Indian President Ram Nath Kovind hosted a dinner for the Trumps and their entourage at the Presidential Palace on Tuesday, where besides Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, several celebrities from film, fashion and industry were in attendance.
Ace Designer Madhu Jain, who is considered the textile revivalist of India working for over three decades with handwoven fabrics, had a fruitful meeting with the first family of the United States at the gala dinner.
In an interview with Sputnik, she shared how both Donald Trump and First Lady Melania were mesmerized by how Indian handwoven textile is advancing.
“Mr. President enquired about the outfit that I was wearing which was a suit made with an Uzbek Ikat print. When I told him that this is a special Indian textile that took 14 years of hard work and extensive research, he said that Americans would love to experience textiles like these in some years,” Jain said.
She also said Melania expressed her desire to own an outfit made in this “fabric of future”.
“I told her that it will be my honour to make one and I am going to send an ensemble made in Uzbek print to her through the American ambassador,” she said.
Jain has experimented extensively with textiles in her long career and her recent achievement is introducing the motifs and weaves of Ikat from Uzbekistan into her design repertoire. She has also introduced the world's first Bamboo Silk Ikat.
Ikat is a dyeing technique used to create designs on the fabric. It is a resist dyeing process, where bundles of yarn are tightly wrapped together and then dyed as many times as is required to create the desired pattern.