Tea Topographies: Telling the Human Story Behind 150 Years of Ceylon Tea Through Fashion, Art and Food.

Tea Topographies
📍 Place des Vosges, Paris
📅 19 September 2026

Drawing from more than 150 years of Ceylon Tea history, the exhibition looks beyond the familiar cup to recognise the generations of people whose labour, knowledge and resilience have shaped Sri Lanka’s tea industry.

Through tea-dyed fabrics, handcrafted tea-flower motifs, visible mending and expressive silhouettes, the exhibition brings attention to the hands and lives often hidden behind one of the world’s most familiar commodities. Here, fashion becomes a language for memory, a way of making overlooked labour visible and transforming personal and collective histories into material, form and story.

Most people I meet have never seen a tea flower. Yet, growing up among Sri Lanka’s tea estates, it was an ordinary part of my world. When a teacher asked us to name the flowers we knew, “tea flower” was naturally among mine. Looking back, I see a quiet parallel between the tea flower and the people whose labour sustains the plantations. Both are essential to the landscape, yet both remain largely unseen behind the tea the world knows and consumes.

For more than 150 years, tea has shaped Sri Lanka’s landscapes, economy and communities. Since commercial cultivation began in 1867, generations of workers have climbed steep mountain slopes to pick leaves by hand, while others have carried out the skilled work of withering, rolling, fermenting, drying and sorting them inside plantation factories. Today, almost 5% of Sri Lanka’s population is connected to this billion-dollar industry, a legacy carried through generations of labour, knowledge, endurance and resilience.

Tea is globally familiar as both a commodity and a ritual. Yet the lives, landscapes, and hands behind each cup rarely get the same visibility. Tea Topographies turns towards these overlooked stories. Throughout the exhibition, the tea flower appears as a recurring motif: delicate, quiet, and seldom associated with the finished cup. It becomes a symbol of hidden beauty, invisible labour and the human lives embedded within the landscape.

The flowers featured across the exhibition were handmade in Sri Lanka by two skilled artisans: Nazeera, a flower maker from Colombo with a disability, and Suramya, a crochet artisan from Kandy. Their craftsmanship brought delicacy, texture, and a deeply human dimension to Tea Topographies, honouring the hands, knowledge, and creative traditions behind every detail.