Caraco Jackets: Fashioning a Hypothesis

 

ModeMuze, Amsterdam

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/12/caracos-around-world.html

See a recent post featuring these 18th-century chintz garments known by several names:

Caraco

Cassaquin

Kassakeinjte

Kroplattan

The Fries Museum in the Netherlands owns many caracos and other chintz clothing but from what I could see in their catalog (couldn't find an English translation) most sources and places of origin are "Onbekend," or "Unknown."

My Dutch is improving:

Patchwork Quilt: Lappendeken

Chintz: Sits

Cotton: Kataoen

The jacket above has a "Maker: Unknown"

and no entry for Plaats or Place.

One of the few objects I found that had a place of origin:

Child's clothing Place Made: India

Even if you can't read Dutch or can't find the Museum's English catalog do a search for SITZ (chintz) and see some great objects.

https://collectie.friesmuseum.nl/?diw-id=tresoar_friesmuseum_T1987-084

I've been collecting pictures for a couple of weeks and went back to look at the captions to see where these were constructed.

Attributed to England, France, the Netherlands and India.

We definitely see recurring style and techniques used in these garments, so much so that it is hard to believe that tailors scattered around the world created such similar objects.

For example, this detail of small-scale trim on sleeves and neck openings is not found in all the garments but in enough to suggest conclusions. Although I have not seen these in the cloth, photo details indicate that the trim is of two types: a print and a woven tape. 

Child's hat in a Dutch museum with the same style of red and white woven tape trim

We might consider edge trim a signature of Dutch style.

But it's much more an indication of Indian style.

Contrasting border edges remain a

design necessity...

...as characteristic of Indian style as the cone shape that the British

borrowed as "Paisley.'.

Border edging for saris (sarees) is still sold as Banarasi Border Lace...

...with little change in classic design as in this trim that is centuries old.

Banarasi Saree

 (quite the elegant and expensive garment)

Based on visual similarities can we assign India as the place of origin for the caraco jackets?
It seems quite likely. Written records are easily found supporting the idea that tailors and garment makers working in India crafted finished clothing for the world market. Most of us are unfamiliar with the European East India Companies' 17th-century buildings in India. Below a print of the Dutch Factory
at Surat.

Note the border on this print from 1634 depicting

the Dutch "Factory" at Surat in 1629.

Factory today means a place where things are fabricated or built. Centuries ago "Factory" meant a building that was more like a “Trading Post” as we called them in America.

Factors or Agents Negotiating

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image in an India-printed petticoat showing resident 

Dutch factors, their families & pets

The word source is Latin factoria which became a factorium, a location for agents who were commonly called factors at the time. The English (EIC) and the Dutch (VOC) East India Companies built their coastal fortresses for storage, and for agents' housing and offices, to say nothing of intimidation.

Baling cotton for shipping in an Indian factory

Embroiderers

 But production went on in the factories too with local artisans creating trade goods to order.

Artisans who had once worked at home were brought into the factories.

Kalamkari, hand-painting dyes in patterns

Kalam = pen

Kari = art

Changing a way of life.

The factory at Surat faced the Arabian Sea.

Surat in red was in Gujarat, a state well known for its textile trade goods.

European factors managed the factories with Indians working under them as clerks, warehouse workers, printers, weavers and crafters. To see to the English colonialists' spiritual needs the English East India Company sent the Rev. John Ovington (1653–1731) to the Surat factory. He wrote a memoir A Voyage to Surat in 1689, published in 1696.

Ovington's Observations:

A "Bannian," a class of men

with reputations as Accounting Clerks. 

"Tailers here fashion the Cloaths for the Europeans, either Men or Women, according to every Mode that prevails....with as much Skill, as if they had been an Indian fashion, or themselves had been Apprentices [in England.]"

The English factory at Surat from Ovington's book

One can go further into descriptions of the European factories on the Indian coasts, but once you become familiar with the 17th-century model for India/European trade it becomes obvious that textiles were commissioned by the trading companies to be fabricated by Indian textile employees in their factories.

Fries Museum The Netherlands

Many of the chintz caracos preserved around the world were likely to have been fashioned in India in a combination of Indian and European taste and shipped to enthusiastic customers in Holland, France, England and other northern European countries. 

And it would seem from looking at these caracos in various European museums:

Different styles for different customers

It's a little late for me to become a costume historian---I look at quilts. 

Christies' caption for this palampore bedcover

tells us it's quilted in a diamond grid.

Next post: Indian-made bedcovers shipped around the world. UPDATE: I have to read a lot more before I'm ready for that post. Next month!