Archives for May 2023

Moving from New York City to the remote mountain villages of southwest China was a real culture shock for me, but not for the reasons one would expect. It was the first time I heard plants talking to me, felt fairies hiding behind bushes, and drank fresh water gushing out from a hole in the mountain. Weird things happen when one lives so deep in nature.

I was there to develop my womenswear collection, but Nature had some hard lessons to teach me if I was to successfully produce my collection on her turf. How I had been trained to design clothes in the fashion industry simply did not work in the forest. These are the lessons that turned me from a polluting designer into a zero-carbon one.

Lesson 1: Forget everything I know

The first thing I had to do was forget everything I knew as a fashion designer in New York.

Producing fabric in any color at any time of year was not possible in nature. There were no sewing supply stores, and ordering anything online took 2-3 weeks to arrive. What made life so efficient in the city did not apply in the mountains. We would have to make with our own bare hands whatever was needed.

I had to let go of any expectations and learn to become self-sufficient. Nature would become my teacher. 

Lesson 2: Man-made vs. Real time

The ancient Greeks had two words for time: “kronos” and “kairos”. Kronos is the structured time of clocks and calendars. Kairos is spiritual time that cannot be controlled or organized. Our lives today are dominated by kronos, or what I refer to as man-made time. We schedule our days according to the hours and minutes of a mechanical clock.

Electricity and light bulbs have allowed us to alter nature’s clock – making us less reliant on the sun and climate to dictate our sense of time. We no longer wake up at sunrise, follow the cycles of the moon, or eat our food in-season. Building our lives and cities around this articial sense of time has shifted our circadian rhythm and internal imbalance with nature. We need to allow our bodies to synchronize back with nature’s timing, and reconnect with kairos — what I now call real time. 

Lesson 3: Follow nature’s timing

Living in the mountains requires slowing down our internal concept of time. Patience is required in adjusting our mind and body to the pace of nature. 

We can observe how silk worms are raised between April and June when the leaves of mulberry trees are available to feed to the worms. In May, the fresh fallen petals of buddleia flowers can be gathered from the forest floor to create a soft yellow dye.

Rushing the process and foraging out of season is not only difficult for us, it also causes stress on the local environment — like nature’s way of teling us to slow down. We see this environmental stress at the macro level when nature cannot break down toxic wastewater at the same rate fast fashion production is dumping it into rivers and oceans. We must follow nature’s timing and only produce at the rate that the environment can recycle or decompose of the waste.

Lesson 4: Electricity

Our village of Tang’an has only had electricity since 1994. The villagers continue to lead a traditional agrarian lifestyle that is powered by sunlight, firewood, water buffalo, and their own hands. When the electricity stops for several days following a rainstorm, life can continues as normal for the villagers. This is why my collection is made without electricity. 

I realized how dependent we Americans are on electric power source run by fossil fuels. Electricity has only been around for the last 150 years, but is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States. There are many ways we can adjust our lives to use less electricity inside our own homes and businesses. Our ancestors were able to live and thrive without it, so we can too! 

Lesson 5: Slow can be strong

For one week, I kept tabs on a spider making a web outside my window sill. Watching it drag one small strand at a time was so slow; it felt painful for me to watch. It seemed like so much effort for something I could easily wipe away in an instant.

One night, there was a powerful thunderstorm that knocked out the electricity in the village, blew the shingles off my roof, and dumped rainwater all over my bedroom floor. Fallen tree branches were strewn all over the property grounds. So I was surprised to find my spider’s web unharmed the next morning. It managed to survive the storm perfectly intact. 

When I looked beyond the window sill and out onto our tea farm, I noticed that all the bushes were covered with spider webs. The raindrops hanging from them glistened in the sun like chandeliers. They had all survived the storm!

That day I learned that slow production can also mean strength, tenacity, and longevity. The spider web showed me that slow can be strong. 

Lesson 6: Nature ages gracefully

Nothing is disposable in nature. Things may change form or purpose, but their role is never less important than how they were used last.

Plant-dyed textiles develop an aged patina that becomes more beautiful over time. By contrast, man-made items look worn and old after being used; they lose value and aesthetic appeal they more they are used.

When something is crafted directly from nature, it can age gracefully like a fine wine.

Lesson 7: Produce less

We need to produce less stuff.

When the coronavirus halted factory production across China for 2 months, satellite images from space showed reduced pollution in the sky. Global carbon emissions also dropped significantly. This is the power of producing less. 

In the mountains, growing and making everything one neeeds to survive is a time-consuming endeavor. Vegetables take 4 months. Clothes take 6 onths. Raising pigs take 2 years. Growing trees to build a house takes at least 7 years. 

After all that time and effort invested, you would not want to throw it away after just one use. Rather, you would try to make it last, fix it when it’s broken, and use it for as long as possible. You would make just enough for what you need, thereby conserving both your energy and nature’s resources at the same time.

Lesson 8: Consume less

Instead, they greenwash with stories about their sustainability efforts and biodegradable materials to convince you to buy even more. This ends up polluting more because everything that is purchased eventually ends up in a landfill. 

Buying less stuff is the fastest, cheapest, and easiest solution to reducing fashion pollution. But fashion brands do not tell you this. Americans now own 3x as much clothing as their parents had, most of which is not even worn. Each person throws out on average 81 lbs. of clothing each year, which means that one garbage truckful goes to landfill every second! 

We all need to stop consuming so much and think consciously about what we purchase. We begin by following these simple rules: 

1) Buy only what you love. 
2) Buy higher quality so it lasts longer. 
3) Wear it every day like a uniform. 

By us buying less, big brands respond by producing less — leading to less fashion pollution. Let’s all be a part of the solution and start voting with our wallets.

Lesson 9: Craftsmanship & the hand

Craftsmanship and the ability to use tools with our hands is what separates us from other animals in the forest. It is human for us to want to make things with our own hands. That’s why we find it so relaxing and satisfying. It is returning to our true human nature. 

Over time, we have forgotten the skills needed to make things with our hands. So as consumers, we are disconnected from the things we buy. Since we did not make it ourselves or know the maker, the object has no meaning for us. So we throw it away with no remorse. The result is a disposable culture. 

Let’s learn to make things again. The most powerful thing we can do as humans is to re-learn these survival skills make things with our own hands. When we make something ourselves, we appreciate it, use it everyday, re-use it, and are less likely to throw it away immediately. I truly believe that hand-craftsmanship is the antidote to a disposable culture. 

Lesson 10: Indigenous Knowledge = Sustainable Future

Knowledge is quickly disappearing and time is running out. Of the 7000 languages spoken today, only half of them are being passed down to the next generation – and with it the accumulation of knowledge humans have amassed on how to live on this planet for tens of thousands of years. 

Our disconnect with nature has led to global climate change, widespread pollution, and the threat of 1 million species facing extinction. The planet has responded with hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and now a global pandemic — like a stern warning that nature can wipe us out in an instant if we don’t change our ways.

Indigenous knowledge can remind us how to live harmoniously with nature. Reviving our connection with nature will be the key to our future survival. 

We are in a global climate crisis. Our apparent disconnection with nature has led to extreme weather, widespread pollution, and the threat of mass extinction. Fashion, the clothing we wear on our bodies, contributes up to 10% of global carbon emissions, more than international travel and maritime shipping combined.

What if we followed a different path? What if we lived in a cleaner and more natural way? What if…we chose to live a zero-carbon future?

My collection ANGEL CHANG proposes a new way of making clothing – one made directly from the earth with a zero carbon footprint.

Unlike conventional clothing today, our clothing is made without the use of electricity, plastics, chemicals, or fossil fuels. It is handmade from seed to button using just three ingredients: sun, plants, and mountain water.

This is how humans made clothing for 20,000 years; only recently have we forgotten how to make clothing in this sustainable manner. Pockets of indigenous artisans around the world have kept these ancient techniques alive, despite pressure to assimilate into the dominant cultures. They have made the collection you are viewing today, but their know-how is quickly disappearing.

It is time for us to reconnect with the earth and re-learn these traditional methods that are healthier for ourselves and the planet. By reviving traditional craftsmanship and indigenous knowledge, we can find solutions for solving climate change and ensure our survival and that of future generations.

ZERO CARBON DESIGN

The pieces in this collection were made following my zero-carbon design philosophy built on three core tenets:

1) No electricity

Conventional clothing today is made in factories powered by fos- sil-fuel energy. Until renewable energy is readily available, our best option is to not use electricity at all.

Each ANGEL CHANG piece is 100% handmade – from growing the cotton seed to spinning, weaving, dyeing, and sewing. No machine is used in the process. Even the buttons and button-holes are sewn entirely by hand. This is how clothing was made until 200 years ago, before the invention of electricity and rise of the Industrial Revolution.

For the artisans, their remote mountain villages only received elec- tricity 25 years ago so they are not dependent on it and practice their traditional way of living sustainably with the earth. Sunlight is our light source and everything is hand-crafted outdoors. The climate and weather determine the speed at which the fabric is produced.

Making clothing this way can only be done using traditional craftsmanship, as it has been practiced for thousands of years. This is ancient couture.

2) All natural

Most clothing today is made from polyester, a plastic fiber made from oil-derived petroleum which is a fossil fuel. The chemical dyes and fabric finishes create toxic wastewater that pollute rivers and oceans. By contrast, our clothing is not made with any of these.

Our collection is made only from what nature provides and from what is seasonal. We grow the raw materials to make our clothing entirely from scratch, based on a farming and harvesting calendar dictated by nature.

Native-seed cotton is grown organically on family farms. It is unprocessed so it feels the same as when plucked fresh from the field. Boiled leaves for dyeing are food-grade and do not harm the local groundwater; in fact, they can be drunk as an herbal tea. These medicinal plant dyes like native indigo and wild gardenia create a soothing experience when worn on your skin.

These pieces feel alive, evolve as they age, and become more beautiful over time.

3) Locally made

Unlike conventional clothing that travels around the world to be made, our collection is made within a 30-mile radius – using local- ly-grown raw materials that nature provides abundantly for free.

All the fibers, plants, and materials are grown on the land or for- aged in the surrounding mountain forest. The entire process from seed to button is done without traveling outside of one location. It’s like growing a garden to make a salad in one’s backyard.

This hyper-vertical and local approach is how clothing and objects were made throughout human history. There is no reason clothing must travel around the world to be made. We can simply design it using materials and labor found in one location.

RE-INDIGENIZING OURSELVES

When I began this journey 10 years ago, I just wanted to make beau- tiful fabrics. I did not intend to be a “sustainable designer,” nor did I know what “indigenous knowledge” or “craftsmanship” truly meant. I felt the world did not need another fashion designer, and so I did not rush to finish this collection.

But by living in the ethnic minority villages and following their tradi- tional way of life, I learned an entirely new way of living that was in harmony with the earth. I saw how sustainability and craftsmanship are not the starting point, but rather can be the final manifestation of one’s view of the world.

This is why we must change our mindset if we are to reduce our carbon emissions by 2030, 2050, and beyond. It is not simply buying vegan products or removing CO2 from the air. We have to change our entire approach to living and how we view our place in this world.

In my own journey, I learned how to speak Chinese fluently and discovered my ancestral roots for the first time. Connecting with these ancestors helped me create the collection you see today.

I believe we can all take similar steps to re-indigenize ourselves and revive the traditional ways of sustainable living that our ancestors practiced in the past.

Ask your parents and grandparents how they lived in the past, and the recipes and stories they have of the generations before them. By learn- ing from our elders, we can incorporate these traditional approaches into our own lives. And together step into a zero-carbon future.

Total Time to make each piece:

Growing cotton:  4 months
Preparing cotton:  3 days
Hand-spinning:  5 days
Setting up loom:  1 week
Hand-weaving:  3-5 days
Finishing fabric:  3 days
Dyeing fabric:  2-14 days
Cutting fabric:  1 day
Sewing:  3-9 days
Washing:  2 days

Total time to make each piece:  5-6 months

———

Timeline of seed-to-garment”

JANUARY Waiting for spring

FEBRUARY Waiting for spring

MARCH Germinate cotton seeds

APRIL Plant cotton seeds 
Raise silk worms

MAY Grow cotton 
Feed silk worms

JUNE Grow cotton 
Feed silk worms

JULY Grow cotton 
Boil silk cocoons 

AUGUST Harvest cotton bolls 
Spin cotton into yarn 
Spin silk into yarn 

SEPTEMBER Set-up yarn on handloom 
Weave fabric 
Harvest indigo leaves 
Create indigo dye vat 
Collect red soil

OCTOBER Weave fabric 
Wash and cook fabric 
Dye fabric in indigo dye 
Dye fabric with red soil 
Beat fabric 

NOVEMBER Cut & sew clothes 
Make hand-knot buttons 
Embroider labels

DECEMBER Garment finished

——

How an ANGEL CHANG shirt compares to conventional clothing:

Carbon footprint (cradle to gate): ⠀⠀⠀⠀
ANGEL CHANG Anti T-shirt = 0.4 kg of CO2e⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Average cotton t-shirt = 2.1 kg of CO2e⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Average polyester t-shirt = 5.5 kg of CO2e

Electricity used: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
ANGEL CHANG Anti T-shirt = none ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Average cotton t-shirt = 1.808 kWh

Chemical pesticides used: ⠀⠀⠀⠀
ANGEL CHANG Anti T-shirt = none ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Average cotton t-shirt = 0.3 lbs

Water used:⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
ANGEL CHANG Anti T-shirt = 12 liters + rainfall ⠀
Average cotton t-shirt = 2700 liters

Traveled around the world (cradle to gate):⠀
ANGEL CHANG Anti T-shirt = 30 miles ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Average cotton t-shirt = 10,000 miles

Amount paid to garment workers (of retail price):⠀
ANGEL CHANG Anti T-shirt = 25%⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Average cotton t-shirt = 3%

For shipping to the U.S., we pay offsets for our carbon emissions through Climate Neutral.

We are Climate Neutral Certified, meaning we’ve measured and removed all of our carbon  emissions from making and delivering products.  

So while we consumers in the US buy cheap products that are Made in China; the Chinese seek out wearing clothes that depict the American lifestyle. It’s a weird economic and cultural dependency. And the financial dependency of migrant workers to make those cheap products for Americans is what is contributing to their own loss of traditional culture. When we buy Made in China, not only are we taking jobs away from American domestic production, we are also luring the Chinese, both Han and ethnic minorities, away from continuing their own traditional culture. 

During my first trip to Guizhou, it seemed obvious that the solution to this was to create jobs in the countryside and pay the villagers the same, if not more, than what the coastal factories were offering them every month. My competition wasn’t other brands, it was the coastal factories that were luring this young work fore away from their villages. The trade-off would be that they could stay in their own village, take care of their kids, be able to watch the grandparents, live at home and not in a factory dorm with bad living conditions, and have health insurance and government benefits that they can only receive by living in their own houkou (?). They would be healthier, happier, and would continue their traditional culture. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, of course they would prefer it!  

I would need to create the demand for their fabrics and embroideries in order for this to work. After speaking to Chinese fashion editors and store buyers in the cities, it was clear that it was too early for China to accept hand-made goods from rural ethnic minorities in the countryside. It was too close to home for them, and hand-made was too familiar to their own poverty of just a few decades ago. They would certainly buy them if they were cheap, but hand-made crafted items are actually expensive if you are hiring others to produce it for you. In France, crafting a hand-made garment is given the esteemed distinction of haute couture. In China, the perceptions is that the makers are so poor that they had to hand-make it themselves. 

So I would have to develop demand for their fabrics in the West where hand-crafted items were more valued and respected. For the Europeans, they still live on the land of their ancestors and have a history of craftsmanship and luxury brands have used it as part of their DNA. For Americans, the land of immigrants, their appreciation for craftsmanship is due to a lack of traditional culture, as the country is so young and still in the process of forming a distinct one that will last the test of time. 

The only indigenous groups that could link the country to the land are Native Americans, but encounters with these groups in the big cities are rare, as they had been moved to reservations a hundred years ago (fact-check year). Perhaps it is this nationwide guilt of what the American government had done to the Native Americans in the past that paints our generation’s respect for these tribes today. There is a general sense of fascination for these native cultures that were once part of our history but are now hard for the average American to find. Perhaps it is because we destroyed our own ethnic minorities in the past that we know what the consequences are and are now trying to support them. And perhaps it is only after it is all destroyed that China will, like Americans today, finally come to respect their own ethnic minority culture. 

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It was not until 3 years later when I finally did meet a 16-year old girl and was fluent enough in Chinese to ask about her ambitions. After her grandmother showed us a traditional silk costume she had handwoven and made by herself, which the curious young girl was seeing for the first time in her life, I asked if this was something she would be interested in learning. Her response was a definite “yes!” — if she could get paid for it, and would open up a workshop to produce my orders. Even in a small remote village, she reflected the optimistic entrepreneurial mindset that dominates modern China – a country where 50% of young girls say they want to grow up to be an entrepreneur. 

If I was to get any fabric made, it was clear that I’d have to find a way to motivate these young teenagers to start learning the techniques from their parents. But once I started sketching, getting them excited my designs took no effort at all. Like so many girls around the word, fashion and clothing got them excited. It was clear that the way to get them motivated about weaving their grandmothers’ traditional cloth was through the lens of modern fashion. 

At what point do we draw the line between real craftsmanship and faux craftsmanship? Real artisanal and fake artisanal for marketing purposes? And does it even matter? 

I would argue certainly yes, especially if there is cultural appropriation involved as has been the case with the Maasaii tribes in Kenya (site source), whose beaded costumes and image are often used as inspiration by fashion brands. To site the people of inspiration is not enough. J. Crew went directly to copying a Miao textile as a scarf, largely unnoticed and with no mention of the tribe that made it (website). Each time a native print or technique is taken without crediting its source is taking a symbolic piece that has been developed over many generations and put on display, in a cheap reproduction if it’s digitally/mass-produced, and judged by a crowd of outsiders who have no connection to what they are looking at and must only appreciate it for its aesthetic purposes. All the knowledge that it carries is lost, and it is reduced to a simple scarf sold on a website for $49 (find exact price and webpage).  By copying an indigenous textile and not engaging with the tribes that make it is a big mistake for fashion and apparel brands – not only for legal and ethical reasons, but because it misses big opportunities for meaningful and rewarding collaborations – the kind that the public is actually craving right now. 

Most Western media tend to focus on China’s economic advancement and newfound wealth, overlooking the other side of China — its poor countryside where people still live on less than $2 a day (fact-check this). As there are few jobs in the villages, they travel to the big cites and coastal factories to become migrant workers for most of the year. The money they make there is sent back to their families in the villages — their parents, their children, for their schooling and to build houses. 

Without global demand for “Made in China” products, these village families would not be able to improve their lives. Already, their livelihood has improved significantly. Talk to any grandmother, and she’ll tell you how hard life used to be, how they made their own shoes because they couldn’t afford to buy any. Their life already seems difficult now, with all the farming and manual labor they must do just to survive; I can’t imagine what life must have been like before — to be so poor, that you didn’t have food to eat. 

 So this is why they find it funny that I am requesting them to make hand-made fabrics for me. For them, it is what they made because they couldn’t afford to buy it at the market. 

 Today, the average factory worker in China receives 3000 RMB ($463 USD) per month, which does not seem like much from a Western standard of living. But for those in rural China, this amount is enough to raise a family and build their home with, and it could go on for 10 years like this. And this is the reason why the craft has been dyeing out in China, because just 30 years ago (fact-check), the rest of China was also very poor. Until 19XX (find year), everyone was making the same amount of money, $50 USD per month, no matter how much or how little one worked. Everyone in China was poor then, and they can remember growing up with their mother making fabric for them in the home. In just XX years (fact-check), this has all since disappeared in China except in remote places like Guizhou.  

So the real need in these villages is that they need local employments. While garment industry workers have lost their jobs to migrant factory workers in China in recent decades, isn’t it ironic that those Chinese migrant workers also can’t find jobs in their home villages. The sacrifices they make, to leave their family and become a migrant worker in a Chinese coastal factory, are correlated to the insatiable demands for cheaply-made fast fashion apparel by the American market. 

Between the years 2000 – 2010 (fact-check with NY Times article), 300 villages were being destroyed per day. This is the first year, not just in China but globally, that more people are living in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, 50 million (fact-check) or XX% will have moved from the countryside to the cities of China. Shouldn’t this be considered progress that the country is improving the livelihood of so many people?  Well, it depends on what you define as “progress”. This is not only happening in China, it is the plight of indigenous people and ethnic minorities around the world.  

Our modern global society has become so removed from respecting nature that we are now experiencing the devastating consequences with global warming and climate change. More extreme weather patterns, floods, and hurricanes are just the topical symptom of the damage the last two centuries of human development has done to the Earth. (Find exact year)

I would argue that pulling so many people off the land that their ancestors inhabited for centuries destroys culture and the soul of a people. They may not realize this in the beginning, but it starts to settle in when they, like me, or any Chinese-American whose parents immigrated to the U.S., is looking for their own identity. It was only after I started going to China, the land of my ancestors, that I started to understand the importance of respecting nature. Until then, I was never interested in environmental sustainability. I thought it was a luxury, an aspirational lifestyle that, despite its good intentions, was expensive to maintain. But now I know what was missing in this equation. 

The conveniences of modern city life warped space and time out of context for me, so I did not have a real sense of real timing, that is, nature’s timing that is slow and requires patience — not human-made artificial timing where everything is fast and strictly regimented.  

I did not really understand what it meant to eat in-season and local. In New York, it seemed like a novel concept that one could try out, but nobody really adhered to it strictly. Restricted access to seasonal foods certainly did not exist for us. Pineapples and Fuji water were shipped year-round to the local Whole Foods, and Amazon Prime gave the false sense that everything we ordered online had come from a magic portal next door. 

I did not know that it was possible to live without all this outside stuff, and that to do so could even be healthier — if not for the body, then certainly for clearing the mind. When I go to the grocery store and see 50 bottles of ketchup, the paradox of choice sets in and I end up not choosing any because I am so confused. 

After studying the entire fabric- and garment-making process, I realized that anything that is hand-made in these villages exists for a good reason. Nothing is made in excess; everything has a purpose. 

Traditional baby carriers, for example, are very simple: a rectangular piece of fabric with two 2-meter long strips of cloth.  These strips wrap over the mother’s shoulders, across her chest, and around her back to support the baby’s behind, before returning to the front where it is tied in a bow. The child is swaddled in, what is essentially, a baby back-pack that frees the mother’s arms so she can work in the fields at the same time — making it the ultimate working-mother accessory. Being able to feel the mother’s heartbeat while being carried on her back is soothing and comforts the baby. When the baby is tired, it can just fall asleep and hang limply in the carrier while the mother goes about her day. As strollers are not used here in these hilly mountains, a mother will a baby on her back every day until the child can walk on its own. 

The traditional costume varies across the different tribes and villages, but they all seem to follow the same silhouette. A woman’s consists of a long-sleeve jacket, pleated skirt, and fabric wrapped around the legs like leg-warmers. The jacket can either have a robe collar (name?) that closes with a belt, or a mandarin color with an asymmetrical opening.  These days, they may wear store-bought blue jeans or black leggings under their skirts for warmth and protection, and a turtleneck or button-down shirt to wear under their jackets.

The men’s traditional costume consist of either a short long-sleeve jacket with mandarin collar, or a maxi version that reaches the floor. The front opening is either asymmetrical like the women’s jacket or falls straight down the front with frog closures. They are a dark solid indigo color and not as visually impressive as the women’s costumes, but they are still elegant in their own way.  

Clothing is, at its core, a second skin that we wear for physical protection. We forget this when we live in the city and most of our time indoors in a climate-controlled environment. The proliferation of fashion trends seem to keep us more entertained than actually make us feel safer. But in nature, what one wears on the body is a protective barrier with the outside world. So that when an indigo-dyed outfits is naturally anti-microbial and insect-repellent, it is comfortable to wear when working out in the fields all day. 

The natural fiber of the traditional costumes, whether it’s cotton, hemp, or ramie, are comfortable to wear and allow the skin to breathe in the hot and humid summers. Contrast this with the synthetic fiber clothing that are a plastic barrier on the skin and make one sweat in the heat. When the younger generation brings back synthetic fiber clothing back from the cities to give the grandparents to wear, the grandparents oftentimes complain of allergic reactions caused by the fabric’s chemical dyes and finishes. 

Natural fibers are also insulating and more thermo-regulating than synthetic fabrics. When there is no central heating indoors, wearing warm clothing is imperative to surviving the cold winter months. 

The only benefit that the villagers feel synthetic fibers have over natural fibers is their more color-fastness and durability when worn in the fields. Personally, I would rather own a jacket that ages beautifully over time. But for the villagers, they see modern synthetic fabrics as “progress” because this is what the Han Chinese in the big cities wear — who, in turn, wear it because it is a reference to Western culture and, more specifically, American style. It does not escape me that the proliferation of American fashion globally is correlated to the disappearance of ethnic minority traditional culture on the other side of the world. 

The current state of fashion

As consumers, we rarely think of the person who makes our clothes. Most of the products we buy are made by machines, and any human intervention is masked by the industrial materials and standardized assembly. The final product is devoid of any human element, and even more so because the maker, the factory, and its exact origin are hidden from public view by the brands that make them. 

As a fashion designer working for brands in New York, Paris and Milan, I never knew who produced my fabric or where the raw materials came from. If I really wanted to find out, it would require a lot of effort and detective work on my part to communicate with the textile mills and their suppliers. I did not know the women (and they are usually women) who sewed my designs that later ended up in the stores. My job was just to choose from the endless supply of fabrics out in the market, and turn them into a style that captured the mood of the times. There was no time for further investigation, nor any interest in it at the time. 

I now realize that not knowing the maker leaves out the majority (80%?) of a clothing’s story. The design is just the last stage of a garment’s life before it reaches the consumer, but somehow it gets all the public’s attention. 

I believe this disconnect with the production process has made fashion very superficial, and those working in the industry oftentimes unhappy because of it. Designers must create at such fast rates these days that products lack meaning. Aside from looking good, they lack purpose and do not really need to exist — hence, the products become victims of disposable fashion. 

Current design trends are quickly forgotten for next season’s new styles which are artificially into the market — through runway shows, fashion magazines, advertising campaigns, social media, blogs — by the entire fashion industry to get consumers to spend their money. Before 1990 (fact-check), the fashion industry offered four collections/seasons per year; today, fast fashion brands have increased this to up to 22 collections/seasons per year. This is not sustainable long-term, neither for the environment nor for consumer psyche. A recent study on fast fashion discovered that consumers were actually more depressed, not happier, after going on a shopping binge. (Site Greenpeace study). 

We have reached a saturation point on how much clothes we need in our closet — 30% of which we don’t even wear (fact-check). Americans now throw away 68 lbs. (fact-check) of clothing per year, much of it of such low-quality that, if it isn’t thrown into landfill, is now being rejected by second-hand markets in Africa because there is too much of it in the market to sell. (Site article)

There is no reason why the fashion industry needs to produce so many clothes, and why we consumers need to buy so much of it. It is excessive, polluting to the environment, and does not make us happy. It just puts us into a cycle of buying more things of lower quality, and constantly having to replace them because they do not last. Shopping may excite us in the short term, but it does not make us happy in the long run. (Site: Greenpeace study)

But to blame the fashion industry and modern apparel production is not entirely accurate. Fashion is a non-verbal communicator, and clothing is just a visual symptom of a much deeper societal problem. Fashion is superficial only because we as an industry have solely focused on its visual aspects.

We live in world where everything is topical and instant today. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. WeChat. Texting. News alerts pinging our smart phones and Apple watches. Digital communication today gives us access to anyone, anything, and anywhere immediately. We are constantly being bombarded with an overload of information which we have to sift through and respond to immediately in return. Whether we choose to engage in it or not, we are all affected by this onslaught of information. This is the world we live in today. 

Even in the remote rural villages in Guizhou, the villagers all had cell phones before getting running water into their homes three years ago. WeChat texting and voice messages enabled them to communicate with me in real-time in the U.S., at any time of day. Calling me on the other side of the world cost them the same as calling their grandmother in the fields. Time and geographic location have been collapsed with digital communication, as has our expectations for how quickly we respond to those who reach us through it.

 Fashion is superficial only because we as an industry have chosen to focus only on its visual aspects. Knowing the entire process, from the seed to the final hand-finishing location gives more breadth and meaning to the final product. It gives the  the product a soul, and the designer a sense of purpose.

When it came to designing my own collection, I had to take this all into account: the history, the production process, the farming calendar, the use and purpose, the human element, and finally how it would be perceived by the public. I had studied the entire process over 5 years and developed a network of relationships with 200 artisans across 30 villages — all of whom I met by knocking on doors and walking around their village. Despite all the cell phone communication, face-to-face is still the only way to get anything done in these villages. 

INSERT BELOW SPIRITUAL TEXTILES TEXT

Clothes must have meaning

So when I think of fabrics with meaning, I think of these baby carriers that are each hand-embroidered by their mothers and serve as a symbolic link, an extension of the umbilical cord, to show the connection between mother and child. 

When I imagine clothing with a purpose, I think of this traditional baby jacket by the Dong people, covered with auspicious symbols meant to protect the baby from sickness caused by the surrounding spirits as it grows up. Or this baby jacket by the Gejia people, whose costumes explain the creation of their people and the various symbols of rice, soybeans, frogs, chickens, paths, to talk about their daily life. 

As one grows up, each person makes their own traditional costume, which is like a uniform that identifies that person to the village where they come from. It is what ties them to their home. Mothers teach their daughters the intricate dye and weaving techniques. These young women then grow up to make clothes for themselves and their children.

Even as one ages, one continues to make fabric, like this 72-year old grandmother here, who is weaving fabric for her funeral. It is a Dong custom for her children to wear handwoven fabric on their heads during her funeral, and on this day, she explained, that she is weaving the fabric so her children so spare them the burden of having to hand-weave it themselves. 

And I think of the other village elders, like the shamin who is the last of his generation to practice witchcraft, to know the local plants to make herbal medicines to cure sicknesses, and to assign the right time for planting seeds, and important dates based on your birth chart. Or the ghost master makes amulets from rice, prayers and incantations to ward off evil spirits so you feel protected in your home. Like the traditional fabrics, all of this knowledge is disappearing now because of a young generation that no longer believe in it, is not picking it up and not continuing it, is told that their way of life is “poor” and “backwards” and feel pressure to be more like those in the city, which, for China, means to be more like us Westerners. 

And so now in just one generation, we are losing their sustainable way of living in favor of machine-made, chemical-dyed fabrics in a market where a low retail price matters more than the meaning imbedded in a garment. In just one generation, the tradition of making the Miao and Dong costumes will be lost, and the thousands of years of oral history and local plant knowledge that are embodied in each piece. 

So why does this matter, this connection with textiles and meaning? When we lose touch with the meaning and purpose of why we are creating objects, we end up over-producing things that are irrelevant, unnecessary, excessive, and finally, polluting. When we relinquish our hands from the make process and allow machines to take over hand-made production, our clothes become soulless, disposable, replaceable, meaningless to us. They do not make us feel protected nor loved. 

We’ve become so out of touch with the way our clothes are made that they have become disposable items devoid of meaning, and end up throwing it all away and into landfill. It’s why, in the last 20 years, since the emergence of fast fashion, that global production of clothing has increased 400%. We now own 3x as much clothing as our parents had, and fashion has become the 2nd largest polluter in the world, after oil, and the 2nd polluter of clean water after agriculture. 

We must remember that humans have clothed themselves for tens of thousands of years, and only in the last 100-150 years have we begun to wear machine-woven, machine-sewn, chemical-dyed, synthetic fabrics. We are part of the natural world. We still live in bodies that are better adapted to traditional conditions than to modern world. And so we must connect back to craftsmanship, to the hand-made, to really feel human.

Finally, all the parts are joined together by sewing — either by hand or with a foot pedal sewing machine. To wear a hand-sewn garment is a privilege I never experienced until I was introduced to it in Guizhou. The  imperfect hand-stitching gives the fabric a subtle volume that allows the seams to conform to your body. Wearing it gives one a comforting cozy feeling that machine-sewn clothing simply does not have. Sewing machines seem to flatten the hand-woven fabric, while hand-stitching makes the fabric come alive.  

Once all sewing is done by hand, choosing the stitching becomes an exciting way to customize the design and give it a finishing touch. There are several stitches that are unique to their traditional costumes and not used in Western clothing. We had to create a library of their stitches in different colors and thread widths, so I could design using the techniques they already knew. By using cotton thread, it can be dyed in any color or left in its natural white. 

Hand-sewing a garment certainly takes longer and is the reason why most of us have never experienced it in person. Whereas machine-sewing a pair of jeans in a factory takes 18 minutes (Source: To Die For), sewing it entirely by hand will takes 2.5 days. 

All the slight imperfections inherent in handiwork balance each other out gives the garment charm. The stitching looks imperfectly perfect. A machine-made stitch, on the other hand, is straight and always look perfect. The down side is that any mistake, like an uneven stitch or change in tension, is obvious and must be corrected or risk looking like a factory defect. 

Hand-sewing can also accomplish what sewing machines cannot — like threading through hundreds of hand-pleats or make frog button closures. Plastic button do not exist in nature, obviously, nor do metal hook-and-eyes, snaps, or zippers. Instead, the villagers carry on the ancient Chinese art of use of fabric to make hand-made buttons. They showed me how we could make them in different sizes, cut them shorter or longer, and dye them in different colors. It could all be customized, and we did not worry about buying them in bulk quantities and the minimum quantity constraints of the global trims market. 

Rather than be dependent on the supplier or trims store, we were self-sufficient craftsman free to create whatever we wanted. 

This did not feel like freedom in the beginning, however. I had to fly all of my trims with me in my suitcase. Trims are what hold a garment together and give it that finished look. However, there was no Garment District or craft stores to supply them for my clothing. Slowly, I had to learn how to design without conventional buttons and button-holes, without zippers, without ribbon, and without elastic. Designing without them explain why “ethnic” artisan clothing oftentimes consists of draw-string pants, wrap-tie belts, and loose silhouettes. On top of the time-consuming fabric-making and zero-waste construction, learning how to design without these industrialized trims was incredibly challenging for me.

No waste, use less

Ten percent of industrially-produced clothing is thrown away as waste in clothing factories (fact-check with To Die For stat). This is because the design of the garment is not created with the entire width of the fabric in mind. A pattern is created after a designer sketches out their vision, and so cutting fabric is the job of the pattern-maker — not the designer who may not even see this stage. There is a lot of talk about zero-waste design in the design schools now, but it always felt more like a theoretical rather than a real concept.

In Guizhou, this was of course different. Limited production means that every inch of fabric is used. The villager that has spent the entire year growing the cotton, weaving the fabric, dyeing and finishing it, is the same one that cuts it into the final garment.  It was this garment that she had in mind when she calculated how many cotton seedlings would first need to being planted. She knows exactly how much of her time was been spent creating the fabric, and makes sure none of it goes to waste.

Handwoven fabric is 38-40 cm wide, so all the garments are designed according to this restriction. Jackets, their sleeves, and pleated skirts are all cut using the entire width of the fabric, all the way to the selvedge. The remaining fabric scraps are used for making buttons, binding, or mending holes later on. It’s zero-waste pattern-cutting born out of real limitations. When so much time and effort is placed into making the fabric, you do not want to throw any of it away. 

For me, designing in this way using modern silhouettes took some adjusting to. I had been trained by the fashion industry to design clothing using 54” width machine-made fabric with no care for how much scrap material was left over. Using those patterns on my previous handwoven fabric now seemed excessive because of all the unused portions that would be thrown away. So I would have to design new silhouettes specifically to use the traditional narrow-width fabric in its entirety.

I studied the cut of the local traditional costumes and how they shaped their silhouettes using the narrow-width fabric. Everything was boxy, with very few curves, and done as a flat-pattern (not draped like in Western clothing). My favorite are the men’s pants of the Miao tribe in Biasha village. The front and back are the same, and the top is held by a belt with no zipper nor darts. It’s so simple. So I made a women’s version with a higher waistband, pockets, and side closure with frog buttons. (Insert pic) The pant leg width is the same as the width of the fabric, and there is very little waste. 

Designing with traditional handwoven fabrics is also challenging because the fabrics do not stretch. It never occurred to me before that stretch fabrics do not exist in nature. Or that natural fibers wrinkle — that’s how you know it’s 100% natural and not made from cheaper synthetic alternatives.  

Why does this matter? Because synthetic textiles like polyester and nylon are plastics made from petrochemicals that require a huge amount of fossil fuel energy to produce (site source).  They do not allow the skin to breathe, and they will not break down in landfills, where they ultimately end up. It requires 4x (fact check) more energy to produce than natural fibers, and the chemicals required to dye it contain cadmium, lead, chromium, and mercury (site source) that are cancer-causing to workers and the communities that come in contact with the toxic wastewater in rivers. 

In my first attempt at a t-shirt, I created a wide boxy shape cut down the center to accommodate the narrow-width fabric. The sleeves were the length of the width of the fabric, and a fabric frog closure was stitched in the back neckline. (Insert pic)

Choosing quality over quantity

After the fabric is dyed, it may undergo a finish to seal in the color and enhance its look and feel. Coating it with water-buffalo glue, a solution made by boiling the animal’s dried skin in water, makes the fabric stiffer and heavier.

The fabric is then hand-pounded with a large wooden mallet to seal the indigo crystals into the fibers and break them down to make them softer. This labor-intensive process takes 1 or 2 days of pounding, folding and flipping the fabric around until all sides are flattened evenly. If water-buffalo blue was used, the pounding will produce a matte sheen on the fabric if it is a flat weave. If it has woven traditional patterns, like the diamond, then the shapes will raise up like an embossment and become more pronounced. 

Egg-white is an alternative to the water buffalo glue and provides a shiny and water-resistant finish without adding weight. The first time I witnessed the Miao people in Biasha village using a chicken feather to apply the egg white to the fabric, it seemed so unusual for me. As an American, I was so used to being a consumer and buying things that my first instinct would have been to buy a paintbrush from an art store. But in the countryside, there were no stores to be found. A a chicken feather, after all, was free and could be found in one’s backyard. The concept that one could simply use whatever was readily available and did not cost anything was a real novelty for me. 

Stone calendaring can also create a smooth and shiny finish on cotton fabric. In the southern area of Guizhou in Nanlong village (?), the Buyi people rub a smooth stone, just large enough to be held with two hands, drags across the surface, back and forth several times, on the dark indigo-dyed fish-eye patterned fabric (confirm name of fabric). The result is a leather-like hand that makes the surface look like snakeskin, and is used as the base for their traditional jackets. The stone is passed down many generations within a family and, through its use over many decades, becomes smooth like jade on all sides. While their heirloom fabric-rubbing stone was too precious for them to sell, they told me I could find my own stone in the nearby river. I could find my perfect stone and pass it down one day to my grandkids in the future. Again, it wouldn’t cost me anything, and it felt meaningful. I would find my very own stone for making fabric. 

It was becoming obvious that the common thread throughout Guizhou was to use whatever was locally available in the natural environment. There was no need to buy anything from a store. If you needed something, just make it! Not only did this philosophy work in the countryside, this simplicity entered into my daily life in New York. Instead of buying things, I first looked in my home to see what could be used as an easy alternative. I felt more empowered to create my own experiences. By making something instead of buying it, I would have exactly what I needed for the exact that it required.  I felt more in control of the world around me because I was creating it myself.

As an American, this was certainly a novel concept for me since I was used to being buy any product, service, experience I wanted. This was even more extreme in New York, where “homemade” things are purchased from a store, farmer’s market, or restaurant where, other people make it for you — certainly not something you waste your precious city time doing yourself.  

Going back to design basics meant going back to lifestyle basics, dealing with people, and how I approached the world around me. Everything had to be stripped down to the essentials. Instead of searching all over the internet to buy the perfect item in a sea of choices, I adopted a new philosophy: work with what you have, and make it stronger, better. Make the things around you work for what you need to do. There is often no need to buy new things. Through your own creative effort, you can make whatever you desire from the things you already have.

——

Add that waterproof DWR finishes in outerwear is carcinogenic

Chemicals when dumped into rivers creates a toxic soup that is harmful to wildlife, the soil, and drinking water

The climate in Guizhou may be considered mild, but the humidity exaggerates the hot temperatures in the summer and hits your bones with cold moist air in the winter. While it rarely snows, the winters are still painfully cold because there is no central heating anywhere. If it is 40 degrees outside, it is also 40 degrees inside. There is no relief from the cold except to bundle up and keep active. If you’re not lucky enough to sit around a small coal or wood-burning fire in the middle of the room, then you’re moving around trying to keep yourself warm.

We Americans take for granted that every building we enter in a big city is air-condition in the summer or heated during the winter, so we are always in a 72 degree climate-controlled environment. While we can escape the cold and take our jackets off once we go indoors, the ethnic minority villagers must keep their winter jackets on all day and night long. The cold is especially painful when exiting a hot shower or getting out of a warm bed in the morning. But once one gets used to it, the fresh cold air can make one feel alive and purified in an almost masochistic way. 

While there are four seasons per year, the Dong calendar breaks this further into 21 (24?) predications in the farming calendar, each spanning two weeks. It’s easy to doubt the change in climate every two weeks, but our Dong minority dyer Lai Lei showed us these subtle changes in the climate in the color of the indigo-dyed cloth. In the winter, the dye hardly picks up on the fabric and instead creates delicate jagged lines from the frost that collects on the fabric’s surface. As the temperature warms up, the indigo leaves more color on the cotton until the end of the summer (or fall?) when it is darkest and the fabric takes more of the dye. Depending on what time of the year the fabric is dyed, it will achieve a different shade of indigo. 

Dyeing other colors happens outdoors during the warmer months of spring and summer when the plants for dyeing are fresh and can be foraged from the mountain forests. Embroidery is done during the winter time indoors when there is less farming activity to do and more free time.

After Chinese New Year in February, I can begin planning production for my collection. The weather starts warming up in March, and villagers germinate cotton seedlings in fire-heated plastic-covered greenhouses. By early April, they are then planted in rows on their land. Each villager is allocated 1 mu of land (about 1/2 acre?) by the government, on which they grow all their crops for the year, including the cotton and indigo that will be made for my fabrics. Families are also given land in the mountains for growing trees, which they use for building their homes. As traditional wooden house typically only lasts 30 years, trees are replanted so there is a future supply for rebuilding. When I asked if they wanted to renovate their home and make it bigger, the answer they gave was simple: wait 7 years for the trees to grow big enough to cut them down. 

It never occurred to me that one would have to wait, especially for a tree to grow so I could renovate my own home. In New York, I was accustomed to getting things immediately, at any time of day, and at anytime of the year. Nearly anything can be shipped these days no matter where it is around the world. But here in the mountains of Guizhou, I learned about the limitations of nature. In this region, it was too cool for fruit to grow in our village, so we rarely ate fruit. Chocolate, coffee, and olive oil were considered expensive foreign products in China, so they were rarely seen in the villages. We only ate what was grown locally, and during the season when it was available. 

Nature had its own timing, and if I wanted to make any fabric then I would have to follow its rules and produce according to the real seasons, not market-driven fashion seasons. In fact, I had to forget everything I learned working in the international fashion industry — whether one is working in New York, Paris, Italy, or even the coastal factories in China, global apparel production worked on an fast-paced cycle that is increasingly becoming harder to keep up. Being able to order any product, in any color, of any quantity, and have it ship at anytime of year simply did not work out here in nature. 

 In the beginning, I used to feel like I was going back in time, hundreds of years, whenever I entered Guizhou. But within a year, that notion flipped and I now it puts me more in touch with the real world. The ancient Greeks referred to this as chronos (measured time) and kairos (the right moment), or kala and ritu by the ancient Indians. The fast pace of modern life, particularly the hyper-speed with which our digital world is experiencing, feels artificial and man-made time in comparison.  Everything just takes longer in nature — what I now view more and more as real time.

Here in Guizhou province, I would have to learn how to design according to nature’s timing, and the villagers would serve as my teachers.

Seasons

The climate in Guizhou may be considered mild, but the humidity exaggerates the hot temperatures in the summer and hits your bones with cold moist air in the winter. While it rarely snows, the winters are still painfully cold because there is no central heating anywhere. If it is 40 degrees outside, it is also 40 degrees inside. There is no relief from the cold except to bundle up and keep active. If you’re not lucky enough to sit around a small coal or wood-burning fire in the middle of the room, then you’re moving around trying to keep yourself warm.

We Americans take for granted that every building we enter in a big city is air-condition in the summer or heated during the winter, so we are always in a 72 degree climate-controlled environment. While we can escape the cold and take our jackets off once we go indoors, the ethnic minority villagers must keep their winter jackets on all day and night long. The cold is especially painful when exiting a hot shower or getting out of a warm bed in the morning. But once one gets used to it, the fresh cold air can make one feel alive and purified in an almost masochistic way. 

While there are four seasons per year, the Dong calendar breaks this further into 21 (24?) predications in the farming calendar, each spanning two weeks. It’s easy to doubt the change in climate every two weeks, but our Dong minority dyer Lai Lei showed us these subtle changes in the climate in the color of the indigo-dyed cloth. In the winter, the dye hardly picks up on the fabric and instead creates delicate jagged lines from the frost that collects on the fabric’s surface. As the temperature warms up, the indigo leaves more color on the cotton until the end of the summer (or fall?) when it is darkest and the fabric takes more of the dye. Depending on what time of the year the fabric is dyed, it will achieve a different shade of indigo. 

Dyeing other colors happens outdoors during the warmer months of spring and summer when the plants for dyeing are fresh and can be foraged from the mountain forests. Embroidery is done during the winter time indoors when there is less farming activity to do and more free time.

After Chinese New Year in February, I can begin planning production for my collection. The weather starts warming up in March, and villagers germinate cotton seedlings in fire-heated plastic-covered greenhouses. By early April, they are then planted in rows on their land. Each villager is allocated 1 mu of land (about 1/2 acre?) by the government, on which they grow all their crops for the year, including the cotton and indigo that will be made for my fabrics. Families are also given land in the mountains for growing trees, which they use for building their homes. As traditional wooden house typically only lasts 30 years, trees are replanted so there is a future supply for rebuilding. When I asked if they wanted to renovate their home and make it bigger, the answer they gave was simple: wait 7 years for the trees to grow big enough to cut them down. 

It never occurred to me that one would have to wait, especially for a tree to grow so I could renovate my own home. In New York, I was accustomed to getting things immediately, at any time of day, and at anytime of the year. Nearly anything can be shipped these days no matter where it is around the world. But here in the mountains of Guizhou, I learned about the limitations of nature. In this region, it was too cool for fruit to grow in our village, so we rarely ate fruit. Chocolate, coffee, and olive oil were considered expensive foreign products in China, so they were rarely seen in the villages. We only ate what was grown locally, and during the season when it was available. 

Nature had its own timing, and if I wanted to make any fabric then I would have to follow its rules and produce according to the real seasons, not market-driven fashion seasons. In fact, I had to forget everything I learned working in the international fashion industry — whether one is working in New York, Paris, Italy, or even the coastal factories in China, global apparel production worked on an fast-paced cycle that is increasingly becoming harder to keep up. Being able to order any product, in any color, of any quantity, and have it ship at anytime of year simply did not work out here in nature. 

 In the beginning, I used to feel like I was going back in time, hundreds of years, whenever I entered Guizhou. But within a year, that notion flipped and I now it puts me more in touch with the real world. The ancient Greeks referred to this as chronos (measured time) and kairos (the right moment), or kala and ritu by the ancient Indians. The fast pace of modern life, particularly the hyper-speed with which our digital world is experiencing, feels artificial and man-made time in comparison.  Everything just takes longer in nature — what I now view more and more as real time.

Here in Guizhou province, I would have to learn how to design according to nature’s timing, and the villagers would serve as my teachers.

Timeline of seed-to-garment

JANUARY Waiting for spring

FEBRUARY Waiting for spring

MARCH Germinate cotton seeds

APRIL Plant cotton seeds 

Raise silk worms

MAY Grow cotton 

Feed silk worms

JUNE Grow cotton 

Feed silk worms

JULY Grow cotton 

Boil silk cocoons 

AUGUST Harvest cotton bolls 

Spin cotton into yarn 

Spin silk into yarn 

SEPTEMBER Set-up yarn on handloom 

Weave fabric 

Harvest indigo leaves 

Create indigo dye vat 

Collect red soil

OCTOBER Weave fabric 

Wash and cook fabric 

Dye fabric in indigo dye 

Dye fabric with red soil 

Beat fabric 

NOVEMBER Cut & sew clothes 

Make hand-knot buttons 

Embroider labels

DECEMBER Garment finished

Choosing quality over quantity

Once the fabric is woven, it is time to to dye it into different colors. These native materials for dyeing generally come from every part of the plant: leaves (indigo, black), flowers (mauve, soft yellow), roots (pink), fruits (golden yellow), vegetables (brown), tree bark (grey, rust red), and minerals (black, bright hues). Like cooking, each family has a different method of dyeing and finishing their fabric and some are regarded as secrets that are only passed down from parent to child. This makes documenting the dye recipes difficult, since the knowledge is not being continued by the younger generation. 

The advantage of powder chemical dyes is that they are faster and easier to use than foraging for wild plants in the forest. It is like buying ground-up spices at the grocery store instead of picking fresh herbs out of the ground each time you want to make dinner. They also create colors that are more saturated and color-fast than natural plant dyes. Chemical dyes are cheaper and easier to trade than natural dyes, and it is for this convenience why their invention in the late-19^th century wiped out the use of plant dyes in __ decades between years the 1870 – 1900? (Fact check in Indigo book).   

 One can tell when a traditional costume uses chemical dyes because the embroidery colors jump out in bright, often garish ways. It does not have the same faded patina that makes plant-dyed cloth more beautiful with age. When natural plants are used, the colors also seem to match better. Colors rarely seem to clash in nature. They always seem to work in harmony with each other. 

Chemical dyes can also cause allergic reactions. While we have been wearing them for 150 years, we are not so clear on the long-term effects of wearing them on our skin. Compare that with natural plant dyes that have been in used in China for at least 5,000 years alongside traditional Chinese medicine, which uses native plants and minerals to heal the body. While every plant that can produce a color, it also has a healing benefit when ingested as an herbal tea or applied topically onto the skin. It is safe enough to ingest into your body, it is safe enough to wear on the skin and will not cause allergies.  

The natural indigo plant, for example, can be used as a paste on a child’s skin when they have the mumps. Or used as a baking ingredient to make cakes. Hands are oftentimes stained blue when the villagers are dyeing their fabric, and they will even stick their finger into the indigo dye vat and taste it to check the pH level. It is also naturally insect-repelling, so it provides a bug-free barrier on the skin when worn outdoors in the fields. This also explain why indigo costumes can survive decades in a closet without being damaged by moths or other insects.

Natural indigo is a cold-water dye that is best used on cotton fibers, as it binds to the outside of the fiber and naturally fades over time. After it is created using a fermentation process involving indigo leaves, ash, and rice wine, it can then be used year-round. Every home in the villages has an indigo dye vat, which the grandmother uses to dye new fabrics and over-dye old ones to give them new life. It must be stirred every day and fed rice wine regularly, treating it almost like a pet and part of the family. Perhaps it’s because of this that the Miao regard it as the only dye with a soul. (Site Mr. Yang interview)

To dye fabric using indigo, the fabric is dipped in the dye vat for 30 minutes, then taken out for 30 minutes to oxygenate, and repeated like this for hours, week, and sometimes even months, until the right shade is achieved. The longer the period of repeated dyeing, the higher-quality and more color-fast the dye. As a base color for their fabrics, it can soaked in an extract of “wild walnut” (genus Platacarya), water buffalo skin, tubor (?), green persimmon, or tree bark(?) to give the dark blue cloth a more black or purple color. (Site Sadae T. book) The versatility of natural indigo dye has made it the dominant color of costumes, not just in these villages, but in traditional villages all over China. The dark blue Mao suit is a reference to the ubiquity of and importance of this native indigo plant. (Site source Indigo book)

Interestingly, blue is the only color in the rainbow that doesn’t lose its hue when it appears in different shades (site Blue ocean book), so any fading of the fabric just makes the indigo alter its hue, not making it lose any color. As it fades over time and interacts with the sun, a dark indigo cloth may turn into a chocolate brown, or become a rich black; that is the magic of natural plant dyes. The unstable color brings the color personality and depth. They can morph into other beautiful variants of the original color so that a pink will mutate into peach and then into beige over time. These rich color nuances are just impossible to get with chemical dyes, which look flat and cheapened as they lose their color over time. 

Indigo is the original dye of the modern blue jean, but don’t confuse it with the synthetic indigo alternative that is used globally today. Natural indigo is an unstable and time-consuming process to maintain, which is why the chemical-dye version replaced it globally within __ decades after its invention in 1874 (fact check in Indigo book). Before then, natural indigo was so valued around the world that it was called “blue gold” and even used as a form of currency in global trade (site source).

Despite having an active indigo dye vat in every village home, they all, especially the youth, wear chemically-dyed blue jeans that are bought in a store. It boggles my mind why the villagers don’t just dye their jeans in that the real indigo vat sitting in their home. After all, Levi’s has even created a natural indigo vat in their flagship store in San Francisco (fact-check this), to imitate the authenticity of what the Guizhou villagers are doing. 

Chemically-dyed blue jeans create toxic wastewater that is released into the rivers and can harm the natural  environment. The Pearl River on the southeast coast of China in Guangdong produced one third of the world’s denim. It is so polluted from the toxic wastewater of the denim factories dyeing that the blue dyed river can even be seen from space (site source), locals refuse to swim in it, it has contaminated drinking water downstream. (Site source)

 On the industrial level, fashion is the world’s second largest polluter of freshwater, and blue jeans are the most worn garment in the world. It would seem we could reduce a great amount of fashion industry pollution just by changing the ways blue denim is produced. 

Dyeing with natural indigo dyes is non-polluting and since the ethnic minority villagers swim, bathe, and wash their vegetables in these freshwater sources, it’s imperative that their rivers stay clean. Mr. Yang, our Miao dyer, explained that natural indigo, because it has nothing in it, will not pollute the river. But because the color is irritating to look at, he gives his method for cleaning the wastewater before releasing it back into nature:

– Round 1: allow indigo sediment to separate from water, wait 2 weeks

– Round 2: allow water from Round 1 to separate additional indigo sediment, wait 2 weeks

– Round 3: allow water from Round 2 to separate additional indigo sediment, wait 2 weeks

– Grow water weeds in all the above water to assist with purification

– Wastewater is now purified and can be used to irrigate crops

There are also native flowers growing wild that can create a rainbow of shades — pinks, yellows, lavender… Madder root, for example…. 

Each plant can achieve different hues, depending on the agent or dye mordant (mei ran ji) that is used with it: lemon, vinegar, white alum, or iron found in the mud. For example, safflower (hong hua) that creates a bubble-gum pink when used with vinegar or a peach color with lemon. (Site Mr Yang interview)

Most natural dye sources come from Chinese herbs, which have different functions for curing diseases, and go back 5,000 years. Turmeric (jiang huang), for example, creates a bright yellow that is very suitable for baby clothes because this herb can protect tender skin. (Site Mr Yang interview)

Some colors, like the pale yellow of the flowers of the locust tree (hua su hua) only bloom for a short while in April or May, so they can only be dyed during that time when their petals can be safely foraged from the ground, not plucked from the tree. Fresh plants must be used immediately to extract the color from them. It is more difficult to get them when they are dried. 

The yellow gardenia seed huang zhi zi (fructus gardeniae) is used to make a bright yellow dye (image of my shorts). In traditional Chinese medicine, it can help cool the blood, and drives out illness and dysfunction that stems from excessive heat, stop hemorrhages and speed healing by encouraging the circulation of stagnant blood, and ease inflammation of the digestive tract.  (Site source)

The root of the Chinese yam (dioscorea cirrhosa) creates a rustic brown color on fabric. The root can be applied onto the skin when it is cut is used to strengthen the spleen and and stomach to aid digestion, nourish the kidneys, stop chronic wheezing and coughing, lower blood sugar, soothe mood and regulate sleep.  

The first time I dyed fabric with the then 70 year old Miao dye master Yang Wen Bin, I was impressed with how boiled water and leaves could create every color on my color card. The waste was just boiled leaves and tree bark. The dye water could be drunk as an herbal tea. It was far from the irritating powdered chemical dyes I was accustomed to buying at an art supply shop, not to mention the harsh toxic ones used in the factories. 

But sourcing these materials isn’t easy. One has to wait for the right time during the year to forage it, and then use it immediately when the plant was fresh so the color could be extracted. It is a long drawn-out process that can not be rushed. That is why the villagers have begun turning to chemical dyes for the bright oranges, pinks, reds, yellow, greens, and blacks. Unfortunately,  they are favored for their cheap price and year-round convenience.

While making clothing in Guizhou is a long process, most of the time is spent waiting for nature to supply the raw materials. Nature has its own timing, and, rushing it will only disrupt the process.

Patience is not easy for a New Yorker to grasp, so these lessons crept up as metaphors in daily life. My favorite example is when I spotted a spider working tirelessly on a cobweb outside my window. It was a slow process. I would wake each morning up to see how much progress had been made the night before, which was very little, and wondered if it was worth spending so much time on a delicate structure that I could easily destroy with one swipe of a finger. 

One day, there was a huge thunderstorm with forceful winds that blew trees down and knocked the electricity out in the entire village. So I was surprised the next morning to find the cobweb still intact and unharmed outside my window. And it wasn’t just that one. Across the tea farm that surrounded us, I spotted beautiful spiderwebs still intact atop all the tea plants. The raindrops made them visible to me for the first time, showing these spiderwebs were not so delicate after all. 

It was my first lesson about craftsmanship: that taking the time to make something slowly and carefully can imbue it with more strength and resiliency than if it were made too quickly and hastily.

Choosing quality over quantity

Arriving in Guizhou on my first trip seven years ago, I thought I could fly in, place an order for my fabrics, and return two months later to pick them up. After all, this was how it was done with every textile mill around the world. But I soon discovered that the locals were hesitant to sell me their fabric. They had only made enough for themselves, and any fabric they gave to me would mean they wouldn’t have enough to finish their jacket. It was not about money; they simply did not produce more than they needed. And developing any additional fabric would take a lot of time and work.   

When we started a fabric training program soon after, I realized just how labor intensive and time-consuming the fabric-making process can be. Each villager makes their fabric starting from growing the cotton itself. That means planning one year in advance for a jacket because all the raw materials need to be grown, prepared, or foraged from the forests in the season when they are available. The fabric itself is the result of a year-long effort.  

Imagine going to any shop in your city to buy a new outfit. Do you know where the raw materials came from? Or where it was produced? Even the designer or brand that created it would not even know. As designers for big brands, we only know the factory where the piece is produced, the mill that wove the fabric, or the supplier that manufactured the zipper. That’s all. The source of the actual fiber and material is so far removed from us in the supply chain that it seems to magically appear out of nowhere. Even for us, as designers, it is a mystery. 

And yet this is where design starts: from the materials. So it was amazing for me to see a cotton plant for the first time, growing on the side of the road like any other plant, and to be told it would later be turned into clothes or blankets for the farmer’s family.

In the mountains, if you want something then you have to make it. So in order to get cotton for my collection, I would have to find a way to gather or grow it on my own. Since I’m not a farmer, I’d have to negotiate with the local villagers to see who had extra land to grow some for me. I wanted it to be locally grown, without the use of pesticides, from the traditional seed native to the region. 

They showed me how cotton seedlings were planted in late April, and left to grow until early fall (fact-check) when they are harvested for their fluffy white bolls, which are naturally off-white in color. Getting cotton more white would take a lot of drying in the sun and/or soaking it in horse manure, the latter which made me squeamish. But bright white cotton is actually achieved by bleaching it with harsh chemicals, and those harsh chemicals, when used by a conventional textile mill get disposed of as toxic wastewater into rivers. I realized that off-white fabrics were probably better for the environment. 

When the local cotton is finally harvested in early fall, the soft fluffy bolls are left in bamboo baskets to dry and then undergo an intensive process where they are ginned, fluffed, carded, flattened, rolled, pulled, and finally spun into finger-twisted thread. It’s a complicated and long process, and these days it’s very hard to find villagers who still hand-spin their own thread. The villagers now prefer to buy machine-spun yarn at the market, which is devastating because the source of those markets is unknown, and most likely coming from Xinjiang, a province in the north of China that produces industrialized cotton from GMO seeds that require a lot of pesticides and water. But the villagers reassure me that locally-grown cotton is hand-spun because the staple is longer (?) while cotton thread from the GMO cotton seeds breaks apart when spun by hand. Their preference, too, is for local cotton. 

Hand-spinning is a traditional process where the uneven consistency of the yarn produces a softer fabric. Sadly, this practice is harder and harder to find in the villages. It may be a time-consuming process, but the reality is that it only takes five days to hand-spin enough cotton for one roll of fabric (18 meters). Just five days, on top of a 6 month process, are enough for a traditional technique to disappear in one generation! 

Like a detective on a mission, I hunt from village to village until I finally find a group of Miao tribes who still carry the knowledge to hand-spin yarn. The entire village still spins their thread by hand, and so are very happy to do so for me also. They were too poor to buy their thread from the market, and so their self-sufficiency has allowed them to retain this traditional technique. They were cut-off from the outside world, but now the government is opening up their village and turning it into a tourist spot. Soon this knowledge will disappear, and so I am on a race against time to keep it going. 

If it takes 5 days to hand-spin the thread, it will take another week to set up the thread onto the loom. This is after the threads are boiled in soybean juice (?) to stiffen them, and drawn back and forth across a room in preparation for the loom. The design is then programmed into the loom through the _____ (term for metal part?). The patterns created convey a story through their iconography, whether it’s a horse symbolizing a daughter moving to her new husband’s home, or a dragon referencing the leader of the country. They have been passed down generation after generation, and perfected in all their variations of color.  According to one scholar, the symbols from the origins of Chinese civilization 5,000 years can still be seen in traditional Miao textiles today. It is evidence that the Miao were some of the original inhabitants to the land before China became a country.

As for silk, these come from the domestic silkmoth, Bombyx mori, which are raised between April and June when the fresh leaves of the local mulberry trees can be fed to the worms. They are grown inside the homes, on circular bamboo-woven trays placed on the ground. For the Miao, they are considered part of the family, calling them their “girls.” As Miao etiquette goes, any mischievous child that comes in and insults the family by pointing out that one of the worms is dead will immediately be sent out the door. (Site Mr. Yang interview)

When their larvae prepare to enter the pupal phase of their lifecycle, they enclose themselves in a white cocoon made up of raw silk produced by their salivary glands. The cocoons are then boiled in water and the fine fibers of the raw silk, 1,000 to 3,000 feet long, are twisted together into yarn. 

The first time we sourced silk yarn across Guizhou, we noticed a correlation between the quality of the silk yarns and the personality of the villager. As we had to meet face-to-face with each of these women and engage in a lengthy conversation to negotiate the price, we noticed that the most beautiful silk yarns also happened to come from those who had the most pleasant personalities. Maybe it was just in the way they twisted it, making it more lustrous and more beautiful. Perhaps the more care they put into their work, the more time was spent and the better quality yarn produced. 

From then on, I realized the difference between machine-made and hand-made in giving something soul. When something is machine-made, that human quality is taken out of the product and every item looks the same. But when it is hand-made, the maker’s personality traits can be seen in the final product. This human element makes hand-woven fabric so special, where even something so subtle as the mood of the maker on a particular day can reveal itself in whatever he or she is making.

Being able to see the personality of the weaver in the fabric created a sense of magic for me, and I began to notice it when the Miao fabric masters started weaving my own fabric. When the men wove, it was heavier and more stiff than when the women wove it on the same loom. Their arm strength brought the ____ (wooden banging thing) back with more force which makes the threads tighter and more compact together. The women, presumably with less arm strength, would leave more space between the threads, creating a looser tension, and produce and a thinner and more delicate fabric.

I learned that, because each human is different, hand-woven fabric cannot really be standardized. Each piece of fabric will look slightly different, just as each weaver carries a different personality. No two pieces of fabric will look the same, and this is what makes handmade so unique and special. 

This inconsistency also makes producing clothes in large quantities a big challenge.  Perfection may be the output of industrial textile looms, but it was not realistic for human-centered production. So I had to design with this in mind, and allow for the inconsistencies to be a hallmark of the final garment. After all, it’s the human variations that make the fabric so charming and imperfectly perfect. 

The first thing one notices upon arriving in the mountains of Guizhou is the beautiful landscape, a balanced collaboration between nature and man. As stewards of the land, their ability to sculpt the rugged landscape into layers of terraced rice patties is a reflection of their finesse and mastery of the land. Nestled at the base of these green hills are their dark wooden houses, clustered together like a tight ecosystem. The Miao homes have a strip of white tiles on tops of their roofs while the Dong are centered around a tall drum tower. They are surrounded by lush green fields where, upon closer look, farmers can be spotted hacking grass with a curved machete blade they pull from a bamboo basket slung onto their back. Out in the fields, the farmers and the land become one.   

While in Guizhou, I came to the sudden realization that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. This may seem obvious to a biologist, but for a New Yorker like me who had spent 15 years living amongst concrete buildings and only experienced trees on the weekends, this was a huge revelation. My first experience with this was walking past village homes where I saw a pulley system made of tree vines, holding up beams for hanging things, were later discarded in a pile on the ground after use. If it had been made of plastic, it would have looked like trash. But being a tree vine, it could be thrown back into the forest and go back to nature where it came from. It seemed like such a novel yet obvious solution for getting rid of waste. This was my first lesson in true sustainability — not an over-thought and forced corporate marketing concept. Here, it just made sense. 

I later saw young women washing their long hair in the water canals, children playing in the river, and grandmothers washing vegetables in pools of collected rainwater. Before then, it never dawned on me where water came from. For me, it always came from a sink faucet  — giving me the false sense that freshwater supplies are endless. So it was surprising when I learned that water plumbing did not exist for some villages as recently as three years ago. Every morning, one had to fetch water from the mountain spring and carry the heavy buckets back to their home. Or take their laundry and vegetables outdoors to the nearest river or spring. 

Fortunately for Guizhou, the sub-tropical climate (fact check) means that it rains all the time. For generations, there has been a constant flow of fresh water coming down from the mountains and villages have sprung up around them. They come from holes from the side of the mountains, either alongside a trail or directed into rice patties. The fresh water is filtered naturally from the rocks and minerals in the soil, and tea connoisseurs note that mountain water is the best water for making tea (site Marriage Frères Art of Tea). It tastes pure, alive, and is better than any over-priced bottled water at a grocery store. It can even have healing benefits, especially if it passes through the roots of the red yam tree (get exact name) as it does in Dongcen village where villages drink a cup of it each day to help alleviate stomach pain. 

 The abundant water source is not taken for granted by the villagers, and these springs are worshiped as a powerful spirit in the village (site source). In fact, the Miao and Dong are shamanistic (animist?) in religion and believe that everything in the natural world has a spirit, including the rivers, rocks, mountain springs, big trees, and plants — even just one blade of grass (site Yang Wen Bin interview). Offerings are regularly given to appease these spirits in exchange for their protection and cooperation, a humble acknowledgement that humans must work in harmony with nature in order to survive. I can’t help but notice the similarities with other indigenous cultures around the world and wonder when, why, and how the modern world decided to abandon their respect for nature. 

Region

Guizhou may be the poorest province in China, but it is rich in natural resources. It is blunted with a lush green mountainous landscape and abundant rain that makes everything grow quickly. Experiencing this natural wealth and the villagers’ own rich culture made me question how poverty is defined, and by whom. Certainly they are cash-poor. After all,  it was once not uncommon for them to go an entire year without seeing any cash. As self-sufficient farmers, they grew and made everything they needed to survive. This, of course, can only be done in nature, where one must acquire the skills to live off the land. Instead of buying the things you need, you’re making them instead. 

Growing food and making their own hand-crafted items was a way for these villagers to be self-sufficient in an isolated region that was, until recent years, inaccessible by roads. Their daily practice of eating organic, freshly-picked, free-range, grass-fed, farm-to-table meals would be considered an expensive lifestyle for an American living in a city. Nature acts as their refrigerator, and their diet is much healthier for it. Their access to fresh air and clean water is also a privilege that even the wealthiest in China’s cities do not have access to. From an outsider coming in, it feels a bit like a utopian paradise.  

The irony is that poor villagers eat organic and farm-to-table because they cannot afford to buy their own food. They must work in the fields everyday to grow and cultivate all the food they need to survive for the year. Americans, meanwhile, generally buy everything they need at the supermarket — which creates a disconnect between the consumer and their source of their food. It also makes the city dweller more dependent on an office job or making money, as they never acquire the skills to become self-sufficient and grow their own food.   

  Even five years ago, when I first arrived in Guizhou, I had to drive 2 hours to the nearest town if I wanted to buy a lemon. As for avocados, I had to buy them in Shanghai and fly them down with me in my luggage. Half of my suitcase was stocked with store-bought items until I learned how to eat locally and in-season. Doing so changed my relationship with food, and valuing those things that were not locally available — like chocolate, olive oil, almonds, and fruit. These all turned into small luxuries when they were suddenly out of reach, and made me appreciate them even more.   

While it may seem unusual to mention growing food in a book about clothing, one has to realize that clothes are grown in the same way. Just as we have natural vs. chemically-processed ingredients for making food, there is also natural vs. synthetic fibers for making clothing. While the natural fibers are grown outside in the sun and have been used to make clothes for thousands of years, synthetic fibers are developed in a lab and have only been around since the 1930s (fact-check Nylon). My aim is to design a collection where the entire production follows the traditional process — which, by default, will be all-natural, organic, and made without the need for electricity. 

The ethnic minorities in Guizhou province may look similar to the outsider, but they are different races, each with their own set of beliefs, and speak languages that cannot be understood by the other.  The ones I am in contact with the most are the Miao, Dong, Sui, and Ge. Each ethnicity specializes in a set of techniques that has been perfected over several generations using resources native to their land. Like a fine wine, the terroir and climates determines the plants that can be cultivated and sourced, and therefore the fabric that can be created.  Each village has a costume style that is unique to their tribe, and these costumes, like a uniform, identifies the wearer with the village where they come from. These villages may be small in number, ranging from 100 to 6,000 people, but together they create a vast network across the province’s 34.7 million population, 37% of of which consist of ethnic minorities. 

The Miao people were among the first people to settle in present-day China and among the first rice farmers in China. Over 3.6 million people, half of China’s Miao population, live in Guizhou. (footnote: Huadricourt, Andre; Strecker (1991). “Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) Loans in Chinese”. T’uong Pao. 77 (4-5): 335-341) According to Chinese legend, they descended from the Jiuli tribe led by Chi You, one of the three founding ancestors of China, who were defeated at the Battle of Zhuolu around 2500 BC (near present day Hebei and Liaoning), while some scholars connect the Miao to the Daxi Culture nearly 6000 years ago. (footnote: Wen, Bo et al (2005) “Genetic Structure of (H)mong-Mien Speaking Populations in East Asia as Revealed by mtDNA Lineages”. Oxford Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution. 22 (3): 725-734) Over centuries of warring with the Han, the Miao were pushed from the central area of China to the southwest and settled in present-day Guizhou province. 

The Dong originated from Luoyue branch of the Baiyue, a group of people in south China in ancient times. Modern-day Dong people are considered a sub-group among the Yue folk who, it is believed, were the original ancestor of the Han Chinese people.(site source). There are 1.628 million of them left, with  The Miao are known for their elaborately embroidered costumes while the Dong wear more reserved costumes with hand-embroidered trims. If the Miao use textiles to pass down their oral history, the Dong do it through their traditional polyphonic singing which is unique to each village. 

The Sui people are also descendants from the ancient Baiyue people, who inhabited southern China before the Han dynasty (before 206 AD). There are only 430,000 of them left, living predominantly in Guizhou, and they excel in weaving an infinite variety of plaids, diamonds, and geometric patterns. 

The Ge people are masters in wax-resist painting on textiles. With a small population of 125,000, they are included within the Miao ethnicity in the Chinese census. They share the same language as the Miao, with slight variation, but they consider themselves a separate ethnicity with different customs and ways of dress.  

In the last 30 years, village life has changed dramatically. The rural youth have left to become migrant workers in coastal factories, and returned bringing outside influence back into the villages. Traditional costumes are replaced with t-shirts and jeans. Wooden buildings are replaced with concrete ones. Dirt roads give way to smooth asphalt roads. Within the span of 5 years, a highway, a fast-train, and even a regional airport were built to advance tourist development for a growing middle-class with more leisure time. Whereas my first trip from the capital of Guiyang to the village of Zhaoxing would have taken 2 days, today the journey only takes 1.5 hours by fast train and only a one hour drive from the nearest airport. 

In Tang’an village, where my workshop is now based, electricity did not arrive until the mid-1990s and running water did not enter the homes until 2014 (get exact year). This explains why, whenever there is a rainstorm and the electricity is knocked out for 3 days, they can still live without electricity, just as human civilization has done for thousands of years. For me, living without power was a new experience, and I quickly realized how much of my modern life is dependent on electric devices.

So I started to look for manual alternatives: a manual juicer instead of an electric one, drying fruit in the sun instead of in a dehydrator, line-drying my clothes instead of using a dryer. I learned how to live without a refrigerator, which meant  always buying fruit with its peel intact or eating vegetables soon after they were pulled from the ground. And I understood why there were so many farm animals running around — chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, frogs, and even dogs. Keeping them alive didn’t require refrigeration, and they were fed well and lived the good life before being sacrificed for the dinner table. 

My work schedule followed that of the villagers, which revolved around the natural light given off by the sun. The  weavers would start at sunrise, the normal time the villagers would start working in their fields, take 2 hours at lunchtime to return home and make their meal, then return to work until sunset. The sun was the only light we needed, and so our workday revolved around that natural source of light. 

Farming is taken very seriously, as the effort put into the land will determine if the family has enough food to eat for the rest of the year.  While we city people may spend our work days in an office building, these countryside villagers “go to work” all day in the fields. They walk the trails with such confidence, with their machetes, pipes, and stylish farm gear. These ethnic minorities are survivalists, understand nature, and can innovate when it comes to getting things made. This makes them very different from city dwellers, but they are not the “backward” and “uneducated” people the city people has stereotyped them to be. In fact, the villagers often surprise me with their creative problem-solving, despite their lack of formal higher education. 

Seeing the ethnic minorities in their natural setting, where they are masters of their land, is very different from dealing with them in the big cities, where they seem a timid and hesitant as migrant workers in the restaurants and hotels. This can be explained by Han chauvinism, an internal form of Chinese racism that views the Han, or 92% of the Chinese population, as more educated, sophisticated and successful than their ethnic minority counterparts.

In this kind of environment, the villagers tell me, the younger generation of ethnic minorities feel pressured to assimilate into the majority Han culture and will imitate their lifestyle and modern way of dress. This is disappointing, of course, not least because the ethnic minority style of dressing is more sophisticated and advanced than what the Han Chinese are currently wearing in the cities, but because their modern dressing is not even traditionally Han. Modern clothing in China is actually an imitation of Western dress that they have adopted in recent decades and are still learning how to coordinate outfits and mix-and-match properly. 

When we’re sitting around a table hand-sewing, I love asking the villagers what life was like growing up without electricity, nor running water. “Why do you want to know?,” was their initial response, “So you can tell your friends in American how poor we are?” 

“No, not at all.” I tell them, “It’s because your life is fascinating and we have no idea what it’s like to live without these modern comforts.”  

It’s too complicated for me, in my limited Chinese, to explain that the world is running out of fossil fuels and freshwater, that we have become wasteful and too dependent on electricity, and that living more sustainably is a survival skill that all humans will need to learn to survive in the future. These villagers may feel poor compared to the aspirational lifestyles they see on their TVs, but the abundance of fresh mountain water, the best water I’ve ever tasted, gives me the feeling that they are much richer than they actually know.   

In the last two decades, global production of clothing has increased 400% to 80 billion garments per year. The pesticides used in the raw materials, the chemicals used in the manufacturing process, and the dumping of toxic wastewater back into the environment has made Fashion the second largest polluter in the world – after oil. 

Where we once had 4 seasons per year, fast fashion retailers now pump out 24 seasons per year – one collection every two weeks, ensuring that there is always new merchandise arriving at their stores. The result is a new generation of Millennial consumers that now expect to see something new every time they walk into a store. These fast fashion pieces, sewn so quickly that the buttons are the first to go, are of such poor quality that they can only be worn for a couple months regularly without falling apart (site source, girl challenge). There is always a newer, better, and more on-trend piece to be bought – or so the windows and advertising would have you believe. New styles replace the old ones, if they even get worn at all. In fact, 30% of what’s in an American closet is not even worn (site source), and rather than mend a hole or sew back a button, the clothes are so inexpensive that it is cheaper to just buy a new piece of clothing rather than send it to a tailor. 

While all products have increased in price due to inflation over the last 20 years (site source), clothing has actually gone down in price – that is, clothing has actually become cheaper. Much of this price drop is attributed to moving production overseas, first with China and now with Bangladesh. There is a human cost to making cheap clothing, of course, and there are many questionable labor practices at clothing manufacturers garment workers often earn less than a living wage in their home country.  

But there is also a serious environmental cost with the rise of cheaper plastic-based fabrics like polyester and acrylic in China. Polyester, a cheap synthetic fiber made from petrochemicals, require high temperatures powered by fossil fuels and 4x more energy than natural fibers to produce, and recently (2014?) surpassed cotton as the leading fiber for clothing globally (site source). Since they are a plastic themselves, they are not biodegradable and cannot be recycled if they are blended with other fibers (which is, most of the time). So they are thrown out and contribute to the 13 million tons of clothing in landfill every year. (site source) 

Even during its life of being worn, the broken-up plastic fibers exit through the washing machine wastewater, and end up in water sources where they harm fish and wildlife. (Site source)

But what may seem most surprising is that most of us do not realize how these synthetic fibers, dyes and finishes are affecting our own health. Natural fibers like flax, wool, cotton, linen, and silk have been worn by humans as far back as 6500 year  ago, so it should not be surprise to anyone that are better for your health than manmade fibers like polyester and nylon that have only been around for the last 100 years. While natural dyes have been used and perfected over thousands of years (if we are to follow Chinese traditional medicine’s history of 5000 years), it seems questionable why we’ve suddenly placed our trust in chemical dyes that have only existed for only 150 years. These man-made alternatives were invented because they were cheaper, without enough consideration for long-term health and environmental consequences.  

Studies have shown that synthetic fibers do not allow the skin to breathe properly, making us sweat when it’s hot out, or not insulate when it’s cold (site source). The cancer-causing chemicals used to dye the fabric can actually enter through our skin, the body’s largest organ, and enter our bloodstream and get stored in our fat cells.(site source). We’ve become aware of the plastics in our food and the chemicals in our shampoo, but what about the clothes we wear all day on our body?   

We look sympathetically at dead ocean wildlife that are cut-open to reveal  plastic pieces they’ve ingested thinking that they were food. And yet, here we are as human doing the same thing, wearing these chemical dyes in various colors, perhaps because instinctually our bodies had once aligned the natural plant color versions with healing properties on our skin, without realizing that the synthetic chemical version is now harming our bodies. After all, scientists have observed that epigenetic memories are passed down for 14 generations, and that the experiences of our ancestors is programmed into our  own DNA.

Since the Rena Plaza collapse, we have put a lot of emphasis on the human labor behind our clothes.  But do we really know where the raw materials for our clothes come from? Who is growing the cotton used for our t-shirts? How is polyester made for our yoga pants?  What are the chemicals and processes used to dye it and make it feel soft? 

I was initially ticked off to the chemicals in our fabrics when I was a Design Assistant at Donna Karan Collection in New York. The local studio that dyed our sample fabrics told me how toxic the dyes were, especially the ones used for synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon – which she refused to dye. One time, we had some expensive cashmere fabric from Italy in a washing machine on our design floor and the smell of sulfur and rotten eggs spread throughout the entire floor and made everyone feel sick. Yet it didn’t sink in at the time that it was a wider industry problem, or that it was necessary to do anything about it. 

As a designer, I was still learning about all the materials and just assumed this is just how things were. I had never learned how conventional fabrics were actually produced. We just ordered them from the fabric mill, based on look and feel and price, and then were shipped to our design studio a few weeks later exactly in the amount and color we had requested. There was no questioning into how or where it was produced and, frankly, it seemed boring and we didn’t care to know. In fact, we designers are often so unaware of the industrial fabric-making process, we wouldn’t even know what questions to ask. Even the trend forecaster Li Edelkoort recently mentioned that designers today are not taught about fabric and materials anymore.(site source, pull quote?)

If it is true that 90% of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage (site Patagonia book source), then we designers have a significant amount of power in shaping the future of a better world around us. We must learn how the fabrics we use are made so that we can make more informed decisions about what we are creating. 

Years later, I got red hives all over my body from a bright blue silk dress that I had bought in a touristy shop in Shanghai. Thinking it was the low quality of the fabric, the label did say “Made in China” after all, the same thing happened to me months later with a pair of polyester shorts from the designer Italian brand (Shirt, Shirt – what is the brand name?) It was the same bright blue, and I picked it up at the department store Le Bon Marché in Paris.   

So these chemicals are used everywhere, in both cheap fast fashion and expensive designer clothes. And the truth is, we designers really don’t know where our fabrics come from or how they are made. We are just as far removed from the process as someone is buying a bag of potato chips at a grocery store. We place our order from the textile mill —whether in Italy, Japan, or China — and we trust that the fabric is tested and safe to wear by the time we receive it 4-6 weeks later.  We don’t know anything about the raw materials or the dyes and finishes being used in them.

It was not until years later, when I was at Lululemon, as Head Designer of their innovation incubator called Lab, that I suddenly had access to a wide range of synthetic fabrics that I was tasked with using exclusively. Natural fiber fabrics were, apparently, too expensive for their lower price point. By wearing the fabrics everyday in various styles, I experienced what it was like to wear plastic-based fabrics every day and the impact these chemical dyes and processes could have on one’s own personal health. It certainly gave me a window into how the majority of Americans wear clothing, especially since more and more people are wearing lower-priced active sportswear everyday to school and work, in addition to working out. It also showed me the barriers and challenges preventing corporate brands from adopting more sustainable fabrics. If I was experiencing these challenges at Lululemon, then I was certain these were happening at other global active sportswear brands.  

Today, we in the U.S. are increasingly removing ourselves from nature and the synthetic-fiber clothes we wear are the first barrier of this separation.  Since the Enlightenment period, we’ve seen ourselves as humans vs. nature when, in fact, we are actually a part of nature. This disconnect is strongest in cities, artificial man-made environments, where we pretend nature does not exist except as a superficial decorative element like a park or a tree-lined street. Flying from the pristine Guizhou countryside where even the dirt seemed clean and organic,  It took a lot of adjusting when flying into Shanghai where the the brown polluted skies were the visual symptom of the man-made chemical-heavy plastic objects decorating the streets. 

Think of all the knowledge that was lost with the eradication of Native Americans in the U.S., and how our country would have developed had we followed their wisdom of living harmoniously with the land. While I could not go back to the 17^th century when Native Americans roamed across the country, I could at least observe the Chinese ethnic minority elders in their natural habitat. Over 700 years (fact check Dimen village), they had created a world where their activities were integral to the ecosystem and perfected farming techniques that were crucial in maintaining balance with nature. Every conversation I have with a local villager leaves me amazed and surprised by what they teach me. 

Of course, I’m a fashion designer and my original intention was not to observe indigenous farmers spending the day pushing water buffalo across terraced rice patties. What I really wanted was my fabric! 

But in order to receive it, I had to learn how to wait. And those who have been trained in the New York fashion industry are not accustomed to waiting. The speed of producing is so fast these days that we work in culture where everything was due  “yesterday.” 

So it took me some time, years even, to wrap my head around this concept of being patient. I had to understand the cycles of nature. Nature could provide all the raw materials I need, but the timing in which it delivers is the complete opposite of how the international fashion industry functions. If I was to receive the fabrics I needed to develop my collection, I would have to forget everything I learned as a fashion designer in New York.  

Originating from Syria 7,000 years ago, according to scholars (site source), the Miao migrated north through Russia and Siberia, entered what is now China, and were pushed south over the centuries due to wars with the Han, until they finally settled in the rugged Karst mountains of southwest China. They did not have a written language, and only an oral history where the iconography in their fabric and embroideries were used as tools to tell the stories of this migration and the creation mythology of their people. 

The Miao are well-known internationally for their elaborate hand-embroideries which are filled with auspicious symbols for protection and iconography conveying their oral history. Not only are they collected by the British Museum in London, they are also on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Quai Branley in Paris. These embroideries serve as tools to pass down the history of migration across China over the centuries; it is literally like wearing history books on your clothes. 

But there is less hand embroidery details on their clothing these days, and they increasingly wear mass-produced clothing they buy in the market — a reflection of their progress/advancement as they can now afford to buy clothes instead of having to make it themselves. So vital are these embroideries to the culture and soul of the people that they were put onto UNESCO’s tentative list of intangible cultural heritages in need of urgent safeguarding in 2014. (?)

So when we’re talking about the fabrics and embroideries of the Miao ethnic minorities, it is more than just clothing – it is literarily their history written down on cloth. With the passing of each elaborately-embroidered piece to a new owner, we lose the original maker who used the fabric as a storytelling tool to pass down the origins of her people. Tragically, the younger generation can no longer read the stories and messages in these fabrics. 

As the anthropologist Wade Davis has said, half of the world’s languages will be lost in one generation (pull quote from The Wayfinders), and with it the knowledge carried by its elders.  The Miao do not have a written language, and the adoption of a written language in 1958 (year? site source) created by the Han has not done much for documenting the knowledge of the elders, most of whom are illiterate and do not speak Mandarin Chinese. 

So why does it matter if their knowledge is lost or not? Is this not the inevitable trend of all indigenous cultures?  By wanting them to continue their traditional ways, are we not keeping them from moving forward with their own economic progress? Should we not deprive them of the better life they see on their television sets and hear about in the big cities? 

Well, traditional craftsmanship is being lost at an even quicker rate all around the world right now — whether it be a traditional mountain village in China, a samplemaker in New York’s Garment District, or a 3rd generation (?) leather button-maker in Italy. It can be attributed to rising labor costs in developing countries and the public’s shift in the last two (?) decades of buying more goods at cheaper prices. Since the U.S. began outsourcing overseas in the mid-1990’s and fabrics becoming cheaper after China joined the WTO in 2001, fast-fashion retailers have trained the mass consumer to buy cheaper goods to wear. As the price of product has grown with inflation, the price of clothing has actually decreased — and with it, certainly the quality of the fabric and sewing. 

On the market level, this means that the diversity of products diminishes in favor of cheaper and more scalable mass-produced items. For the environment, it means that more products of lower quality are being produced and sold – a product life-cycle that usually ends up being thrown into a landfill, because it does not last very long and buying a new one is cheaper than mending it. So this means that the hand-crafted is becoming more rare as companies are seeking our less costly ways to manufacture products. 

The overuse of “craftsmanship” and “artisanal”

Which is why the terms “artisanal” and “craftsmanship” are being overused today. After the 2008 recession, luxury brands needed to find a way to differentiate themselves (?) and bring more value to the post-recession mindset, so digging into their history of craftsmanship was a way to bring more meaning to their product (site source).  This was a natural narrative for a French luxury goods house or Swiss watch manufacturer, whose story may have started as a humble atelier over 100 years ago. And interestingly, their use of local natural resources to define their handmade products is not unlike what we see with the ethnic mountain tribes in Guizhou province. When I read about how Goyard used local tree logs that they floated down the river (site source), or hear about how the “petite-mains” of the haute-couture houses in Paris (site source) would take pieces to sew at home, it reminds me of the humble way of producing in Guizhou province. Luxury goods were not always highly-branded, machine-manufactured replaceable products found in every major airport and capital around the world. They were more humble in origin, small quantities that were hand-made and pushed innovation, as can be seen by Louis Vuitton’s entering into the World Exposition in 1885? (find year). Or Hermès’s use of the newly-invented zipper in 193?. (site source) Or Cartier being the first to move the pocket-watch to the wrist-watch for pilots of WWII (site source).

But to suddenly call something “artisanal” when it is industrially produced is false advertising and being abused by American marketers. A McDonald’s hamburger, for example, is perceived as being of higher quality when it says “artisanal” next to it. (find source) Hamburgers have always been slapped together by hand, so why do we need to now say that they are “artisanally” put together? Or when a Levi’s dress gives the perception of locally-crafted (find source) when the tag labels inside says it was manufactured in a factory in Portugal? 

Living in Guizhou, I discovered that craftsmanship is culture. It’s a reflection of the people and the way they live. It’s their beliefs and the resources around them. It is a reflection of the maker, the human. When I see a garment, I know who made it cause it bears the imprint of their personality on the cloth — a tight weave by a man who pulls harder, a woman whose weave is looser because she is more gentle on her pull.

In Guizhou, I would see bamboo baskets that were 10 years old, aged from daily use, in beautiful condition, that families would make for their own use. It looked like something that could be sold at Pottery Barn for $100, for an artificially-aged faux version. 

At what point do we draw the line between real craftsmanship and faux craftsmanship? Real artisanal and fake artisan? And does it even matter? What does craftsmanship and artisanal really mean? In Guizhou, craftsmanship is not a profession. It’s a way of life. It’s life itself. Everyone knows how to make things. And maybe that is the skill that we are missing. To make is to be human. That is what separates us from other animals. Our ability to make things with our hands, whether they are are small things or giant buildings. Perhaps that is why we are. So happy when we are making things — because it brings us back to our purpose of being human. Because when we start using machines, it takes us away from being human. We end up over-producing and creating pollution because we are not in touch with the end consumer – we are not making it directly for them. So there are a lot of wasted elements, pieces not being used (think of all the extra things your phone does that you don’t use). If we were to make things for ourselves, or customized for us, the product would only use the materials for that use. It would be more efficiently-designed. We would use it longer. It would last longer. We would care for it, fix it if it broke, and mend it if became torn. 

In the last 7 years since my first trip to Guizhou, I’ve witnessed the evolution of this trend in the resurgence of artisanal and craft production in the U.S. as an extension of the DIY maker movement that has grown in the last decade with Etsy and the Maker Faire. There is a return to slow and local production, as a reaction to the increasing speed in communication and how the 24-hour news cycle and constant flow of information has affected our daily lives.  And also to the ubiquity of fast fashion and the outpouring of trends and anonymously-designed new products that is constantly being advertised to us. 

Surprisingly, even  the super tech-savvy post-Millennials in China are sparking a traditional craft revival now because they have never been to a traditional village themselves. 

—

  It was not until 3 years later when I finally did meet a 16-year old girl and was fluent enough in Chinese to ask about her ambitions. After her grandmother showed us a traditional silk costume she had handwoven and made by herself, which the curious young girl was seeing for the first time in her life, I asked if this was something she would be interested in learning. Her response was a definite “yes!” — if she could get paid for it, and would open up a workshop to produce my orders. Even in a small remote village, she reflected the optimistic entrepreneurial mindset that dominates modern China – a country where 50% of young girls say they want to grow up to be an entrepreneur. 

If I was to get any fabric made, it was clear that I’d have to find a way to motivate these young teenagers to start learning the techniques from their parents. But once I started sketching, getting them excited my designs took no effort at all. Like so many girls around the word, fashion and clothing got them excited. It was clear that the way to get them motivated about weaving their grandmothers’ traditional cloth was through the lens of modern fashion.