Ikat is her calling card and her style sensibility — in defiance of the Great Indian Weddingwear market — is strictly a no-bling one. She has never picked up off-the-shelf fabrics for her collections, but has earned a formidable reputation for promoting indigenous textile weaves and design.

Famous for eschewing fashion shows, designer Madhu Jain has been missing from Indian runways for years. But breaking away from her own rules, she’s just back from the first-ever French European India Fashion Week in Paris. Says the veteran designer: “Unfortunately, subtlety, delicacy and craftsmanship don’t show up too well on the ramp.”

Craft revivalist and textile conservationist, Jain, who has spent decades working with master weavers in Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Chennai, says: “My weaves require a much deeper scrutiny than is possible at a ramp show.” 

So, next year, when she celebrates 30 years in the world of Indian fashion, she promises to do so by unveiling a special eco-friendly weave. She’s no newbie to creating new fabrics and textures. Back in 2004 she launched a fabric which combined bamboo fibre interwoven with chanderi, khadi and wool.

At her Paris outing, Jain showcased never-before-seen outfits culled from 30 years of her signature clothing collections. “I tend to secret away some of the best pieces from each collection as a reminder of what my weavers and I have achieved after our experimentations,” says the designer who is known for dressing politician Maneka Gandhi. 

While the mainstay of her show was the ikat weave, she also paraded outfits with vibrant Banjara embroidery, intricate Banni mirror-work from Kutch, embroidery made by displaced tribals living on the Kutch border, and some striking, opulent brocade weaves from Varanasi.

But she took care to tweak the outfits to resonate with Western sensibilities. The Indian achkan worked as a substitute for the little black dress. She did away with the churidars and, instead, let her outfits serve as short and long dresses. She used dupattas innovatively as wraps to lend drama to the outfits. “But my emphasis, as always, was on the textiles,” she says.

Experimentation and innovation are the name of the game for Jain. Earlier this year, she took inspiration from Uzbek culture and developed a new fashion vocabulary, fusing their Ikat techniques with our very own. “I found Uzbekistan fascinating and was consumed with how I could use the Adras and Atlas forms of Uzbeki ikat weaves,” she says. 

Jain’s journey in the fashion world has been an eclectic one. Armed with a degree from the Delhi School of Economics she switched tracks to fashion quite seamlessly.

She comes from an industrialist family — her brother is the leading environmentalist Kamal Meattle, CEO of  Paharpur Business Centre & Software Technology Incubator Park. And her aesthetic sensibilities were honed by her mother’s dreamy chiffon-filled wardrobes and her father’s penchant for the finer things of life. She realised soon enough that designing her own outfits wasn’t enough and that her calling lay in reviving forgotten Indian weaves.

In 1996, in Bangladesh, she collaborated with BRAC, one of the world’s largest NGOs, to successfully revive Nakshi Kantha embroidery, which is quite different from Santiniketan Kantha work. 

She also reinterpreted the Dhaka muslin, a handmade textile, which had almost disappeared from the textile map of India after Partition.

Then she went full-on eco-friendly and in tandem with the textiles ministry, created the bamboo fibre. 

On a roll, in 2005 she was invited by the Government of India to work in Kashmir to generate interest in Kashmiri crafts for international buyers. Her work culminated in presentations on the state’s crafts at leading museums including the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, American Museum of Natural History and Rubin Museum of Art. 

And when the Commonwealth Games came calling on India in 2010, the spotlight turned on her once again. She created a giant 115ft eco-friendly installation for the opening ceremony using bamboo fibre and the kalamkari craft technique.

And now, in keeping with the Madhu Jain mould, she says with conviction: “My new fabric is going to be a future trailblazer for generations to come. This will be my legacy!”