Months in the Making: How Chikankari Embodies Sustainable Clothing

Pick up a white kurta with delicate floral patterns worked in white thread and you're probably holding chikankari. Or you're holding something pretending to be chikankari, which happens more often than anyone wants to admit.

Real chikankari comes from Lucknow. It's been there for over 400 years, arriving with Persian nobles at the Mughal court. The technique involves needle, thread, and time. Lots of time. More time than most people buying it realise.

Here's what that time actually looks like.

 The Three-Step Process

Image: articles.wifd.in 

Chikankari happens in three stages. 

First comes chapya, the block printing. Artisans carve wooden blocks with floral motifs, peacocks, paisleys, creeping vines. They dip these blocks in temporary ink, usually blue neel or white safeda, and stamp the design onto fabric. 

Different blocks for different elements. One for borders. One for small butis. One for larger flowers.

The fabric, now covered in printed guides, goes to the embroiderers. This is tankha, the actual needlework. This is where months disappear.

Finally, dhulayi. Washing. The finished piece gets soaked, scrubbed clean of all that temporary ink, then starched and pressed. This alone takes 10 to 12 days because it involves bleaching, acid treatment, and careful stiffening. You can't rush chemistry.

 Thirty Two Different Stitches

Image: Coral Sub

Chikankari uses 32 distinct stitches. Not variations. Distinct techniques, each with its own name, purpose, visual effect.

There's bakhiya, the shadow stitch worked on the reverse side so only a subtle tint shows through on the front. There's jali, the speciality stitch where thread never pierces through the fabric. 

Instead, warp and weft threads get carefully separated and tiny buttonhole stitches create a net pattern. Front and back look identical. You literally cannot tell which side is which.

Murri creates rice-shaped knots. Tepchi forms running outlines. Phanda makes spherical knots. Rahet is stem stitch done with six strands on the reverse. The list continues.

An artisan spends 15 years training to master four or five of these stitches. Read that again. Fifteen years to become proficient in less than a sixth of the available techniques. This is handcrafted fashion in its most demanding form.

Most embroiderers specialise. One person does all the jali work. Another handles murri. Someone else fills in with bakhiya shadow work. A single piece might pass through multiple pairs of hands before it's complete.

What Months Actually Mean

A simple kurta with minimal chikankari work takes 10 to 15 days. That's for something with a scattered pattern, maybe some border work, nothing too dense.

Go heavier on the embroidery and you're looking at weeks. A lehenga with comprehensive work across the fabric? Two months easily. Maybe more if it includes intricate jali sections or extensive murri detailing.

The fabric sits stretched in frames while someone works it stitch by stitch, following those block printed guides. Six hours a day. Sometimes more. The work demands focus. Your eyes strain. Your fingers ache. Headaches are common. Back pain from hunching over frames. Tingling in fingertips from repetitive motion.

This is slow fashion clothing at its most literal. Not slow because someone decided to market it that way. Slow because the work genuinely cannot move faster without machines taking over.

The Economics Nobody Talks About

Over 5,000 families in Lucknow and surrounding areas depend on chikankari. Ninety per cent of the embroiderers are women working from home, balancing needlework with household responsibilities.

Average monthly income from chikankari? Around Rs 2,500 to 4,100. That's roughly $30 to $52 USD per month. For work that takes specialised skills and causes documented health problems.

One woman spent eight months embroidering a lehenga and earned Rs 2,000 total. About $24. For eight months of skilled labor. She couldn't buy herself a single saree with what she made.

This is the reality behind a lot of artisan textiles. The craft gets celebrated. The aesthetic gets appreciated. The people doing the actual work get paid almost nothing.

Middlemen

 take most of the profit. Retailers mark up heavily. By the time a chikankari kurta reaches a boutique, it might cost 20 or 30 times what the embroiderer was paid. Maybe more.

The chikankari industry received Geographical Indication status in 2008, which means legally only work from specific districts can be called chikankari. But that doesn't protect the artisans from exploitation. It just protects the name.

Machine Versus Hand

Machine-made chikankari exists now. It's faster, cheaper, more uniform. Every piece looks identical because a computer controls the stitching.

Hand embroidery shows variation. The lines aren't perfectly straight. The spacing isn't mathematically precise. There's personality in the irregularities. That's how you know human hands made it.

The threads matter too. Hand embroidery uses cotton or silk threads with natural variation in thickness. This allows for detail that machines struggle to replicate. Real chikankari has depth, texture, subtle shifts in how light hits different sections.

When you buy machine-made work, you're getting something that looks like chikankari. When you buy handmade, you're getting actual traditional embroidery. And you're supporting someone's livelihood, assuming they were paid fairly, which often they weren't.

What Ethical Fashion Actually Requires

Calling something sustainable clothing or ethical fashion doesn't automatically make it so. The fabric being natural doesn't matter if the person who embroidered it earned $24 for eight months of work.

Real ethical fashion in the context of chikankari means knowing who did the embroidery, how they were paid, and what their working conditions looked like. It means transparency about the supply chain. It means fair wages that reflect the skill and time involved.

It means recognising that if a heavily embroidered kurta costs $30, someone in that chain got exploited. The math doesn't work otherwise. Quality traditional embroidery from fairly compensated artisans cannot be that cheap. It's not possible.

When brands talk about supporting artisan communities but don't disclose what they actually pay embroiderers, that's a red flag. When the price seems suspiciously low for the amount of work visible, that's another one.

Why This Craft Matters

Chikankari isn't just pretty needlework. It's 400 years of inherited skill. It's cultural memory stitched into fabric. It's thousands of women who learned this from mothers and aunts, who teach it to daughters, who pass down specific techniques that don't exist anywhere else.

When fast fashion copies the aesthetic with machines, the craft doesn't just lose market share. It loses the next generation. 

Why would someone spend 15 years learning murri stitch when machines can approximate it in minutes and nobody can tell the difference?

The craft survives when people understand what they're actually buying. When they recognise that real chikankari takes months, not hours. When they're willing to pay prices that reflect the genuine time and skill required.

What Handcrafted Fashion Really Costs

At TuDuGu, we work directly with chikankari artisans who can tell you exactly how long each piece took, which stitches were used, and who did the work. The artisan textiles on our platform come with that transparency built in.

When you choose traditional embroidery from us, you're not just buying sustainable clothing. You're buying work where the embroiderer was actually paid fairly for their time. 

Where their skill is valued, not exploited. Where months of careful needlework translate into compensation that makes sense.

Because handcrafted fashion should mean the person who made it with their hands can afford to keep making it. That's the baseline. Everything else is just marketing.