Black, Sandy
By Design: Sustaining Culture in Local Environments
Issue #004, Winter, 2020 ISSN: 2581- 9410
Introduction The creation of textiles from animal, plant and man-made fibres through technologies of spinning, weaving, felting and knitting is fundamental to clothing, whether worn for utilitarian or more aesthetic purposes. The embellishment of basic cloth through dyeing, printing, beading and embroidery is a cornerstone of fashion, creating uniquely visual and tactile products for a clothing industry that has moved in the last century from handmade to machine manufactured, from elite to mass market, and from high value to disposable goods. Fashion has become a global industry, and clothes are now well travelled items with very brief lives. Perhaps surprisingly for such a fast-moving sector, fashion remains one of the last craft-based industries, that still relies for its mass production on skilled individual workers operating manually-controlled machinery. Whilst textile production is highly automated in industrialised countries, hand weaving and embroidery of cloth, and craft-based production of fashion accessories (bags, scarves, belts, jewellery, etc) is still significant in many countries in the global south, particularly for women, who form the majori...