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.
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