Last Chance to See: "Ce Qui Se Trame" - Stories Woven between India and France.
Open until 4 January 2026, Ce Qui Se Trame: Histoires tissées entre l’Inde et la France, at the Mobilier National, Paris, offers a richly textured exploration of the creative, technical and cultural exchanges that have linked India and France for nearly four centuries. Through the prism of textiles, the exhibition reveals how materials, motifs and making traditions have travelled, transformed and endured across time and geography.
Embroiderers from Kalhath Institute, Lucknow, creating pieces by artist Pauline Guerrier, artist-in-residence at Villa Swagatam, 2025 © Pauline Guerrier.
Curated by Mayank Mansingh Kaul, with Christian Louboutin as creative director, the exhibition unfolds across seven visual chapters, each tracing a different strand of this shared history. From hand-spun and hand-woven Indian cottons that reshaped French fashion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to contemporary works produced through the Villa Swagatam residency programme, the emphasis is firmly on the handmade. Embroidery, block printing, brocade weaving and lace-making appear as practices that are still fully alive as systems of knowledge transmitted through generations, standing in resistance to today’s all-digital culture.
L'Antichambre, Christian Louboutin. A reproduction of a French eighteenth-century apartment, entirely draped in Indian textiles crafted by the House of Kandudu. Photography by Sophia Taillet.
Among the exhibition’s most immersive moments is L’Antichambre, conceived by Christian Louboutin. This sensory installation recreates an eighteenth-century French interior entirely enveloped in Indian textiles, produced by the artisans of House of Kandadu using traditional block-printing and natural dyes. Elsewhere, pristine white muslins and French needle lace reveal shared histories of fibre and finesse, while sections devoted to chintz, indiennes and paisley trace the circulation of Indian printed cottons and their lasting influence on European decorative arts. A striking installation by Raw Mango brings the sari—ancient yet continually reinvented—into the monumental space of the Gobelins staircase.
“Embroidered Stained Glass,” a collaboration between Victoire de Brantes and the Vastrakala workshops, Villa Swagatam, 2024 © Camille Lemonnier
Contemporary textile art forms a vital thread throughout. Works by artists including Rithika Merchant, Sheila Hicks and Jeanne Vicerial push textiles beyond the functional, using cloth as a sculptural and conceptual medium to question the body, memory and collective identity.
Pauline Guerrier (2025 resident at the Kalhath Institute) showing her completed work in collaboration with the embroiderers of the Kalhath Institute in Lucknow © Kalhath Institute
Earlier in the exhibition’s run, an ambitious programme of workshops, performances and discussions extended these ideas beyond the gallery walls. A four-day Franco-Indian festival brought together artists, artisans and the public through participatory weaving, indigo dyeing, musical performances and roundtables on embroidery, printed cottons and contemporary craft. At the Mobilier National, Lesage Intérieurs led a collaborative embroidery project—an Indigo Tree of Life—inviting visitors to stitch their own contributions into a shared work.
Prints, Patterns, and the Paisley on show in "Ce Qui se Trame" Photo: Sophia Taillet
As the exhibition enters its final days, Ce qui se trame invites a slower, more attentive way of looking—one that recognises textiles as both decorative and as repositories of knowledge, labour and exchange. By foregrounding making as both cultural practice and contemporary inquiry, the exhibition demonstrates how textile traditions continue to shape, and be reshaped by, the relationships between India and France.
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Further Information:
Ce Qui Se Trame: Histoires Tissées Entre L'Inde et la France is on show at the Mobilier National, Les Gobelins, Paris, until 4 January.
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Image Credits:
Lead: The Flowers We Grew - Rituals of Care (Detail), Rithika Merchant et la Chanakya School of Craft, Christian Dior Couture, 2024 © Adrien Dirand.
All further images as credited in photo captions.