Maria Grazia Chiuri's Collaboration with Chanakya is Now at This Mumbai Exhibition

9 Sept 2026

The chief creative officer of Fendi has partnered with Indian craft house Chanakya on one of three exhibitions across Mumbai this season. Each traces how craft knowledge is inherited, transformed and passed on by hand.

Indian craft house Chanakya has worked with some of the world’s biggest luxury brands. Maria Grazia Chiuri's collaboration with the creative institution has landed at a Mumbai exhibition that honours heritage, embroidery and pioneering female travellers.

Knowledge, in craft, is rarely put down on paper. It travels instead by hand, passed from one artist to the next until it is no longer technique, but instinct. This act of inheritance sits at the heart of Chanakya’s 40th-anniversary celebrations, marked with three fibre-based exhibitions across Mumbai, each exploring what it means to inherit knowledge, transform it and carry it forward for generations to come.

“When we were looking back at 40 years and what it meant, we wanted to honour what making in India meant,” Karishma Swali, creative director of Chanakya International and Chanakya School of Craft, tells AD Middle East. The milestone is a double one, with 40 years since the atelier's founding, but also ten years since the school of craft, which trains and empowers women artisans to keep more than 5,000 years of cultural heritage alive. Each of the three exhibitions, En Route at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Garden of Gestures at the Chanakya Ateliers and Belong at Experimenter Colaba, looks at the language of textiles as an art practice.