February 2024 - Handmade to High Fashion

A dyeing workshop in Ahmedabad, India in Autumn of 2003. Marian attended the workshop and may even have been an instructor in her particular style. The techniques learned in this workshop would go on to inform her 2004 and 2005 collections.

It’s sort of funny how January felt like it took 100 years but February was gone in an instant. How is it already March? Time flies.

Writing

I have made basically no progress on the writing front since Jan. I did have a lovely meeting with my supervisory committee, who said it was a strong start and that I’m bang on track (hooray!). They’re recommended I present something at a conference and conduct one oral history interview before I can apply for transfer and become a doctoral candidate rather than just a postgraduate researcher. I’m pushing hard to get the approvals to start the interviews, and I’ve applied for a conference as well! More to come if I get accepted, but cross your everything for me!

Ahmedabad Case Study

The picture for this month’s newsletter comes from a bunch of slides Marian saved labelled “Ahmedabad”. Ahmedabad is a city in Gujarat, India. Marian had visited Ahmedabad in 1997 for the 2nd International Shibori Symposium, but returned in 2004. While there, she attended a dyeing workshop and took plenty of photos. The techniques used in these workshops would later go on to directly inspire some of her design choices for the 2004/05 Fall collections of Clayden Inc.

In this image, workshop instructors or attendees take previously dyed materials and embellish them with small sequins. The style of wrapping the fabric up to prevent dye transfer is known in Gujarat as bandhani, whence we get the English word “bandana”. It is similar to shibori, the Japanese term for similar resist-dyeing techniques.

Here we see an unknown workshop attendant displaying some sample fabric drying in the sun. Notice (if you can, Squarespace makes these pictures tiny) the bunching of fabric in tiny groups.

Here we can see a Clayden garment called “Artisan Blouse” from the Fall 2004 collection. Notice the bunched and dyed pieces, and the small squares on the shoulders. Both of these can be seen in the workshop as techniques later used by Marian in her design of the 2004 collection.

Another of the workshop’s outputs. In this case a stitch resist using thread has been employed to achieve a difference resist pattern. This is often called tritik, an Indonesian term for stitch resisting. Pay special attention to the colours and straight-line patterns.

This blouse is from Clayden Inc’s Fall 2005 collection, and the direct inspiration from the Ahmedabad workshop colours and patterns could not be more clear.

Keen eyes will notice, however, that the resist pattern is far more symmetrical and regular than the individual hand-stitched lines in the workshop image. This is likely as a result of Clayden Inc industrialising the handicraft portion to be a clamp-resist. The regularity of the plastic clamps to produce easily repeated results increases Clayden Inc’s ability to standardise some of its garments, and also means a lot less effort to make them at production scale.

This image depicts “Float Dress”, a Clayden classic from the Fall 2004 collection. The design here is further removed from the designs seen in the workshop, but Marian included this image in the middle of the Ahmedabad workshop slides. I choose to interpret this as the direct attribution of the design principles of this dress to the workshop Marian attended.