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