The hands

Their NamesAre on the Label.

The karigars, weavers and setters who make everything the house sells.

The house roll

Two hundred and forty people are on the house roll — karigars, weavers, dyers, block carvers, setters, and one pattern cutter who argues about shoulders.

Everyone is paid per piece, at rates the house publishes, agreed against a measured estimate of hours before the frame is set up rather than against whatever the finished garment turns out to fetch. The person who did the embroidery is named on the label of the garment they finished, and the estimate is theirs to argue with. The people below are the ones whose work you are most likely to be wearing; the rest work in the same rooms, at the same rates.

240 on the roll422 years between them

The Roll Name by Name.

14 of them, and what each one actually does at the table.

How the work is done

Zardozi34 years

Rafiq Ansari

Lucknow

I learned the adda frame from my father at eleven, and I have not worked at any other table since. A bridal panel takes me and four men about nine hundred hours, and the hardest part is not the gold — it is keeping the tension even across a metre of silk so the fabric does not pucker when it comes off the frame.

Gota Patti28 years

Meena Devi

Jaipur

Gota is ribbon work, not embroidery, and people confuse the two constantly. I cut the lametta by eye, fold it into leaf and paisley shapes, and stitch it down with a single anchoring thread so the metal stays proud of the cloth. Machine gota lies flat; that is how you tell.

Chikankari41 years

Salma Khatoon

Lucknow

There are thirty-two stitches in chikankari and most workshops now use six. I still do murri, phanda and jaali, and the jaali is the test — you part the warp with the needle instead of cutting it, so the net is made from the cloth itself. A full kurta panel runs three months.

Aari19 years

Imran Shaikh

Kolkata

Aari is a hook, worked from underneath the frame, and it is four times faster than a needle once your wrist knows the rhythm. I do the sequin and bead grounds on reception pieces — long, repetitive fields where a single dropped chain unravels a hand-span. My father worked the same hook on Nakshi kantha in Bardhaman.

Bandhani26 years

Jitendra Khatri

Bhuj

A fine bandhani odhani carries somewhere near forty thousand knots, each one tied by fingernail around a grain of the cloth. My wife and two sisters tie; I dye. We work light to dark across four baths, and nothing is untied until the last colour has dried.

Ajrakh37 years

Ismail Khatri

Ajrakhpur

Ajrakh is sixteen stages and most of them are washing. We print resist with tamarind and lime, dye in indigo and madder root, and the cloth goes to the river between every stage — river water, not tap, because the minerals matter to the madder. The village moved here after the 2001 earthquake, and we rebuilt the dye pits first.

Kundan setting45 years

Hariram Verma

Jaipur

Kundan is pure gold, twenty-four carat, and it is soft enough to set a stone cold — no heat, no glue, just foil pressed into the collet until it holds. I have set for the antique trade and for the house both, and the work is identical. The stones we use now are polki, uncut, so nothing is faceted and nothing sparkles the way a diamond does.

Banarasi weaving32 years

Ashok Maurya

Varanasi

The draft for a kadhwa brocade sits on punched cards above the loom, and a saree with a heavy pallu takes two of us four months on the pit loom. Kadhwa means each motif is woven separately rather than carried across the back, so there are no float threads to cut. It is slower and the saree lasts three generations.

Kanjivaram weaving30 years

Thangam Pillai

Kanchipuram

The body and the border are woven as separate pieces and joined at the korvai — you can see the join if you hold it to the light, and if you cannot, it is not a real Kanjivaram. Three of us sit at the loom for the joining because the interlock has to be done by hand on both sides at once. A nine-yard takes about fifty days.

Meenakari22 years

Nasreen Begum

Hyderabad

I fill enamel into engraved gold cells and fire each colour separately, hottest first, because a later firing would melt what came before. White goes in last and it is the one that fails most. On a jhumka reverse nobody will ever see, the meena still gets six firings.

Marori24 years

Devendra Soni

Jodhpur

Marori is zardozi worked so densely that the metal thread stands away from the cloth in relief — you build it over a cotton padding you have laid down first. It is used on grooms’ plackets and bridal borders where the piece has to read from twenty feet. Three of us can do about eight square inches in a day.

Block printing18 years

Ramji Chhipa

Chanderi

I carve my own teak blocks, which is unusual now — most printers buy them from Pethapur. A three-colour repeat needs three blocks in perfect register and the registration marks are two pinholes in the corner. On sheer Chanderi the dye bleeds if the paste is a shade too thin, so I mix it fresh every morning.

Zari drawing39 years

Ghulam Mustafa

Varanasi

I draw the wire. Silver ingot down through forty draw-plates to something finer than a hair, then gilded, then flattened and wound onto silk core — that is one thread of real zari. The weavers get the credit and that is fine, but no brocade in Varanasi exists before somebody has done this.

Pattern cutting27 years

Anil Sathe

Mumbai

Every commission starts as a calico toile on my table before anyone cuts silk. I work to twelve measurements and the shoulder is the one I argue about, because a shoulder set half a centimetre wrong shows in every photograph and cannot be fixed later. Embroidered panels get cut to the pattern, never the pattern fitted to the embroidery.

The Rate Is Set First.

A credit on a label is only worth what stands behind it.

A piece rate is agreed in the workshop before the frame is set up, against an estimate of the hours the work will take. It does not drop if the garment sits on the rail for a season, and it does not rise if the garment sells three times over. Nothing on this site is finished by a workshop the house cannot name.

Read how a piece is made

House of VastraDrawing the room.