NEW YORK, NY.- For textile designer Peter D’Ascoli, India is not simply a source of motifs or materials. It is a place where art, ritual, architecture and daily life remain closely intertwined, and where centuries-old traditions continue to shape contemporary design.
That idea is at the heart of
India: A Journey Within and Without, a new large-format volume from Flammarion pairing D’Ascoli’s writing with photographs by Ambroise Tzenas. The 352-page book, illustrated with 370 color images, will be published in the United States on October 6, following its September 30 release in France and ahead of its October 8 publication in the United Kingdom.
Rather than attempting an encyclopedic survey of Indian art, D’Ascoli presents the country through the eyes of a designer who has spent decades working with its artisans and studying its decorative traditions. The result moves between palaces, workshops, private homes, shrines, textiles, jewelry and architecture, looking closely at the way materials, symbols and craftsmanship carry ideas across generations.
D’Ascoli describes the book as personal rather than academic. Born in New York to a family with southern Italian roots, he first traveled to India in 1982 after a menswear designer sent him to New Delhi to source fabrics. The trip became a turning point. He subsequently worked with India’s Handicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation, traveling throughout the country and encountering weavers, printers and embroiderers whose knowledge had often been passed down through generations.
After returning to New York, D’Ascoli joined Diane von Furstenberg’s company in 1985, where he worked in fashion and lifestyle design. But India continued to exert a pull. In 2006, he moved there with his family and founded Talianna Studio in New Delhi, where traditional craft techniques are combined with contemporary design and production.
That biography gives the book an unusual structure. It is at once a visual study of Indian decorative culture and an account of how prolonged exposure to that culture altered one designer’s way of seeing. D’Ascoli writes of India’s craftsmanship not as an archive of disappearing techniques, but as a living system that continues to evolve.
The book is divided into sections titled Sublime India, Divine Opulence, Stone and Spirit, Spectra of Exaltation and Dialogues. Together they move from architecture and sacred spaces to color, textiles, ornament and the continuing exchange between Indian traditions and global design.
One of the book’s central ideas is that ornament in India cannot easily be separated from belief. Hindu, Mughal and Persian traditions overlap throughout the volume, while mirrors, sacred geometries, carved stone, painted walls and textiles are considered not simply as decoration but as carriers of spiritual and philosophical meaning. The publisher describes Indian art in the book as a meeting point between the material and metaphysical worlds.
The photographs by Tzenas reinforce that approach. Rather than concentrating only on famous monuments, the imagery moves from monumental architecture to details of surfaces and working processes: carved sandstone, painted palace interiors, hand-printing blocks, woven carpets, embroidered cloth and jewel-like glass mosaics.
Jaipur occupies a prominent place in the book. Its City Palace appears repeatedly, including the Shobha Niwas, or Hall of Beauty, whose gilded stucco, mirror work, colored glass and painted decoration provide the setting for the book’s cover image. The photograph shows Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh of Jaipur seated within the elaborate late-18th-century interior.
Padmanabh Singh also contributes the book’s foreword, in which he describes Indian tradition not as something frozen in the past but as something continuously remade by those who inherit it. He presents the volume as a journey through Indian craft, design and imagination, and as a meditation on the relationship between heritage and modernity.
The book’s geographical and cultural range is intentionally broad. D’Ascoli writes about the interaction of Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Buddhist and European traditions, arguing that Indian visual culture developed through centuries of exchange rather than isolation. Architectural forms, textile patterns and decorative motifs become evidence of that continuous conversation.
Nature is another recurring thread. Birds, trees, flowers and animals move between landscape and ornament throughout the book, appearing in painted palace rooms, Kashmiri carpets, carved marble and textiles. In this view, the natural world is not simply copied by artisans but transformed into systems of pattern and symbolic meaning.
The final sections bring that history into the present, examining how contemporary designers and craftspeople continue to work with inherited materials and techniques. D’Ascoli’s own studio becomes part of that story, producing textiles and furnishings through a combination of block printing, embroidery, digital printing and tailoring.
That contemporary dimension is important to the book’s larger argument. India: A Journey Within and Without does not treat craftsmanship as something surviving on the margins of modern life. Instead, it presents craft as a form of knowledge capable of adaptation—one that remains relevant precisely because each generation finds new ways to use it.
For D’Ascoli, the people who maintain those skills are ultimately the book’s central subject. He describes the volume as a tribute to India’s craft heritage and to the artisans who sustain it, arguing that their work carries not only aesthetic value but cultural memory.
With Tzenas’s photography moving from the monumental to the intimate, the book makes a case for looking slowly: at the surface of a wall, the weave of a textile, the geometry of a window or the accumulated decoration of a palace room. In doing so, India presents ornament not as excess, but as a language—one through which history, belief, craftsmanship and contemporary life remain connected.
