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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    Article on textiles - IHT



    LINK



    I found it interesting, I just wish it was much more detailed. Fabrics are fascinating!








    The globalization of fabric





    Friday, February 29, 2008




    PARIS:
    Each time we encounter an amazing collection, it is well to remember
    that it is the fabric that defines its uniqueness - but what is the
    story of these textiles?




    What is it that differentiates the high street from haute couture, the brand leader from the mass market: It is the cloth.




    Try to track the source of these fabric miracles and you will meet
    many barriers, because this is a world of secret suppliers - who
    provides fabric for which labels is closely guarded intelligence.




    Commercial etiquette prohibits the fabric manufacturers from
    revealing their client brands for fear of losing them to rivals. Yet,
    although they are as invisible as microfibers, these fabric companies
    are the essential foundations upon which luxury fashion stands.




    The economic shattering of traditional textile industries in the
    past few decades has resulted in global specialists, with Italy for
    fine silk and prints, England for worsted wools and tweeds, Japan for
    high-tech fibers and finishes. A single collection is an international
    textile exhibition, taking the best from each country.




    In addition, "off-menu" textiles are created in lengthy
    collaborations between fashion designers and fabric houses and a really
    successful designer also has to be something of an expert in the
    chemistry of cloth.


    In Italy


    Today, the historic makers of fine silk in Italy are under siege from the goliath producers of China and India.




    Italy is the country of inspiration - one vast museum of print and
    woven designs - and still with the skills to create hand-painted
    designs for the most famous brands. A company like the century-old
    Mantero on Lake Como, where I have been a research consultant, has an
    archive of 12,000 books dating from 1800 to draw upon, some with
    perhaps 1,000 fabric swatches or painted papers in each - millions of
    little jewels to make the eyes tingle.




    As a match to the fire of design imagination, a treasure bank like
    this is priceless. An archive swatch, however, is only the beginning of
    a long process. Designs are repeatedly reworked and recolored to fit a
    specific designer's signature style.




    To fully understand extravagance in a print design, just know that
    as many as 54 colors can be layered precisely onto a piece of silk,
    requiring the perfect registering, or matching, of 54 screens. If any
    exquisite silk prints or weaves exist in your wardrobe, they are more
    than sure to have been made by one of the legendary Italian companies
    like Mantero, Lorma, Canepa or Ratti.


    In England


    Heritage is at the heart of all textile manufacturing and, just as
    Italy is the natural home of silk, England is the historical homeland
    of fine worsted manufacturers.




    Think tweed and the double Cs of Chanel certainly come to mind. The
    chilly borderlands between the north of England and Scotland have for
    centuries created the world's best weaves and when Coco Chanel met
    William Linton, the founder of Linton Tweeds, in the 1920s, a
    collaboration was established that remains steadfast to this day.




    One perfect example of a mill working hand-in-hand with a designer
    is Bower Roebuck's collaboration with Paul Helbers, Louis Vuitton's
    director of menswear and a man passionate about fiber and cloth. The
    West Yorkshire mill has been producing material since 1899, and its
    customers include some of the top tailoring designer brands, including
    Hermès, Prada, Tom Ford, Dunhill and Brioni. (The British are less
    squeamish about naming their clients.)




    According to Wayne Fitton of Bower Roebuck, one of the mill's most
    demanding challenges was to design for Helbers fabric with a dégradé,
    or shaded, effect. Within an already complicated pattern, several
    shades of color were arranged from dark to light to produce an
    incandescent effect, like light moving over a surface.


    In Japan


    For total technical command in fabrics, however, no country can compete with Japan.




    Perhaps most illustrative of just how minutely expert are the
    Japanese is an ethereal composition in 100 percent polyester by Amaike
    Textile, based on Honshu island. "Super-organza" is the thinnest and
    lightest fabric in the world, an almost invisible floating film, as
    insubstantial as a baby's breath.




    Miniaturization was Japan's means of acquiring its near monopoly of
    high-tech quality cloth. In the 1980s, its celebrated fashion designers
    astonished the West with their fabric-based design, shifting the
    emphasis from the cut and onto the cloth.




    "Make me a fabric that looks like poison," Issey Miyake once asked
    his textile engineer, Makiko Minagawa, and it is this poetic approach
    to technology that characterizes the Japanese aesthetic. Artists in
    textiles they may be, but their palette is the chemist's laboratory.




    Many top designers admit that Japan provides them with the most
    experimental and exciting materials. Nicolas Lepoutre, coordinator of
    fabric research for Louis Vuitton's women's wear, says that 60 percent
    of the company's fabrics are sourced there. One of the reasons, he
    said, is that the Japanese will "try anything" and are willing and able
    to produce very short runs of experimental pieces.




    The Itochu Fashion System, based in Osaka, is a large trading
    company and a first stop for European designers, who will find fabrics
    created by numerous, all but anonymous manufacturers - like
    color-morphing satins from Teijin Fibers, sculpture cloth from Toray
    Industries and thermal color-change fibers from Kyokuyo Sangyo.




    Susannah Handley is author of "Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).





    Notes:
































    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • laika
    moderator
    • Sep 2006
    • 3787

    #2
    Re: Article on textiles - IHT



    Really interesting, Faust, thanks so much for posting this!!!



    I have that Nylon book in my virtual library stack, will have to take a look ASAP.

    ...I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.

    Comment

    • Faust
      kitsch killer
      • Sep 2006
      • 37852

      #3
      Re: Article on textiles - IHT

      you are welcome, laika.
      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

      Comment

      • kira
        Senior Member
        • Mar 2008
        • 2353

        #4
        Re: Article on textiles - IHT

        54 colors layered onto a piece of silk registering the different screens precisely 54 times. amazing. nice read.
        Distraction is an obstruction of the construction.

        Comment

        • clay
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2006
          • 284

          #5
          Re: Article on textiles - IHT



          Yeah Textiles are a huge part between mass market and high end. I am working with this company now and I've been fighting with them to use better fabrics and its a all out war! My samples are looking terrible when the factory uses its regular fabrics ( cheap crap from India and China, bucket dyed to match my palette.). So I get them to buy fabrics like twills and wools locally ( Mood) to make my samples look half way decent, but even those get screwed up sometimes when they have to be dyed by them. And don't even get me started on the printing....




          I'm ready to jump out a window just thinking about how my up coming line is going to look with these budget market techniques being used on what is actually being marketed as a better line that will sit with the likes of Lacoste, DKNY, Calvin Klien and others.




          It was shown at Project and believe it or not, as bad as I think it was, a really big retailer is picking it up... I will not say the name cause I'm working on my high end stuff and want to keep a distance publically from it. Sounds terrible I know.




          But I'm trying to get all my fabrics locally for this spring line,I just hope we have the budget for it. That is very questionable right now. It would mean a few thousand dollars for about 15 styles. Small amount for some companies, really big for this one.

          Comment

          • Faust
            kitsch killer
            • Sep 2006
            • 37852

            #6
            Re: Article on textiles - IHT

            Clay, good luck with everything! I hope it pans out.
            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

            Comment

            • Avantster
              ¤¤¤
              • Sep 2006
              • 1983

              #7
              Re: Article on textiles - IHT



              Thanks Faust - it's articles like these that I'd love to read more about (and wish I would see more of in fashion magazines.)



              Interesting insights into the industry there clay - good luck with it!



              let us raise a toast to ancient cotton, rotten voile, gloomy silk, slick carf, decayed goat, inflamed ram, sooty nelton, stifling silk, lazy sheep, bone-dry broad & skinny baffalo.

              Comment

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