The Dutch turned trade into art — and no cargo they carried home changed the world's wardrobes more than the painted cotton they shipped from India.
✨ Fun fact: The Dutch and English East India Companies imported so much Indian painted cotton — chintz — that rival wool and silk weavers pushed to have it restricted, and in some countries banned. The word “chintz” itself is Indian, from the Hindi chīnt.
Chintz — the Indian cloth that conquered Dutch taste
In Dutch it is called sits; in English, chintz — glazed cotton, hand-painted or block-printed with flowers and dyed in fast, brilliant colour. It was made in India, above all on the Coromandel coast by the kalamkari method, and from the seventeenth century the ships of the Dutch East India Company — the VOC — carried it home by the bale.
Europe had never seen anything like it. Its colourfastness, its lightness and its vivid flowering patterns gave it qualities European producers struggled to match — and it sold to everyone, from the grand house to the probate inventory of the poor. Demand ran so wild that France and England eventually banned it outright to protect their own weavers, while the Dutch — its great carriers — kept trading it.
Hindeloopen — when India became Frisian
The most beautiful twist is what the Dutch did with it. Long after chintz had passed out of high fashion, it survived in the north — and became the heart of regional folk dress. In the little Frisian town of Hindeloopen, Indian chintz became the wentke, a long women’s coat, with different chintz grounds kept for different occasions — bright cloth for celebration, darker for mourning. Cloth painted by hand on the Coromandel coast, carried halfway round the world, became the Sunday best of a Dutch fishing town.
We find this endlessly moving: cloth travels, and it is taken in, renamed and loved as though it had always belonged. It is the same journey by which Dutch imitation-batik became, in time, the “African” wax print we meet in West Africa.
Delftware — the blue and white
The Dutch did the very same with porcelain. As Chinese porcelain became the height of fashion and imports were disrupted in the mid-seventeenth century, the potters of Delft set out to imitate it, and created Delftware: tin-glazed earthenware, famously blue-and-white, its tiles and vases covered with windmills, ships and flowers. Like chintz, it began as an answer to an Asian luxury and ended as a Dutch icon.
The linen loom
Closest to our own craft is Dutch cloth itself — above all its long tradition of linen damask, figured table-linens in which the pattern is created through the weave itself, catching the light as the weave changes direction. That is precisely what we do in silk: build the pattern into the weave, so it shifts and gleams as the cloth moves. Damask and brocade are cousins.
Where to see it
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam — outstanding chintz, Delftware and damask.
- Fries Museum, Leeuwarden — the great collection of chintz and Hindeloopen costume.
- TextielMuseum, Tilburg — Dutch textiles and a working textile lab.
- Zuiderzee Museum, Enkhuizen — regional dress along the old Zuiderzee.
The thread we love
The most Dutch of cloths — the chintz of a Frisian bride — was Indian to begin with, painted by hand on the Coromandel coast and carried home in a Company ship. When we see it, we do not see a foreign textile. We see ours, gone travelling and come home changed. Explore our handwoven Brocade Fabric collection, or read how India painted the cloth that started it all in kalamkari.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Netherlands most famous for in crafts?
Delftware pottery, linen damask, the chintz-based regional costumes of towns like Hindeloopen, and wooden clogs.
What is chintz (sits)?
Glazed cotton, hand-painted or block-printed with flowers in fast colours, made in India and imported in large quantities by the Dutch East India Company.
What is a Hindeloopen wentke?
A long women’s coat of Indian chintz that became a centrepiece of the traditional costume of Hindeloopen in Friesland.
What is Delftware?
Dutch tin-glazed earthenware, most famous for blue-and-white decoration, originally created in imitation of prized Chinese porcelain.
What is linen damask?
A fine figured linen in which the pattern is created within the weave itself — the linen cousin of woven silk brocade.
Sources & further reading
Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam); Fries Museum (Leeuwarden); TextielMuseum (Tilburg); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: kalamkari · ajrakh · kincob · the crafts of West Africa.
