Sunday 4th October 2015

Lord Arrowby gains 50 years tomorrow but the function was on Friday. Owing to my own birthday having been the day before and not being in top condition, I failed to take any graphs of his Dries housecoat, so now there’s a studio crisis with after-shots required and copy must be delayed. I’m hoping to persuade him to pose very suggestively with perhaps exceptionally sheer foundation garments. So many other outfits as well as coiffures, jewels and embroidery, some from deep underground, from the most extreme strata of society or not in society at all by choice. Extraordinary, when Lord Arrowby is one of the most powerful people in Our Nation.

So I revert to Wednesday which was Press Preview of the Fabric of India show at the V&A. Enthralled as was Val, who was well enough to accompany me. The printed pashmina gloves! The boy Prince’s jacket of silver thread! Fabric is the foundation of India. Fabric is to India what porcelain is to China. Because of having a ready supply of cotton from earliest times. Also Lord Arrowby loves India and sometimes dresses Indian, which is to say heaped with ravishing fabrics all hand-made and dyed. People think Indian means gaudy. It’s true there’s a shade of cerise called ‘Queen’ or ‘Rani’ in India but the real Indian cloth is brilliant, exquisite and festive and, because hand-made and dyed with colours of natural origin, not gaudy. One of the best bits of the exhib was the slide-show on the wall of real Indians on the streets wearing fabrics, some of them quite poor but still decked in what Nancy Mitford would have called ‘yards and yards of marvellous stuff ‘. There was a superb construction worker get-up (possibly: I didn’t graph it) of loosely-woven trousers in a reddy-brown shade worn with a blue-striped collar-less ‘blouse’. The colours and variety of textures in the hand-made cloth – no fashion house could have achieved that, even at the highest end. Actually fabric got quite political, you know, which goes to show decoration can go deep. The reason the Mahatma was mad keen on home spinning and weaving was to counter the dominance of Western imported mass-produced cloth which was crushing the Indian textile workers.

We were so buoyed up and I felt a lot less awful about the Poor because of the Indian Fabric Exhibition.

The Fabric of India at the V&A: Pashmina gloves from 19th Century

Fabric of India at the V&A: Beetle-wing Embroidery: 19th century

Boy-Prince’s Silver Coat: Fabric of India Show at the V&A: late 19th century

Fabric of India Show V&A: Men’s Hunting Waistcoat: 18th Century: Let’s Copy and Wear Ourselves

Fabric of India at the V&A: 19th Century Export Fabric: Ravishing

Fabric of India Exhib at the V&A: Contemporary Wedding Outfits: Idea for the Forthcoming Strachan/Willis Wedding?

Fabric of India at the V&A: Fabric on the Streets of India Today: These Ladies are Pleased with Their Fabrics

Fabric of India Show at the V&A: Photo of Bicycle-Wallah in Sensational Fabric on India’s Streets Today

Fabric of India Show V&A: Ordinary Street Get-Up on the Streets of India Today