Gota patti.

Gota patti looks deceptively simple from a distance and turns out to be a discipline of millimetres up close. The karigar takes a strip of gota — sometimes only three millimetres wide — and folds it by thumb-feel into the shape the design asks for: a leaf, a petal, a tessellated rosette, the toothed kinari edge of a dupatta border. Each fold is anchored with a couple of stitches in silk thread of an exact matching colour. Done well, the result reads as architecture rather than appliqué.

We source gota from one family in Jaipur's Johari Bazaar — third-generation suppliers who can still produce gota with a real gold-leaf top-coat rather than the lacquered brass substitute that dominates the cheap end of the market. The base cloth — usually a Banarasi silk, sometimes a Kota doria — is sent up to a cluster of women karigars in a village two hours outside Jaipur who do the application. The atelier finishes the cut and the lining in Melbourne so the geometry survives the freight; a folded gota leaf is fragile in transit and a flatbed handler will crush a season's work in a single careless drop.

What you should know as the wearer: gota patti catches light differently from any embroidery you have worn, because it is not embroidery — it is applied geometry. Photographs flatten it. In person, a gota patti lehenga moves with you and the rosettes throw highlights in shifting directions. Store the piece folded along the seams the karigar has already established, never against the gota direction, and air it before a wear rather than ironing it. A steam iron will dull the foil within seasons.