The art of the textile label: how British mill-made cloth sold itself to Indian buyers

Tucked into the inside of every collar or seam is a quiet declaration: ‘Made in India.’ ‘100% Cotton.’ ‘Dry Clean Only.’ These stitched-in scripts graze the skin, but we rarely pause to consider them. Yet they speak – to our bodies, our desires, our sense of place and value. A few words and symbols tell us where a garment came from, how to care for it, what kind of body it was made to fit. Most of all, they say: trust me. And we do. Because trust, like style, is constructed – cultivated through repetition, ritual, and image. Every region, every era, every empire has had its own markers of credibility, often more visual than textual.

In colonial India, that trust was deliberately fabricated. As British textile mills flooded the subcontinent with factory-made cloth, labels – then known as tickets, chaap, tika, or shippers’ marks –became tools of seduction.

The exhibition ‘Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile’ at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, brings these chromolithographed fragments into sharp focus. Featuring nearly 300 vividly printed labels alongside historical photographs, printed ephemera, and artwork, the exhibition looks at these tickets not just as legal trademarks or advertising gimmicks, but as aesthetic artefacts of a complex visual economy. Through gods and empires, monuments and tigers, these tags turned fabric into fantasy. They didn’t just sell cloth – they sold desire, invoking trust through motifs that were instantly recognisable, culturally specific, and emotionally resonant.

In a linguistically and culturally diverse marketplace, visuals did the heavy lifting. Hindu deities, Mughal architecture, British royals, and alpine scenes stood in for quality, authenticity, and aspiration. It didn’t matter that the fabric had little to do with the imagery. The label was a promise. In a way, it was the first thing we consumed –before we wore the cloth, we absorbed its story.

The rise of chromolithography – a 19th-century printing technology that enabled lush, colourful reproduction – helped labels become art objects in their own right. Some were repurposed as decoration or even venerated as sacred images. This exhibition reminds us that the label was never just about information; it was about influence. It mirrored the anxieties and ambitions of its time – colonial power masked in local iconography, mass production wrapped in intimate symbolism. As tools of branding, they charted the journey from handmade to machine-made, from the handloom to the factory, from identity to commodity.

Yet, they remain strangely familiar. ‘Ticket Tika Chaap’ doesn’t just excavate a forgotten visual language; it situates it within the long arc of image-making and manipulation. Even now, labels work in similar ways. Fast fashion tags continue to declare origin, fibre, fit –while concealing extractive systems that rely on low-wage labour across South and Southeast Asia. The language of trust hasn’t disappeared; it has simply been rebranded. Sleek typography, minimalist logos, and eco-certifications are the new chaaps – meant to reassure us that what we buy is ethical, desirable, worthwhile.

Today’s labels still sit close to the skin, quietly asserting where a garment was made, by whom, and for what kind of body. This assertion hasn’t gone out of fashion. If anything, it’s taken on new weight. Even in the churn of fast fashion, the label remains –required, read, reckoned with. Its text is no longer invisible. As consumers grow more conscious of the hands behind their clothes, the label becomes a site of accountability, a mirror to the global garment economy, and a reminder that the threads that touch us are always tangled in history.

‘Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile’ is at Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, until November 2nd, 2025

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