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On the trail of French chiffon in Dubai

Gold shopping apart, Dubai has long been the place for ladies searching for chiffon. Khaleej Times visits three of the most well-known stores for chiffon saris to learn the trends behind this delicate and much-desired fabric

Rivoli, Regal and Ratti. Names of these three shops crop up repeatedly when you ask a cross section of women in Dubai where they buy their chiffon saris. These women are all expats, wives of businessmen from Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Karachi and London. Some are businesswomen themselves.

They frequently travel, and buy chiffon saris for friends and relatives in either south Asia or America. Some have lived in Dubai for over 20 years and will swear by only one of those three shops and tell you to stay clear of the “dubious maal (stuff)” in shops along Satwa. Others say buying chiffon depends on your taste, how much you want to spend, how important ‘genuine’ is to you, and your equation with the shop people and your faith in their shop.

Sales person Kamlesh Kumar shows a hand-painted French chiffon at Regal in Mina Bazar, Dubai, and (right) Kumar of Rivoli shows a branded chiffon sari material. — KT photos by Nivriti Butalia

Grey-haired Sharma at the Regal showroom in Mina Bazaar has been in the business for 35 years. He’s been watching the shop floor ever since Dubai started growing, and he pegs that to 1975.

“Our number one selling item is French Chiffon,” he says, explaining with pride how they go to France themselves and source this wispy, diaphanous fabric, suggest design and colour tones to the manufacturers as they know their customer’s taste, what sells in Dubai, and what women tourists take back to their home countries. Sometimes they place orders for a mere 25 metres (or approximately five saris) of a very specific embellishment and fabric density. Prints and fabrics that work in France — those $200 headscarves — are not what works here for saris.

But in this day and age, are people still buying chiffon in the quantities they used to? Sharma says with some direct sadness, no, sari sales over the years have come down. The young mostly don’t buy saris, he says. It’s an after-marriage phenomenon. Nowadays even 55- to 60-year-old women, Sharma says, those who used to wear saris — and we’re not just talking about chiffon now — are seen about in leggings and kurtas.

Trends have changed. Time has passed. But the loyalists, he says, are still around. There are women who will always prefer a sari to a salwar kameez. And there will always be those sari lovers — price no matter — for whom the possession of a French Chiffon remains eternally desirable.

Faking it?

Sharma says with pride that they aren’t one of those shops that pass off Japanese/Korean or Singaporean fabric as French chiffon. “Jinko pehchan hoti hai (Those who can tell)…” he says.

But how can you tell? Sharma instructs his salesperson with 12 years’ experience, Kamlesh Kumar, to explain the difference in textures, the fall of a fabric, the fluidity of the drape. The variety is astounding. As are the prices, anything upwards of Dh350 for a plain ‘French chiffon’. These plain one-tone chiffons — perhaps the most versatile — are easily the most affordable of the lot, but there are numerous variables. Plain doesn’t mean cheap.

Then come the exquisite hand-painted ones, two-tone chiffons, the ones with Swarovski stoning work, the metallic ones, the 36-gram ones and the ones weighing 40 grams. There are also varieties called Ombre, Opal, Jacquard, Metallic, and ‘film cut’. They have chiffon with velvet, flocking, and changeant chiffon. The types are understood best by playing with them in your hand and physically getting a sense of, sometimes, very subtle differences in fabric. Nobody can fault the store for being under stocked.

Sharma says some of his best repeat customers are the Marwari ladies, of business houses in Mumbai and Chennai, who have “subdued or subtle taste”. The shop has to cater to a wider audience, of course. Nobody can say also that the stock of all those hundreds of yards of chiffon are ‘subdued’. In more cases than not, subtle is a concept long put to sleep.

Budget chiffons

Pamela Singh, wife of a tea planter in Jorhat in northeastern Indian state of Assam, has been frequenting Ratti for Chantilly lace pieces and French chiffons for over a decade. “I’m in Dubai once or twice a year, and at least one of those times, I make a visit to Ratti to see if they have anything new. I feel Bharat (Bharat Rawtani of Ratti) keeps a good stock and their stuff is not over priced like some of the other places. I’ve been going to him for years. I usually end up spending 500-800 dirhams on a chiffon sari I like and that I know I won’t get in Delhi or Mumbai.”

Singh says she’s been trying to get her daughters to see some of the materials if they like anything, “but their tastes and fashions are very… different. You know how fussy daughters can be.”

Salesperson at Ratti for eight years, Vipin Aruniwas Harshan unfurls a sample of digital satin chiffon for Dh140 per metre. Jacquard chiffon for as much, but he says their most popular has been a copper-tinged chiffon for Dh45 per metre.

Harshan doesn’t hesitate either to lay on the counter rainbow chiffons and velvet chiffons, chiffons with lurex threads and metallic threads, brasso chiffon and opal chiffons. From Dh40 per metre to Dh140 per metre, Ratti’s ethic seems to be: retain interests and business of the budget shopper.

Burn and tell

Rivoli in Karama, it’s possible, has a selection even larger than the other two shops since they stock a lot of designer fabrics, the Versace and Ermenegildo Zegna stuff. Prices are accordingly exorbitant. It’s not a law of Murphy’s, but always what catches the eye is what seems unreasonable. In this case, a beautifully printed grey-blue two-toned printed chiffon with tiny floral motifs. The price is Dh2,000 for the sari. Why? Well, because: ‘Valentino’.

Not everybody is insulted by the prices justified by designer tags. Kumar, salesman in the shop, says they in the past when many more women would buy chiffon, they would get clients from Djibouti, Sudanese ladies and ladies from Oman who would want chiffon to “match with their handbags and sandals”. Some would ask to see chiffons to go with jewellery sets. Kumar is evidently a gold mine of chiffon anecdotes, and he’s serious.

At Rivoli, the range again is stunning. You can get a plain chiffon for Dh390 per metre to about Dh1,200 a metre. As against the more low-brow Japanese blends, the synthetics and polyesters can be bought for Dh165-195 for the whole 5.5 yards.

Across all shops, it is the hand-printed ones that are cascaded open with a special reverence. The permutations of fabrics and techniques blended are fascinating. Hand-printed with something called a woven emboss is Dh550 per metre. Hand-printed with velvet and a metallic finish is Dh2,500 per metre. It doesn’t stop there. Their most fast-moving product is the printed chiffon with metal. Younger ladies like the plain ones. Shaded and printed not so much, Kumar says. “There are 40 per cent fewer takers for French chiffon than they were ten years ago,” he says.

As Kumar explains the trouble one has to go through to take care of a chiffon — no washing, for one, only dry cleaning otherwise the sari will shrink to a handkerchief — a pair of Sudanese women walks in. They want to buy French chiffon to wear also as a sari, but one without pleats, draped across, covering the head. They are attended to by another salesperson.

Kumar continues with trying to answer my question. How do you know that what is being labelled and sold as 100 per cent chiffon and even claims ‘Made in France’ is in fact 100 per cent French chiffon? He tells me to wait, and goes to the back end to fetch a lighter.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Kumar cuts a tiny triangle from the splayed end of a rust-orange chiffon material. He then tells me to watch as he flicks the lighter under the chiffon triangle. In less than a second, the flame has caught and the triangle has turned to ash. His thumbs are blackened. “That is your test,” he says. “If the piece just becomes ash, then it’s 100 per cent chiffon.”

Now he gets a scrap of polyester and puts it under the same test. The polyester curls like plastic. It doesn’t turn to ash.

So the lighter test can decide if your sari is 100 per cent chiffon or whether you’ve only paid the price for a chiffon. That requires practice and a more nuanced eye. And the answer is always in the feel of the fabric.

nivriti@khaleejtimes.com