Refashioning the fashion: Handloom products and western wear in North India, 1860s–1950s

This article explores how changing textile fashions and evolving consumer tastes reshaped handloom production in North India between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British imperialism and industrialization transformed the social practices of textile design, production and consumption in colonial India. The implications of these new fashion arrangements – often overlooked – led both consumers and producers to engage, consciously or not, with the modernizing colonial project. The article argues that responses to European industrial fashion were not merely imitative or passive but marked by selective appropriation and strategic revival of Indigenous styles. These sartorial choices reflected deeper social negotiations, expressing class, hierarchy, nationalist sentiment and evolving identities. The handloom industry, far from being obsolete, adapted to new fashion regimes, making cloth a powerful site of cultural expression and social change in the material world of colonial India.