The History of Clothing

Medieval · South Asia · 500 - 1500 CE

Medieval South Asian Clothing

Medieval South Asia's unbroken tradition of draped garments, masterful cotton and silk weaving, and richly dyed textiles made the subcontinent the medieval world's most celebrated source of fine cloth.

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Chola and Southern Kingdoms (9th–13th Century)

Chola-period copper-alloy sculpture of Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of Dance, wearing a short wrapped lower garment with a flying sash, inside a ring of flames Shiva as the Lord of Dance (Nataraja), Tamil Nadu, c. 950–1000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.75.1. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

The Chola dynasty (9th–13th century) presided over a flourishing of textile arts in southern India. Temple sculptures and bronzes from this period reveal men and women wearing finely draped unstitched garments — lengths of cotton or silk wrapped, pleated, and tucked with remarkable precision. Women typically wore a long cloth draped as a lower garment, sometimes with a separate breast cloth, while men wore the dhoti, a single length of fabric wrapped around the waist and legs in various styles.

South Indian weavers became renowned for their mastery of cotton, producing cloth of exceptional fineness; writing shortly after the Chola period, Marco Polo described cottons from the Coromandel coast as resembling spider's web. Their most consequential skill, though, was fixing color to cotton with metallic salts so that it survived washing — a problem most of the world had not solved. The patola silk — a double-ikat weave requiring extraordinary skill — originated in Gujarat and became a prized trade cloth across Southeast Asia. Dyeing techniques using indigo, turmeric, and lac produced vibrant textiles. The trade networks of the Chola maritime empire carried these fabrics to ports throughout the Indian Ocean, making South Asian textiles a form of currency and diplomatic gift.

For a fuller account of dress, ornament, and the temple weaving economy under the Cholas, see Chola dynasty clothing and textiles.

Delhi Sultanate and Early Mughal Influence (13th–16th Century)

Sultanate-period manuscript painting of men in fitted tunics with sashes and trousers, above a scene of a seated man and a woman in a draped wrap and veil Page from a Chandayana manuscript, Sultanate India, c. 1525–40, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1981.55. Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 introduced Central Asian and Persian clothing traditions to northern India. The new ruling class wore tailored and stitched garments — greatly expanding the limited range of stitched clothing known in earlier periods, when draped styles had dominated. Long coats such as the jama, a fitted coat with a flared skirt tied to one side, were fashionable at court by the end of the period, when Akbar's courtiers wore the pointed-hemmed chakdar jama. Court women came to wear the peshwaz, a long gown with a fitted bodice, sometimes worn over trousers — a style that was at its most fashionable under the Mughals. Head coverings, including turbans for men and odhni (light veils) for women, gained new prominence in court dress.

Despite these changes at the court level, the majority of South Asia's population continued to wear unstitched draped garments. What emerged was a distinctive synthesis: urban and courtly fashion increasingly blended Persianate tailoring with Indian textiles, while village weavers maintained ancient traditions of muslin, hand-spun cloth, and regional handloom weaving. The textile workshops, or karkhanas, established by the sultans organized weavers and other artisans into state-run production, making luxury fabrics including zari-embroidered cloth woven with gold and silver threads that would reach its fullest expression under the later Mughals.

Textile Techniques and the Indian Ocean Trade

Patola double-ikat silk from Gujarat, 19th century, Cooper Hewitt Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Medieval South Asian weavers developed a repertoire of techniques that few weaving cultures anywhere could match. Ikat weaving — in which yarns are resist-dyed before being placed on the loom — reached its highest expression in the patola silks of Gujarat, where both warp and weft threads were precisely dyed to create intricate geometric, floral, and figurative patterns. This double ikat technique required extraordinary planning and skill, as the dyer had to calculate exactly where each color would fall in the finished cloth. Patola textiles became prized status symbols across Southeast Asia, where local elites sought them as markers of wealth and rank.

Block printing — in which carved wooden blocks were used to stamp patterns onto cloth — and mordant dyeing — in which fabrics were treated with chemical fixatives before being dipped in dye baths to produce vibrant, colorfast hues — allowed South Asian artisans to produce richly colored cotton textiles in vast quantities for export. The kalamkari tradition of the Coromandel Coast produced elaborate narrative textiles depicting Hindu mythological scenes, painted freehand with a bamboo pen. These cotton fabrics circulated through the Indian Ocean trade network from East Africa to Indonesia, shaping dress cultures across the maritime world and establishing South Asia as one of the medieval world's leading centers of textile production.

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