Quadrille Fabric: Les Indiennes Multicolor - Custom Multi Taupe / Brown / Lilac

Les Indiennes has teeth. The name sounds decorative — sounds French, sounds polite — but the history behind it is a story about a fabric so dangerous that a king made it a crime to wear it. In the mid-seventeenth century, Armenian merchants operating out of Marseille began importing painted cottons from the Coromandel Coast of India — vivid, washable, colorfast in a way that European textiles simply were not. They detonated at the court of Louis XIV. The nobility wanted them. The peasants wanted knockoffs of them. And the French wool, linen, and silk industries — the ones Colbert had spent a generation building into national enterprises — watched their markets evaporate and went to the King. In 1686, Louis XIV banned les indiennes outright: illegal to import, illegal to produce, illegal to sell, illegal to wear. The ban lasted seventy-three years. It did not work. The fabric was too good.

This brown colorway is the quietest version of the most dangerous pattern in the Quadrille catalog. Where the red reveals its teeth and the turquoise and lilac flash their colors across a room, the taupe and brown sit back and let the drawing do the talking. The botanicals read as study rather than spectacle — closer to the pages of a naturalist's folio than to a bolt of contraband cotton. Lilac enters as an accent, not a statement, warming the composition just enough to keep it from going monochrome. On a tinted Belgian linen-cotton ground, hand screen-printed in the USA with twelve screens, the brown has the quality of something that was once vivid and has aged into something better — which is what the best antique indiennes actually look like after three centuries of use. Two individual yards in a same dyelot. Enough for the pair of pillows that quietly tells every other object in the room where it came from.

At time of listing this fabric was in two pieces, both from the same dyelot, and each measuring one yard - please measure before ordering to make sure these cuts will work for your project.

Please note that colors may not represent accurately in photo. Additional photo(s) provided to show scale, not colorway. All sales are final, and we do not send cuttings for approval.