Wearable Art: The Prints Inspired by Paintings

Some prints decorate a shirt. Others turn it into a canvas. Our Artistic edit is the second kind — prints drawn the way paintings are made: brushstrokes, sketch lines, painted landscapes and gallery-worthy compositions, printed onto breathable cotton and cut into clothes you can actually live in. This is the story of wearable art, and how to wear it.

Where these prints come from

Every print at The Print Factory starts as an artwork on a screen or a sketchbook page — drawn in-house, approved by hand, and printed on our own machines. The Artistic edit is where our designers go furthest: a dress that borrows the swirling energy of post-impressionist skies (Vincent's Vision makes no secret of its muse), shirts that carry hand-sketched cityscapes and botanical illustrations, prints that look painted rather than patterned. Because digital printing gives us sixteen million colours and no screens (we explain the machinery in this guide), an artwork loses nothing on its way from sketch to sleeve.

How to wear a print that talks

The rule for statement prints is generosity: give them room. An art print needs solid, quiet companions — white trousers, black cigarette pants, plain denim — and accessories chosen from colours already inside the print. One painted piece per outfit; let it be the exhibition. Gallery openings, dinners, days when you'd like a stranger to ask "where is that from?" — this is the drawer you open.

Art that survives the wash

A painted print is only as good as its permanence — nobody frames a watercolour in the rain. Every Artistic piece carries the same anti-bleed, anti-peel, anti-shrink promise as the rest of the range, lab-tested before a metre is cut, and expected to stay vivid past 200 washes. The art does not crack at the fold or fade at the shoulder; that is the whole point of owning the factory.

Start your collection

The full edit lives in the Artistic collection — shirts, dresses and co-ords, sizes S to 2XL, with new artworks landing in the Friday 5 through the season. Free shipping across India, COD and 7-day returns. And fittingly, our first store stands in the middle of Mumbai's art district — see the prints up close at the Kala Ghoda Experience Centre, a few lanes from the Jehangir Art Gallery.

Read next: Schiffli & Hakoba in India: The Definitive Guide — when the art is stitched instead of printed.