“I spend my life discovering hidden histories and hidden stories,” says Karun Thakkar, one of the world’s most prolific textile collectors. Sitting under a rare, luminous piece of Indian embroidery in his home in London, he speaks poetically about the forgotten hands behind the abstract masterpieces that he feels “the Western art world has always ignored.”
For Thakkar, textiles are the most intimate form of art. “They touch our bodies all the time,” he explains. “It resonates in every aspect of our lives, our births, and our deaths.” They are made for personal or home use, and carry with them the stories of their long-forgotten owners and makers. If you ask why antique fabric looks the way it does, you begin to discover how people live and what they consider beautiful.
In a new book, Chintz: A Universal Storyand a series of six exhibitions in Japan and the UK in 2026, Thakkar shows how the quintessentially English look has come to be. Perhaps we do not know much now about the workshops that printed fabrics from shiny ivory with red and white dyes. But we have an image of chintz, and often a negative image. “In Britain, the term ‘chintz’ denotes something old-fashioned, decorative and bourgeois,” Thakkar writes. But he argues that Indian textile artists produced “the first globalization of design.” It is a story of empire, local art, and medieval mercantilism.
For a thousand years before the dawn of colonialism, the Indian subcontinent lay at the heart of global trade routes. Caravans on the Silk Road and trading boats on the Arabian Sea shaped tastes across Europe and Asia: patterns and dyes flowed from China and Central Asia, while piece-dyed Indian cotton made its way to Indonesia and Japan. By the 16th century, European merchants intensified the global demand for Indian textiles, which in turn provided inspiration for new designs that drew on both East and West.
“Commercial agents would bring European prints of flowers, Chinese dragons, Turkish designs, etc.,” says Thakkar. “A whole new visual language has been introduced to these Indian artists who have been producing something specific for generations. They have revolutionized traditional Indian designs, under the influence of colonialism and trade, and are the first international artists to do so.”
Accompanied by a series of academic articles, the book illustrates pieces of Indian cotton cloth made to Japanese designs for domestic use in late medieval Kyoto; A ritual hanging commissioned by the court of Siam in the 18th century; And the mysterious outstanding Buddhist temples from pre-colonial Sri Lanka. Thousands of pieces of home furniture, intended for the European market, were manufactured in workshops in Gujarat or south-eastern India, but the only evidence of their design are the textiles themselves, a rare relic that puzzlingly points to a lost world.
Avalon Fotheringham, curator of South Asian textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, describes this as an anthropological approach: “Textiles present the same kinds of challenges as any unknown art, especially in non-Western traditions. But you can still read them very carefully to see why the design is the way it is.” Without signatures or patterns, you rely on the “gut feel” of the textures, warp and weft of precious scraps of fabric.
Thakkar inherited this instinct from his mother, who ran a high-end fashion boutique in Delhi after emigrating from what is now Pakistan during the Partition of India in 1947; On her perilous journey across the violent sectarian divide, she draped her jewelery with strips of “phulkari” – mesmerizing abstract compositions of heavily embroidered silk made on both sides of Punjab – which Thakkar still cherishes.
He says: “Since childhood, I have practiced knitting, sewing and embroidery.” “But after we came [to England]My mother gave up her shop and started working on a horrible factory floor. Thakkar began working in the East End of London in the 1980s at “the sharp end of monitoring racist attacks on the black and Asian community,” and sought a respite in the beauty of textile art. After being attacked by skinheads, he took time off work and began visiting National Trust properties with his late partner Dr Roy Short “as a form of escape”. Now, after decades of chasing textiles from Ghana to the northwest border of Pakistan, Thakkar is serious about opening his estate to study.
He will display a small part of his collection at three National Trust properties next May; It is the Fund’s first textile exhibition, and will explore themes of “migration, trade, crafts, colonialism, global history and beauty.” In partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum, Thakkar has set up a scholarship, with donors including textile designer Lulu Little of Swann – whose elegant wallpapers sparked much controversy during Boris Johnson’s renovation of 10 Downing Street – to fund research into global textile art. According to Fotheringham, the $50,000 annual funding has allowed the foundation to “keep the technologies alive and bring them to a wider audience.” To date, it has supported projects including a Ugandan podcast on the colonial history of tree bark cloth and research into quilting made by the Sidhi community, descendants of sailors and African slaves in Pakistan and western India.
Thakkar’s focus, according to Fotheringham, on “specific textile practices within communities – the work of women, for example, not just kings and queens” – is timely for an institution like the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was founded in the late Victorian era. “When we opened, it was about looking for the best examples of art and design by the standards of that era,” she says. “But now it’s more about representation and… the everyday life stories of people across Asia and Africa.”
By sharing his collection, Thakkar hopes to change public perceptions about textile art. With shows planned in major London galleries during 2026 and 2027, he wants to move away from outdated perceptions of taste. These efforts will begin in the UK this spring at Osterley House in west London with an exhibition of Punjabi phulkaris (“Journeys – Global Textiles from the Karun Thakkar Collection“) who hopes to engage local Asian communities in the same intimacy that has defined his life.
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