Kerala company turned to Madagascar to make Met Gala carpet

These are the words used by Indian carpet company Extraweave to describe the mammoth rug it created for the Met Gala 2023, which took place in New York on Monday evening.

With its Karl Lagerfeld theme and celebrity attendance, the gala is a bona-fide red-carpet event. However, the rug it commissioned this year was white as the purest snow, GG Aniyan, the general marketing manager of Extraweave, tells The National.

“The Met Gala wanted a top-grade fibre and weave, as well as a carpet that was as white as possible because this year they wanted to add some texture to the carpet by way of multicoloured swirls of red and blue. For this reason, we went with a boucle weave and sisal fibre sourced from Madagascar,” explains Aniyan.

“While the fabric is also available in Brazil and Tanzania, it is not as pure.”

The company shipped 80 rolls of the carpet to the organisers in January, having been commissioned last November. Each roll measures 4 x 30 metres, so the rugs sent cover an area of 9,600 square metres.

This is the second Met Gala carpet furnished by Extraweave, which also provided one in 2021 for the event In America: A Lexicon of Fashion theme.

Extraweave has also supplied its wares for events at Buckingham Palace in the past, says Aniyan, as well as exporting rugs to Dubai's Alexandria furniture company.

Neytt, which is the designer wing of the B2B company, plans to open shops across India this year.