected by the wax retain a similar halo of white around their motifs:


© Karun Thakar Collection
Mulhouse was not the first to borrow heavily from other cultures of design. Indian artists regularly imitated patterns drawn from foreign sources in order to meet their consumers’ demands for new and exciting patterns. The chintz fabric of the dressing gown below, for example, was hand-made in Southeast India but imitates a Japanese-style design of pine trees and plum blossoms. Imported into Europe, the fabric was then tailored into a banyan robe (a garment modelled on Asian prototypes) to be worn by a Dutch gentleman. Roughly a century later, the cycle of design exchange continued as the same pattern was re-interpreted anew by Mulhouse designers:


Tracing the myriad influences which together resulted in these designs is an eye-opening exercise. The patterns of these swatches represent links in a chain of design exchange going back long before they were produced, and reaching across the globe, demonstrating how design is foundationally a collaborative process. They also demonstrate the extent to which pattern is inextricably linked with process, in that we – consciously or unconsciously – connect certain styles with specific structures and techniques. And in a modern, industrialised world, they are a reminder of how much we value the hand-made – such that industrial manufacturers sought to mechanically reproduce the subtle inconsistencies of hand-production. Textile manufacturing has become more mechanised than the designers of these Mulhouse swatches could ever have foreseen, and yet this value endures – we continue to, and will likely always, value the skill of the artisan.
