ABSTRACT
Ritu Kumar has innovatively revived many languishing embroidery and craft traditions. She designs for famous celebrities in India where she is a very big name. Her publicity states that she is ‘Couturier to the Stars’. These include former beauty queens like Miss Universe and Miss World (the latter title being won a number of times by Indian women in the 1990s), Sonia Gandhi (the Italian widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi), leading film stars, Indian aristocrats and fashion icons like Princess Diana and Jemima Goldsmith-Khan, as well as television cook and actress Madhur Jaffrey in London. A designer now for over thirty years, she is considered ‘a national icon’ in India. She is an executive member of the Delhi Crafts Council. On top of her design work, her book, Costumes and Textiles of Royal India was launched at Christie’s in London in 1999. She is currently working on another book, Indian Costumes in the Collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles dated Eighteenth to Mid-twentieth Century. She talks like a supremely articulate, commercially savvy profesor of cultural studies, as can be seen from her many television interviews. She trained in museology (museum organization and management) in the United States before embarking on her career of reviving traditional arts and crafts in India.
