How did cloth come into existence? What is ornamentation? Since when has this existed? Is it good or bad? Who decides what it is? What is the significance of textile in our life? Where did the patters and weaving come from?

Today weaves can be found in so many aspects of our day to day life. In the clothes we wear, the beds we sleep on, home décor, bags, jewellery, and the list can go on. But where did it actually begin? The early man used to wrap around animal skin. This evolved into the loosely wrapped drapes of the Greek’s, the saris of India and so on and so forth. It has come to these extremes that today, Fabric governs the taste of people and people are judged on what they wear.

The simplest form of weaving began with the interlock weaving done using the palm and coconut leaves. Basket weaving was done since the earlier times. This certainly brought on the invention of the complex looms that we use today.

According to me weaving is like getting order to all the chaos around. Weaving can be done with similar material or by mixing materials. Mixing materials while weaving gives rise to different types of fabrics. These differences can be in terms of the feel, texture, the fall of the fabric, etc. Taking all of these into consideration, we choose our fabric for different purposes.

Now that the fabrics are in place to construct clothes to wear, I think it’s the human psychology of always wanting more that brought on the ornamentation to the cloth like embroidery, printing, giving shape to garments, bead work, mirror work, dying and so on and so forth. All of this is also used to bring in the individual element to the garments. I believe that ornamentation is a form of expression. This could be individual specific or cultural specific for example in the video “threads of art” Yinka Shonibare uses the prints from African origin and the fabric construct from the Victorian era. The fad of patterning on garments by printing, embroidery, and so many other techniques has been there since before the Mughal Empire. What does representation mean? The desire to be different from the others around gets translated into everything in and around. I think the ruling class decides to see what is wrong or right in terms fashion, lifestyle, home décor, ornamentation and actually everything in and around a person. Why you might ask, how else can then the

wholask, how else did the whole rich and poor in the society , lyfestyle,nd so forth  forth. rich and poor in the society be determined? The whole sense of possession and power used to lie in the hands of the ruling class people and I think it still does even today.

What happened when industrialisation came into being? How did people get to differentiate? How did the patterns get into the industries? These questions were answered by a man named William Morris. He was the influential designer of the nineteenth century. He was also a scholar, environmental campaigner, writer and poet, political theorist, translator and publisher. He thought that there were enough art, paintings, poetry, etc. out there so he felt the need to revive art. He created a company in collaboration with a few others to create studios in which each person worked on images to create images using the older forgotten imagery or designs. He generally geometricized the images to give a design or motifs that could be repeated to create prints in the industries.

Basically by all this I understood that everything that we have today around us can be traced back and interlinked with a lot of chaotic history that once surrounded everything may it be the patterns, prints, motifs, the drapes, garment construction, etc. or even the fabrics that we have today.This was just half of what was discussed in class. It was too much for me to digest in just one class.