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.
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