Indienne

Indiennes originally with Indian exotic motifs printed calico from the 17th to the 19th century and now a label for cotton fabrics, follow their designs to historic patterns.

The painting on cotton fabrics was developed in India since the second millennium BC and demanded both high artistic skills as well as a very specialized technical knowledge in dealing with the colors used. Portuguese merchants led the goods as an alternative to a heavy silk or wool and harsh lines in Europe in the 17th century. In France the leading culturally Indian fabrics (French toiles indiennes ) got their name. Unprocessed Indian cotton itself was called Calico, after the port city of Calicut / Calcutta.

Indiennes found use for clothes and as coatings for seating or as wallpaper; developed on the basis of colors and comfortable to wear rapidly a market. The demand was greater than the supply, so that soon developed his own European Indiennes production. The first production plant opened Armenian merchants in 1640 in Marseille, England and Holland followed in the 1670s. Also changed the production technology; instead of the individual fabric painting was switched to the cheaper and faster industrial fuel pressure, which in turn was zurückexportiert the country of origin. There you can also fit the motives more to the European taste: So dived European plant in Indian sceneries on. Until the 1790s most Indiennes came from India.

Especially in France felt the traditional producers and suppliers of textiles and clothes gradually significant loss of business by the new mass product. At her urging, the production, importation and possession of Indiennes was banned by Louis XIV in 1686 to to 1759 (in England the same thing happened from 1700 to 1774 ), which on the one hand an immense black market with the still coveted Indiennes and on the other hand, in neighboring countries caused the development of a Indiennes economy. So 8,000-10,000 people worked in Switzerland at the end of the 18th century in the Indiennes establishments; the largest factories were among several hundred workers, mostly seasonal workers, as the then fuel pressure in the winter has not been possible for climatic reasons (bleaching and drying was done in the open air ). The now all around know-how built led after the opening of the French market to the fact that in France en masse foreign management staff (eg, around a thousand Swiss ) worked. In the increasingly mechanized mass production of textiles, the industrial revolution of the 19th century, it was one of their most important starting points.

The greatest popularity and dissemination acquired the Indiennes in the 1780s when they were affordable for large parts of the population. They were part of a globalized trade: Indian workers put mass-produced for the European market forth; European and Indian fabric design mingled; European production methods summarized in India foot; Cotton and cotton cloths was transported from Asia and America to Europe; not least served the finished Indiennes as barter and trade goods in the Atlantic triangular trade ( and were printed for this purpose with African motifs ). The Indiennes end product of the end of the 18th century global cotton economy are a remarkable example of the juxtaposition of different stages: At one end of the trading strand across the Atlantic, in America, are strictly manually cultivated cotton plantations as the conclusion of the pre-modern slavery, while at the other end, found in Europe, the proto- industrial textile companies as a nucleus of the modern factory production.