Mukaish.

Mukaish is the quiet sibling of chikankari, and the more endangered one. The karigar threads a short length of flat metallic badla through the muslin from the back, brings it through to the front, twists it tight against itself with thumb and forefinger so it forms a small bright knot — fardi — and clips the wire flush. That is one dot. A finely worked dupatta might hold three thousand of them, each placed by eye against a chikankari ground.

There are perhaps a hundred true mukaish karigars left in Lucknow. The craft almost died in the eighties and nineties when costume jewellery and machine embroidery cannibalised the market; the wages collapsed, the apprentices stopped coming, and a generation of master karigars went into auto-rickshaw driving and worse. The atelier commissions sparingly, slowly, and at a per-fardi rate that lets the surviving karigars take on apprentices again. Three of our 2026 mukaish pieces are part of a co-funded apprentice programme with a Lucknow NGO; that detail is on the atelier file.

What you should know as the wearer: mukaish is light. The metal is real badla, drawn fine, and on a good piece you can see the cloth move beneath it like water under leaves. The badla will oxidise slowly to a soft warm grey if untreated — we coat ours with a museum-grade lacquer that holds the silver bright for around a decade — and the piece can be re-treated then. Never dry-clean mukaish; the solvents lift the badla. Hand-wash cold, lay flat, and let the karigar's hand be the one that touched it last.