2 days ago
Dior's 200K Dollar Houndstooth Coat Has An Indian Edge With Its Mukaish Work
Jonathan Anderson who has been appointed as the sole creative director of womenswear and menswear at Christian Dior, showcased his debut collection for the luxury label in Paris on June 27, 2025. While the show created a lot of buzz online with celebrities such as Robert Pattinson, Rihanna, Daniel Craig and more in attendance, it also created online chatter.
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Fashion commentator and content creator, Hanan Besnovic who runs the Instagram handle @ideservecouture, made a video of a particular goat and ivory coat with a houndstooth design. He accompanied his post with the caption, "34 days to create a 200k Dior coat? Well here is a little more context to Dior's 200k coat!" And this is exactly what caught our eyes.
This intricately crafted coat stood out to us because of its use of Mukaish work hailing from the lanes of Lucknow. Hanan Besnovic too pointed out in his video that, "Why is it a 200k dollar coat? Well, there's a little more context to it. The coat is from the debut collection of Jonathan Anderson for Dior, but the procedure used to make this coat is not easy. First of all, the embroidery that you see on this coat is made by using the traditional Mukaish technique. This is a traditional Indian hand embroidery technique."
He further adds how this technique of Mukaish embroidery is done, and also says that 12 embroiderers were required to make this coat and it took 34 days to create it.
All About Lucknow's Mukaish Work
Mukaish which is also called Badla work is a traditional Indian embroidery that finds its roots in Lucknow and involves the use of strands of metal. These strands are twisted into a pattern that forms a design that is the hallmark of craftmanship. The wires sued to create two distinct types of embroidery including kamdani - which features the entire pattern filled using badla, and Mukaish which is otherwise called fardi ka kaam, which employs metal wires being insterted and twisted into the fabric to create small dots of floral and geometric patterns. While the gold mukaish work dots are common, the houndstooth pattern was meticulously created on the Dior coat.
Mukaish is an almost dying craft of Lucknow, is an age-old embroidery with very few karigars kaing exclsuive Mukaish sarees as it is mostly done to highlight or adorn Chikankari work. Over the years, Chikankari travelled far and wide across the globe, but Mukaish stuck to the tiny lanes of Lucknow. The karigars of this craft are also called Badla in Gujarat and Maharashtra, are a dying populace.
