Reading Between The Folds

Traditional textiles play a major role in creating an identity. A piece of fabric can communicate a lot about the culture, history, geography, occupation and character of the person wearing it as well as the place from which it has originated. In today’s class, we learnt the process of how to read cloth by answering the 4W’s and H.

We were divided into groups and given a traditional fabric from Africa. The only information we were provided with was which part of Africa the textile originated from. The rest was up to us to figure out. This was interesting as it really enabled us to study the fabric’s qualities such as the patterns painted on it, the material used, the techniques, dyes, ornamentation etc.

From reading Yuko Tanaka’s comparative study of textile production and trading (16^th century to the end of the 19th century), I can see how textiles has played such a vital role among Asian and European countries. Apart from being an important commodity for trade and cultural exchange, it also communicates the everyday life values from different historical eras.

Each country has their own traditional textiles, motifs, patterns, methods etc. However the article spoke of how the blending and trading of ideas and the combination of conventional and non-conventional aspects led to the diverse variety of textiles present today. For instance, although Chinese and Indian textiles were different from one another, the Japanese was almost like a merger of the two, taking inspiration from not only them but other south East Asian countries as well. The ‘Suji’ or simple striped pattern that later developed into an array of stripes in various colours called ‘Shima’ was one of Japan’s oldest and famous motif (post Edo period). The Shima pattern is another example of how much a textile can communicate about a person. Similar to the African mud cloth, the Shima stripes reveal age, gender, class of the person, attractiveness, personality type, economic status and elegance.

The whole concept of being able to read cloth like it’s a book without pages and finding reams about an individual just by looking at their attire intrigues me and has opened my eyes to the deeper and more meaningful qualities that textiles has to offer.