Latest news with #textiles
Irish Times
a day ago
- Lifestyle
- Irish Times
From Malin to Milan: Donegal tweed gets an international twist at Dublin show
Stories are embedded in what we wear; language and cloth are intricately connected. The words text and textile come from the Latin texere, to weave. Fabric and fabricate come from fabrica – something skillfully produced. The words lingerie, lining and linoleum all originate in linen. We talk of life 'hanging by a thread', being 'on tenterhooks' or 'spinning a yarn'. The drive to establish textiles as a fine art movement began in the 1960s and has gathered momentum all around the world. A major new exhibition in Dublin Castle places international fibre artists from the Milan -based collective Fringe and their invited guests alongside Wild Donegal Tweed, a recent collaboration between five Irish tweed companies and the fashion and textile students of NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in Rome. The Fine Art of Textile exhibition is curated by Milan-based Irish artist Nuala Goodman. She points out that the last two Venice Biennales have sanctioned the shift of textiles from the marginal confines of 'low art', relegated to being a homely practice and mainly the prerogative of women, to a phenomenon that travels to the heart of the art system and market. This was confirmed by the extraordinary work of Olga de Amaral at the Cartier Foundation in Paris recently. Such popularity has been attributed to the changing face of recent art history and the work of dedicated scholars, curators and critics. READ MORE In May, Art News reported that the New York art scene has been 'fibre bombed' with textile exhibitions not only in institutions such as MOMA but also in blue chip commercial galleries. Dealers are responding to the work of international curators so that weaving, embroideries and other textiles formerly classified as craft or denigrated as women's work are now being reassessed. The French modernist Sonia Delaunay once said, 'For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work', illustrating how artists across the past century have bridged the gap between painting and textile art. Stitched Book by Maria Lai Colomba Leddi, Panel in blue, digital print on cotton Life is Short by Lisa Farmer Wild Tapestry 21, 2021, by Nuala Goodman Goodman, who had the idea for the exhibition on her mind for years, believes the creative disciplines of painting, sculpture, textile, design and architecture have always been of equal value. 'I see no hierarchy. Many of the international artists in the exhibition are incorporating one or more of these media into their works,' she says. The Wild Donegal Tweed project, by the students of NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in Rome The Wild Donegal Tweed project, by the students of NABA The Wild Donegal Tweed project, by the students of NABA The Wild Donegal Tweed project, by the students of NABA 'There is a special place in my heart for textile, for there is something free and intuitive about it. It is wonderful also to show the contemporary twists on traditional Donegal tweed in the work of young international design and fashion students in Rome.' [ Dream weavers: Donegal tweed inspires younger talent to make new 'music' in cloth Opens in new window ] The Fine Art of Textile opens at the Coach House Gallery in Dublin Castle next Friday, June 6th and runs until August 24th. There will be an embroidery talk and workshop on Saturday, June 7th. See See @fineartoftextile on Instagram or for details.
News24
2 days ago
- Business
- News24
Turkish crackdown on Africans, higher prices stall 'suitcase trade'
• For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page. Porters roam the narrow streets of Laleli in central Istanbul carrying parcels ready for shipment to customers all over the world. The maze of alleys that lead down to the Sea of Marmara have long been the centre of the "suitcase trade" to sub-Saharan Africa, a route through which merchants carry goods back and forth in their baggage. But Laleli's informal shipping scene, once a bustling hub of cross-continental trade, is now facing growing pressure from rising costs and tougher residency rules imposed by Turkish authorities. African traders, who helped drive demand for Turkish goods through the "kargo" system -- small-scale shipping services between Turkish wholesalers and buyers across Africa - say business has slumped, even as official export figures continue to rise. While some still make round trips, most trade now moves through shipping services. For agents like Fadil Bayero -- a Cameroonian who runs a kargo business that ships clothing, cosmetics and home textiles from Turkey to clients across Africa -- business is slow. Turkish products have a very good reputation in Africa, he said. "Before this room was filled to the ceiling. Today it is half-empty," the 39-year-old said. Like many Africans in the neighbourhood, he claimed that shipments have dropped, even as Turkish exports to Africa have generally soared -- from $11.5 billion (R207 billion) in 2017 to $19.4 billion last year. Turkish textiles, once known for their affordability, have grown more expensive in recent years. Merchants say inflation -- above 35 percent since late 2021 -- has pushed African buyers toward cheaper suppliers in China and Egypt. But for Bayero, the explanation lies elsewhere. "It's not inflation that's the problem, it's the arrests. Many people have been deported," he said. Since 2022, Turkey's migration policy has toughened, with the authorities blocking new residence permit applications in several districts of Istanbul, including Fatih, where Laleli is located. The goal is to limit the proportion of foreigners to 20 percent per neighbourhood. "The stores, the streets, everything is empty now," said Franck, one of Bayero's colleagues. "Look out the window -- the sellers sit all day drinking tea while waiting for customers." A few streets away, Shamsu Abdullahi examined his spreadsheets. In his dimly lit room, dozens of bundles are stacked on the white tiled floor, awaiting shipment. Since January, he and his two colleagues have shipped over 20 tons of goods by air freight and filled the equivalent of 15 maritime containers. The Nigerian has also made around 15 round trips to his homeland, bringing 80 kilos (176 pounds) of goods with him on each journey. "My residence permit expires in two months, and I think the authorities won't renew it," he said. He and his associates generate over a million euros a year in revenue. "It's money spent in Turkey that fuels the local economy," he said. Historian Issouf Binate, a lecturer at Alassane Ouattara University in the Ivory Coast, said much of the trade is informal, making it hard to track. "It's difficult to provide figures on the volume of Turkey's exports to Africa because many businesses are informal," he said. "Kargos" are "transitional businesses", with improvised activity shared between friends or family members. Many in Laleli now believe that the golden age of the "kargo" and suitcase trading is over. "In one year we went from about three tons of shipments per week to 1.5," said a young Congolese who has lived in Istanbul for five years and asked not to be named. "Even if we still manage to find low-cost products, we cannot compete with China," he added. Arslan Arslan, a Turkish merchant who sells African dresses a few metres (yards) away, painted the same picture. "Before, I had customers from morning to evening... but the authorities sent them back." Now Arslan searches for his African customers on social media. "I'm on Telegram, Instagram, Facebook. But here, everything has become expensive," he said. "I've lost 70 percent of my revenue in a year."
BBC News
2 days ago
- Lifestyle
- BBC News
Red dress created by hundreds of women to be displayed at Woven textile festival
A dress embroidered by 380 people from across the world is to go on display as part of a month-long celebration of Red Dress is a project led by artist Kirstie Macleod, which began in 2009 and involved work by 367 women and girls, 11 men and boys and two non-binary people from 51 will be displayed in Yorkshire for the first time as part of Woven, a biennial festival celebrating textile heritage crafts in Macleod said she was excited to be showcasing the piece at Oakwell Hall in Birstall. She said: "Oakwell Hall looks absolutely breathtaking. It has its own history and tradition, so it will be interesting to see The Red Dress in such a space."It's brilliant that they have this festival. I haven't been to an equivalent - a whole month of textile based happenings and events is fantastic." The Red Dress exhibition, which coincides with World Stitch Day on Sunday, will be the first time the item has been on display since Ms Macleod published a book about the tells the story of the dress's creation, as well as some of the stories of the people involved in creating 23 women have worn the dress, Ms Macloed said, but she has turned down many requests from people wanting to borrow it."You have to have contributed to the project to be able to wear the dress," she said."I really wanted it to have this very kind of strong, empowered feeling to it, but also hopefully be quite timeless."I have had so many people asking to wear it for various performances, weddings, even a coronation, but I said no because I'm trying to keep the focus of the project on the embroiderers and their stories."There was one curator from Bosnia who wore it and then a politician from Kosovo who was connected, otherwise it's all the embroiderers who have worn it."Woven festival runs from 1 to 30 June and is run by Kirklees Council. It was established in 2019 and takes place every other theme for 2025 is Connecting Culture, with more than 100 events designed to bring communities Natalie Walton said it would be the most "inclusive and diverse festival to date"."We're really excited to empower and connect communities together through the universal language of textiles, celebrating our rich heritage while looking toward the innovative future of the industry in the area," she said. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Times
The woman making $2,000 shaggy chandeliers
As we look up at the gigantic shaggy 'creatures' hanging above us, Angela Damman smiles. 'They are dramatic,' she admits. 'They sort of take on their own personality.' We're gazing at the latest surreal-looking chandeliers that the American textile designer is creating in the studio of her 22-acre Mexican hacienda. It's located outside a rural village 40 minutes from Merida, the capital of the Yucatan. The Yucatan peninsula is known today for its idyllic beaches and Mayan ruins. Less known is that until the early 1900s, the Yucatan supplied 90 per cent of the world's rope thanks to a native agave plant called henequen. When the Spanish arrived, they referred to the plant as 'green gold' — until the money dried up in the early 20th century with the invention of synthetic fibres. When Damman moved here with her husband and two children in 2011, the plan was to do up the splendid yet dilapidated hacienda surrounded by lush jungle. (The ruined haciendas of the Yucatan are a legacy from the henequen boom.) But one day Damman, a former environmental consultant, noticed a man wearing a sabucan, a traditional Mayan field worker's cross-body bag. She was fascinated to learn not just that this woven bag was created from the famous 'green gold' but that the plant was still growing in the grounds of her family's new hacienda. 'I've always loved natural materials and the concept of seeking new ideas within existing commodities,' says the 55-year-old, who grew up on a family farm in Minnesota. Her father started one of the first grassroots ethanol fuel plants in the US using corn that was stockpiled and rotting because of the market crisis in the 1980s. An idea was forming — but she had no clue how to work with this spiky agave. It seemed as if knowledge of handcrafting the plant had become extinct. But Damman didn't give up. 'I asked my housekeeper and she found an old lady called Doña Felipa who'd been weaving henequen fibres for nearly 80 years. Her grandmother taught her when she was 12, back in the days before anyone dreamt of petrochemical synthetic threads.' With Doña Felipa's help, Damman learnt how the plant fibres were used for craft. It's a long process that involves extracting the fibres, drying them in the sun and boiling them in a cauldron over an outdoor wood fire. Afterwards comes hand-combing and colouring with organic dyes from local trees and plants. The final fibre resembles luxuriant lengths of horsehair that are then woven into textiles using portable back-strap looms. Damman then uses this superfine textile to make handbags and home decor items. As well as weaving the fibres into textiles, she also began to experiment with using the raw fibres for conceptual pieces such as the chandeliers. When business took off and Doña Felipa couldn't keep up with the textile orders, Damman co-sponsored a weaving school called the Maya Youth Artisan Initiative, which teaches young women from local communities this ancient craft. 'At first the young women weren't convinced about learning the ancient skills,' Damman says. 'Traditionally, henequen weaving didn't make much money.' She explained that the items they'd be making would earn them more because they would be reaching a higher market. She then took them to the Mayan World Museum in Merida to inspire them. 'What began as an idea to work with local plants became my life's passion,' Damman explains. 'Our goal is to support both the land and the rural communities.' She now grows fibrous plants on five acres of her property (with friends in a nearby village growing a couple more acres for her) and works with about 30 Mexican artisans and workers. Her bags and home decor items are popular, but the shaggy-chic chandeliers are her bestsellers, and cost from $2,350. 'They really are something different. You wouldn't find them in a regular lighting catalogue.' They form super-sized statement pieces in the new Noa Santos-designed Banana Republic flagship store in New York, and diners at the Los Mochis restaurants in London can eat ceviche under stretches of Damman's reimagined Yucatan green gold. One chandelier requires about 40,000m of fibre and takes more than three months to produce. Another plant that Damman uses is Sansevieria, or mother-in-law's tongue, since its fibres are softer and finer than henequen. It also happens to be one of the highest oxygen-producing plants in the world. Alongside their extraordinary shape, Damman's sculptural 'creatures' give off a unique luminosity because each plant fibre is different from the next. At this year's Mexico City Art Week she premiered a chandelier from a new series, From the Underworld. Its atmospheric colours of orange and red glowed as if they were dipped in a gentle fire of hell. The piece's inspiration is the Ceiba tree, which in Mayan belief symbolises a sacred conduit between the underworld and the heavens. 'This one really feels alive to me,' she says, 'as though it's coming out of the ground and reaching for the skies.' The concept is linked with Damman's own spiritual journey, although she jokes that her children say it looks like something from outer space, but she's fine with that. 'I love all the interpretations,' she says. 'When you keep it simple, it seems to open up the imagination.' Damman's works are for sale in London at the Sarah Myerscough Gallery,
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Faribault Mill Is An Inspiring Story Of Industrial Rebirth
The "new" mill building in Faribault, Minnesota, which dates back to 1892. To the people who say you can't bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., that nobody here in the States wants to do textile work anymore, and that services are the country's future, the folks at Faribault Mill say, 'Hold our beer.' The company, privately held since merging with the investment-minded clothing firm CircleRock in 2020, came back from being shut down, flooded, and ready to be dismantled to ramping up production once again, combining the area's old-school know-how and an investment in modern equipment to forge a whole new business model. A rich history Part of the strength of Faribault Mill is its history. The year was 1865, and the Civil War was just drawing to its close. In little Faribault, Minnesota, about 50 miles south of the Twin Cities, German immigrant Carl H. Klemer was starting up a business that would become the Faribault Woolen Mill Company, with the original horse-powered mill operating as a wool carding factory that made raw local wool into wool batting—layers of interlocked fibers used for quilting. In 1872, the company's offerings would be expanded to include cloth, flannel, and wool blankets. In 1892, the company would move into a new mill there in Faribault, trading their actual horsepower for hydropower that better accommodated the growing business. Their wool blankets would provide the company with a huge sales opportunity when America entered World War I in 1917. Over the country's year-and-a-half involvement in the fighting, Faribault would provide our soldiers with about 100,000 blankets. Faribault had strong sales growth between the wars as department stores took the country by storm. That accelerated after the Second World War ended, as the US became increasingly prosperous in the post-war boom. The company began using imported wool from Australia and New Zealand and continued to innovate in new products, designs and colors, as well as advances that included washable wool and moth-proofed offerings. Business expansions into areas such as blankets for airplanes and hotels helped grow the bottom line too. Faribault's Cabin Wood Throw blanket is characteristic of the company's superior quality, upmarket ... More product direction. But the new millennium brought big trouble. Textile producers across America were either offshoring their production or shutting down completely. Faribault soldiered on longer than most, but the business was sold in 2001, ending 136 years of ownership by the family of founder Carl Klemer. In 2009, the industry trends appeared to finally catch up with the company. The factory was closed, employees were laid off, and the plant's equipment was tagged to be sold overseas. Rising from the dead But then along came Chuck Mooty, former CEO of International Dairy Queen, and his cousin, attorney Paul Mooty. They reopened the business in 2011 as a family venture, which included bringing Chuck's son John on as marketing director. They envisioned a big opportunity to leverage the high quality of the company's products to move their marketing upscale. They relaunched with about 30 employees and new commercial customers such as high-end New York hotels that included the Hudson and the Waldorf-Astoria and helped along by a large but brief flurry of demand from JC Penney. The group's business recovery plans were progressing when the newly revitalized company merged with CircleRock, then an American-made men's clothing company. 'They were looking for a new group of investors, kind of a different direction for the company in February of 2020, and that's when we got the deal done,' Ross Widmoyer, a co-founder of CircleRock who now serves as CEO of Faribault Mill, told me in an interview. 'We've been working hard over the past couple years to right the ship and point us in the right direction,' added Rick Dow, the company's Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. 'Three straight years of record growth has us all pretty excited about where we're headed.' Rehiring expert workers One of the first challenges in restarting the mill dated back to the original group that tackled the problems, and that was quickly regaining the expertise they needed to operate. Dow explained, 'When the group out of the Twin Cities that bought the assets of the mill came down to Faribault, they went around town knocking on doors of people who used to work at the mill to say, 'Can you come over and tell us what this machine is? Does this machine work? If it does work, do you know how to operate it? If the answer to all three of those questions is yes, yes, yes, you're hired.' And that's the kind of heavy lifting of reviving this mill.' They also tapped into the network of their newer team members. 'What we did is found a core nucleus of younger workers who had joined us over the previous few years and sat them down and said, 'Who do you know that's smart, who's curious, who's creative, who would like to work in a fun environment, who may be doing something totally different?' explained Widmoyer. 'And let's start talking, because good people hang out with good people, and we can train them and give them a career path. And that's what we did. And so if you look at our workforce right now, we've really bucked the trend. Right now, our average age is somewhere in the 30s on our manufacturing floor.' Faribault Mill CEO Ross Widmoyer chats with a team member on the factory floor. Another part of the workforce strategy was knowledge capture, involving both the company's most knowledgeable employees and its broader business network. 'Frankly, we know we've partnered with experts around the globe,' Dow said. 'We've got loom experts, color experts and others internally that can pass along some of their knowledge to the next generation of workers, and for the areas where we don't have experts, the production team has done a really good job bringing in outside experts to show us how to optimize things.' Bold new investment An especially bold move by the new owners has been their enormous investment in new production equipment. 'We knew when we came in we were going to have to make a significant investment in new production equipment,' said Widmoyer. 'A multi-million-dollar investment in new looms, a new state of the art industrial tenter dryer, nappers, fulling machines, and so you know that not only has allowed us to have our team spend more time actually making product as opposed to fixing machine, but it's also allowed us to retain and recruit a much younger workforce.' 'I think one of the things that has hurt the American industry has been the lack of ability to really do that kind of investment,' Robert Antoshak, VP of global strategic sourcing and development at Gray Matter Concepts and a textile industry expert, told me in an interview. 'They can't keep up. So you walk into some of these plants and they're pretty old and they're just not running efficiently. They don't keep up the maintenance, that kind of thing. It's really a tough story. So to see something like this is just really exciting.' A final big recent move was the expansion of the business into another natural fiber, cotton, through the 2022 purchase of Maine's Brahms Mount, a much younger fellow blanket maker founded in 1983. The team saw that as a great merging of traditional regional cultures that share the made-in-America ethic. In the end, though, it all comes down to the people. 'We've been really fortunate to have second, third and fourth generation craftspeople at our place,' said Dow. 'One of my favorite stories is there's a woman up on our third floor cut and sew area who just had a baby, and her grandparents met while working on that very same floor where she works today. So, you know, it's the fourth generation that we welcomed into the Faribault family, which is really, really neat.' I think that's a terrific model for a lot of manufacturing,' said Antoshak. 'It has to be more than a niche. It's understanding what your what market is, how to reach that market. It's more important than ever, how to do it to different channels. Yeah, it's also more than just a Made-in-USA story. I think it's that local story, going to get the workers back. I think that will resonate and translate not only to more attention for the company, but to more sales.'
