Dress doctors

Between the clinking of wine glasses at textile exhibitions and the academic lectures that follow, ARMAN KHAN finds an invisible workforce restoring our heritage, stitch by stitch

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It’s incredible, the first thing you teach a machine is memory. To record the past,” says a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman). Now, AI machines are proving Godard right as they mine our collective memories. When Hamish Bowles curated India in Fashion: The Impact of Indian Dress and Textiles on the Fashionable Imagination at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in 2023, the impetus was to centre India’s splendour, a past woven through “admiration, appropriation and celebration,” as Bowles put it in the accompanying book. But behind the red-carpet glamour, an unseen force was at work.

In three wide rooms attached to the exhibition space, teams in white lab coats and purple nitrile gloves meticulously examined over a hundred fragile garments, implementing preventative conservation, checking transit stress, mounting them with special care and ensuring they survived another era. “Quietly efficient,” is how Anupam Sah, the art conservator and collection care expert, who led the team, describes it.

While the exhibition made textile restoration visible to a wider audience, these conservators remained unnoticed. I think of them as 'dress doctors', borrowing the term from Linda Przybyszewski’s book The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish (2014). Unlike Przybyszewski’s dress doctors, who shaped how women dressed a century ago, these restorers work in reverse: stitching the past back together, piece by fragile piece, invisibly.

“It’s an exercise in humility,” says Deepshiikha Kalsi, who has been restoring textiles for over twenty years since the beginning of her career with the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. She later established her own private practice, the Textile Conservation Studio, in Delhi. “Our repair stitches have to be weaker than the original. They should never compete.”