Ritu Kumar

| via @ritu.ritukumar Judith AnnIn the 1970s, I revived small printing units in Srirampur, restoring ancient processes, patterns, and colours.Surrounded by nature, I watched the artisans for hours, learning the meditative work of degumming, printing, and steaming silk - it was like being inside a Daniell painting.At the time we chiefly made saris and didn’t have a proper business. However, we were exporting some scarves to America. Serendipitously, an enterprising New York buyer, Judy Eagen, the brain behind Judith Ann - a major garments store on 7th Avenue, dropped by a show at the Sheraton Hotel where a few of our scarves were on display. She took one look at the scarves and was smitten. They were on large silk squares, in jewel colours, with classically Indian motifs.Some time later Judy flew to Calcutta. My husband, Shashi, and I met her in a dodgy hotel room, done up in red velvet and brimming with flowers. She wore these wild, floating, white clothes and walked in looking like Mother Superior and this encounter started one of the craziest adventures in my life.After visiting the factory in Srirampur, she carried back some scarves, and her father, Mr Egan, took them to Bergdorf Goodmans’ and other stores. He was told, that they wanted dresses, not scarves. With great apprehension and some arm-twisting by Judy, he ordered 200 dresses from us.However, I’d never made a dress in my life! So we joined two scarves up on the sides and cut one straight V-neck with a master called Abdul Hamid. He understood how to cut the V but he had no idea what we wanted, so we just stitched the rest of the dress on two sides. You couldn’t get zippers in India then, so I requested Kuku Bhagat, then a young designer, to put in some tassels so that the neck could be tied up and off went the dresses to New York.Soon enough a message from New York arrived that read “It doesn’t fit a dog.” It took me a minute to understand what Mr Egan meant. The boobs were falling out from either side! We managed to convert those dresses into nightgowns, by stitching in a panel on the side, but through this experience we learned how to make dresses. #rkarchives

Many hands make beautiful work | Process - Screen Printing IForce dye on to a surface through a prepared screen of fine material so as to create a picture or pattern.Ritu Kumar has been making her own silk print designs for 50 years in Kolkata. They say the water of the Hoogly river adds a vintage to the color, thereby making the silk prints of this region unique. #rkarchives

| via @ritu.ritukumar A Special Campaign With Prabuddha Dasgupta and Lakshmi MenonWe did this photoshoot for our bridal collection line; Ri Ritu Kumar in the Fall/Winter of 2009/2010. With Paris as its backdrop, it was totally Amrish kumar ‘s vision.Amrish had spent a lot of time researching in Paris then and I recall him staying in a tiny one-bedroom in North Paris. He’d been talking to the photographer, Prabuddha Dasgupta about doing a campaign for Ri. Until then, Ri had been photographed in a typical Indian aesthetic and he wanted to give it a bit of a twist and make it more global in its style. So, for example, some garments you see here are kurtas, with the lining cut out and styled like dresses instead of sets.As luck would have it Prabuddha and the model Menon Lakshmi were in Paris around the same time Amrish was and they got to work. So, Amrish packed a suitcase with some key pieces and along with Prabuddha started looking for locations for the shoot. While initially, the idea was for it to take place on the roots of Paris, they settled on these gardens in the North of Paris. They got a friend to do the make-up and that was the extent of the production as such, it was very guerrilla but as you can see the results were incredible. #RKarchives #rkarchives

A photograph of Mrs.Ritu Kumar from the late 1980s, browsing through textile books. #RkArchives