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Reserve Bank staff once stopped at Smoker’s Corner in Ballard Estate to borrow a Mills & Boon for the train home. You can still make a trip to Botawala Chambers for a book, though these days the bookshop is three floors up, and the distractions along the way include some of Mumbai’s most exquisite wedding clothes.
Sisters-in-law Monica Shah and Karishma Swali opened Jade on Peddar Road in 2008. Even then, it was a good shop to stop and peer into. Gond paintings once shared the window with their couture. The two come from the family behind Chanakya, the Mumbai embroidery house whose work for Dior under Maria Grazia Chiuri made it famous well beyond India. You can see that appetite for handwork all over their new 20,000 sq ft flagship. The outline of the old bookstall survives in the foyer, the lions from Jade’s logo keep turning up in dreamy murals painted on lime plaster, and even the deep oxblood tiles in the elevator are handmade.
Give the ground floor a little time. As a girl, Monica visited Mumbai’s CSMVS museum and attended Paramparik Karigar craft exhibitions. In 2023, she returned to the museum to showcase Jade’s own work. That same year, she started the Grassroot Artisans Project to give craftspeople, including bandhani artisans in Bhuj and ikat weavers in Pochampally, steady work and room to experiment.
Here in Ballard Estate, the project has a gallery of its own. Palimpsest’s opening show, Gods & Glitches, pairs four textiles depicting kuldevis, or family goddesses, with playful pop art. Bombay has a permanent place in the gallery, too. Look for the huge wall panel devoted to goddess Mumbadevi and the city that takes her name, then see how differently Bombay’s office workers and street vendors come across in wax-resist batik and hand-worked raffia.
Upstairs, in the sunlit bridal salon, lavish lehengas hang beneath antique metal busts. Shreya and Prerna, the senior designers showing us around, are positively giddy over the details, and it’s easy to see why. Parrots perch on a lehenga in appliqué. A slinky little bralette gives moti bharat, the tiny glass-bead work we associate with our grandmothers, a very sexy Jade twist. Then there’s their signature hawa ka kaam, work done ‘in the air’, in which metallic kasab threads are knotted to form an entire bridal outfit without any fabric underneath. The prices are steep, but up close you can see where the money goes.
We’d happily wear the second floor’s Chantilly lace separates and light jackets to a party. Little bows turn up on denim in the 400 001 Bombay Edit and again on the Vivienne Mini, a gold-plated brass evening bag engraved with flowers (₹39,799). Our other great weakness is upstairs at Jade Home, where the brand branches out into homeware for the first time. It’s familiar territory for Monica, who designed interiors before she designed clothes. We’re particularly taken with the flower-shaped serving platters, hand-painted vases and etched silverware. The Jade × CMYK bookshop is on this floor, too, with Jade Café due to open alongside it in December. Look up from the coffee-table books to spot the fantastical creatures in the hand-painted Gond mural overhead.
Time Out tip: When your friends from abroad are angling for an invitation to a big fat Indian wedding, you can offer them the next best thing: a tour of South Bombay’s most extravagant bridal shops. Start at House of Jade’s sari salon, gawk at the antiques at Sabyasachi and finish under the golden clouds at Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla’s Mubarak Baug. The dress code for this one is comfortable shoes.