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November 6, 2015

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Heritage fashionista spins old craft revival

By Xu Wenwen | November 6, 2015, Friday | Print Edition

EDITOR’S note:

CHINA’S time-honored arts and crafts traditions are being kept alive by a fresh crop of talented, young artists and designers. Across Hangzhou, these emerging artisans are adapting these ancient cultural products to suit modern tastes. Shanghai Daily’s Hangzhou Special is here to put the spotlight on these young innovators.

HERITAGE fashion revivalist Zheng Fenlan consulted 22 people a decade ago about whether they liked the idea of her starting a brand under which she would sell tubu clothes (homespun clothes). None of them said yes. “No one wears it or weaves it today,” they said.

However, Zheng, then 30-years-old and from a village in Pan’an, Zhejiang Province, where every woman weaves, made up her mind to be the person to try the idea. “Countryside cuisine was getting popular in China at the time and I believed there would be a boost for countryside homespun,” she said.

Tubu is the name of fibers made by spinning thread, weaving on a loom and then coloring with plant dye. Most of the fibers are made of cotton thread, with linen or silk sometimes weaved in. It is healthy, breathable, and features various colors from natural fruits and leaves. Grids and jacquard are common patterns.

In past generations, clothes made this way were worn in almost every countryside household in China. In Zheng’s village, before the 1990s when synthetic fibers replaced clothes made in a more time-consuming way, it was common to see a villager wearing clothes made of tubu by mothers, wives or children. Zheng herself only stopped wearing the homespun clothes when she went to Hangzhou city for college.

After the village girl graduated, she worked for years in a Hangzhou fashion brand while continuing to study design and business management. Noticing that many fashion items looked similar, she thought about reviving tubu which by then had become rarely worn.

Zheng returned to her home village where it was an advantage that the surviving looms continued to be used by villagers to meet tubu orders from Japan. She bought rolls of fabric and started to establish her “Fashion in China” business that sells clothing in both Western and Chinese styles made solely of tubu.

However, the business did not go smoothly at the start. Designing fashion items that match the homespun’s texture was a long process, and there was the added challenge that homespun costs more to make than synthetic fabrics because it’s more time-consuming and the weave is narrower. The final products were, therefore, more expensive.

Zheng eventually solved the problem by producing children’s wear. The limited width of the fabric was no more a problem, and the cloth’s healthy, natural features were an advantage. All Zheng’s children’s clothes cost from 100 yuan (US$15.76) to 300 yuan.

As the business grew toward sales of a million yuan, the ambitious and far-sighted woman also became a protector of folk weaves.

Today almost 1,000 women in different villages of China produce material for “Fashion in China” which is made into Chinese, Western or fusion-style dresses and suits.

“I protect this traditional technique by using it to serve modern people’s life,” said Zheng. As the business grew, it started to produce adult fashion items generally priced from 1,000 yuan to 2,000 yuan. It now also makes bedding and bags.

To even further protect traditional culture, Zheng started a DIY program in stores last year and so far around 20,000 people have participated. People can learn how to weave fabric on a wooden loom, how to dye clothes with tea water or fruit juices, and even how to make a scarf. “Fashion in China” is now listed in the Zhejiang Province Intangible Cultural Heritage Program, and Zheng herself is its tubu-weaving technique representative.

Hangzhou


 

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