Why India Never Learned Minimalism: The Karkhana Origins Of Global Maximalist Fashion

India's reputation for maximalist fashion is usually treated as an aesthetic preference, a cultural fondness for colour and density that runs counter to the restraint of European design. That framing misses the more interesting explanation: excess was never a style choice here. It was engineered, centuries ago, into the technique itself, inside a workshop system built specifically to produce embellishment at volume rather than conserve it.

The Origins

The word 'karkhana' is Persian for factory, and under Emperor Akbar, it became the organising unit of Mughal manufacture. Abu'l-Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari records over 100 karkhanas operating during Akbar's reign, staffed by thousands of artisans and overseen by an official called the Mir Saman—or Khan Saman, the head of the purchase department—with production, inventory and wages tracked in meticulous detail. Akbar personally recruited master weavers and embroiderers from Persia and Central Asia to settle in Lahore, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, and the fusion that followed gave zardozi, from the Persian zar for gold and dozi for embroidery, its distinctly Indo-Persian character.

Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, the karkhanas expanded further: the Kashmiri shawl industry alone grew to some 40,000 looms under imperial patronage, and Abu'l-Fazl notes that Akbar commissioned a thousand new garments a year, each one a small exercise in density rather than restraint. That density was itself the point. In a court where rank and favour were read directly off a person's clothing, the amount of gold thread, the weight of the embroidery, the sheer coverage of a garment's surface, was not decoration layered onto a design; it was the design's entire argument. Zardozi, gota-patti and real metal-thread work were, in this sense, tools built from the outset to cover the maximum possible surface with the maximum possible detail, because a karkhana that produced anything less had failed at the one job it existed to do.

The Disruption

The system's dependence on state money made it fragile. Aurangzeb's austerity ended royal funding for the more lavish crafts, and karkhana artisans, unable to source gold and silver thread without imperial backing, began migrating outward to regional courts in Awadh, Bengal, Rajputana and among the Marathas, each of which sustained its own shorter-lived embroidery renaissance. The larger collapse came later, and more completely, once East India Company rule displaced royal patronage across the board: both the imperial karkhana and the smaller riyasati karkhana systems run by regional courts crumbled, embroiderers had to find open markets for the first time in their history, and the sheer cost of hand zardozi restricted its reach in a way it had never been restricted before. It would take India's independence, and a fresh round of government-backed craft revival programmes, before the karkhana lineages began to recover any real institutional footing.

The Revival

What rebuilt Indian maximalism was not a museum or a government programme, though. It was couture, and specifically bridal couture, arriving in a short, dense window between 1986 and 1995. Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla launched their first boutique, Mata Hari, in Mumbai in 1986, before founding their eponymous label three years later and building a business around reviving chikankari, zardozi and mirror work for a modern Indian bride. JJ Valaya founded the House of Valaya with his brother in 1992, training under Rohit Khosla before building what would become one of Indian couture's most recognisably maximalist ateliers. Tarun Tahiliani, who had already co-founded India's first multi-designer boutique, Ensemble, in 1987, launched his own label in the mid-1990s, going on to describe India, accurately, as the embroidery capital of the world. None of these houses were reviving Mughal karkhana technique as a historical exercise. They were rebuilding it as infrastructure for a wedding economy that, unlike the seasonal churn of Western fashion, never goes out of season and never asks for restraint. A bridal lehenga is closer, in spirit and in labour, to the imperial garment than anything on a European runway: commissioned for one event of maximal significance, embellished without a budget for negative space, and worn once as a kind of small-scale imperial display.

The Validation Loop

That density has since become the thing the rest of the fashion industry outsources. Mumbai-based Les Ateliers 2M has embroidered for Chanel, Hermès, Isabel Marant and Schiaparelli; Milaaya Embroideries, founded by Gayatri Khanna, counts Gucci, Versace and Roberto Cavalli among its clients; the six-generation family atelier Aamir has worked with Alexander McQueen, Ralph Lauren, Mary Katrantzou and Elie Saab; and Chennai's Vastrakala has embroidered for Christian Louboutin since 2015. A single embellished coat can run to over 2,000 hours of hand embroidery across a dozen artisans, work that European ateliers, by their own admission, largely no longer have the hands to do at scale. Sabyasachi Mukherjee's 2021 collaboration with H&M, the label's first with an Indian designer in its 16-year history of global fashion partnerships, sold out within hours and briefly became the most visible retail proof that Indian maximalism could travel intact.

The irony, largely unremarked on, is that the West did not import Indian maximalism as an idea. It has been quietly outsourcing its own maximalism to India for decades, one karkhana-descended atelier at a time, long before it thought to put India's name on the label.