The Most Photographed Carpet in the World Is Made in God's Own Country

Kerala's weaving tradition does not need a global stage to validate it. It has been supplying the world's finest hotels, resorts, and homes for over a hundred years. The Met Gala carpet is simply the moment the world looked down and noticed. 

For four consecutive years, the carpet that the world's most photographed guests have walked on has been woven in Cherthala, a town in Kerala's Alleppey district. The brand behind it is four years old. The craft behind it is over a century old.

Kerala's Weaving Tradition Has Its Own Story to Tell

The backwaters region of Alleppey and Cherthala has been a weaving hub for over a century. Generations of weavers here have worked with what the land and sea offer: coir, sisal, seagrass. 

The things they make with these materials have travelled far. Luxury hotels, heritage resorts, and beautifully designed homes across the world have been furnished with textiles that started here, on looms in Kerala, made by hands that knew exactly what they were doing.

Sivam Santhosh grew up in this world. When he launched Neytt in 2021, his goal was to bring that craft into a conversation it had always deserved to be part of. Kerala's natural fibre weaving did not need reinventing. It needed a platform. 

The Met Gala carpet is what that platform looks like at its most visible. The craft behind it had been earning its place for a hundred years before anyone outside the industry was paying attention.

Four Generations Before the Met Gala Noticed

Neytt's story is four years old. The family story behind it goes back a century. Santhosh's great-grandfather founded the Travancore Mats and Matting Company, rooting the family in Kerala's weaving economy from its earliest organised phase. His father Santhosh founded Extraweave in 2000, building it into a commercial operation that supplied premium natural fibre products to hotels, resorts, and international buyers.

By the time Sivam entered the business, he was the fourth generation of a family that had spent a hundred years learning exactly what this craft could do.

What he built with Neytt, alongside his wife Nimisha Srinivas, was something different from what came before. Extraweave operates at commercial scale. Neytt is design-led, artisan-forward, and explicitly interested in storytelling.

• It has a flagship store in Delhi. 
• It has won international design awards. 
• It positions itself within the language of global luxury rather than simply supplying into it.

The Met Gala relationship began through a US-based client called Fibre Works, who recommended Neytt to the event's organisers. The first carpet, in 2022, was a red-and-blue striped design for the 'In America: An Anthology of Fashion' edition. 

In 2023, they collaborated with Japanese architect Tadao Ando on a swirled design for the Karl Lagerfeld tribute. 

The 2025 carpet was a natural fibre base that artist Cy Gavin painted midnight blue and dotted with narcissus flowers, tied to themes of identity and self-expression. As for 2026, the carpet arrived as an off-white natural fibre canvas from Kerala and was painted in New York to resemble a stone pathway with patches of moss green, framed by cascading wisteria in lilac, pink, and white. 

500 Artisans Working For 90 Days

The scale of what Neytt produces for the Met Gala is worth sitting with. Each carpet involves around 500 artisans working over 90 days. 

The fibre, natural sisal sourced from Madagascar, is hand-sorted before weaving begins. Fifty-seven rolls of carpet, totalling 6,840 square feet, are woven in a bouclé construction that requires consistency across every inch. 

A wall-to-wall carpet at an event of this visibility leaves no room for error. As Santhosh has said, even the tiniest impurity is visible.

The base leaves Kerala as a blank canvas, undyed and unfinished, and is transformed in New York by artists and designers working with the Met Gala's creative team. 

The final product carries the names of the designers, the event, and occasionally the brand. The 500 people in Cherthala who spent three months making it possible are rarely part of the headline. 

This is a pattern familiar to anyone who follows Indian artisan craft at the point where it meets global luxury. The skill travels. The credit is slower to follow.

Why This Story Matters to Us

At TuDuGu, we have always believed that Indian craft is not a regional category. Nor is it defined by one corridor, one state, or one tradition. 

The work coming out of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka carries the same depth and quality as anything produced elsewhere in the country. It has simply had fewer platforms.

Neytt's Met Gala story is a reminder that the craft was always there. What changes over time is who is paying attention. We intend to keep paying attention, and to make sure the artisans behind the work are part of the story when we do.