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CONTENTS INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 13 HOW TO Make a tide beret from Knitting from the North By Hilary Grant 15 HYGGE A heart-warming lesson from Denmark By Polly Leonard 62 SHOP TALK Jane Audas goes shopping at The Shop Floor Project 74 LOFTY AMBITION Fibre from the roof of the World By Sarah E. Braddock Clarke GLOBAL textiles from around the world 16 FIERCE AS FOLK Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann 32 PERENNIAL PRINTS Josef Frank’s Striking Botanicals By Lesley Jackson 36 HAND ME DOWN Friends of Handicraft Combine Tradition and Innovation By Susanna Strömquist 46 COLD COMFORT Keeping warm in Siberia Photographs and text by Bryan Alexander 68 UP THE MOUNTAIN FOR DOWN June Cashmere Unlocks a Kyrgyz Treasure Chest By Amy P. Swanson ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 22 NIGHT BLOOMS Fashion is suffering from a case of Tulip Fever By Kate Cavendish 26 ROYAL OPERATION Inside the wardrobe at the Royal Opera House By Liz Hoggard 96 SWATCH Favourite Fabric No.34: Burel Felt By Sarah Jane Downing, illustrated by Georgina McAusland ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 44 ALPINE INSPIRATION Moncler’s subversive yet traditional collection By Nicola Donovan 64 PERMANENT COLLECTION The philosophy behind Korean label Oma By Jessica Hemmings 70 GO WITH THE FLOW Annemarie O’Sullivan’s aesthetics of movement By Ptolemy Mann, photographs by Alun Callender CONCEPT textiles in fine art 38 UNRAVELLING TRADITION Carpets in contemporary Art By Cosima Stewart 57 THE GOSPEL TRUTH Ethel Mairet picking up the threads of tradition By Donna Steele INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 31 FLORAL FREEDOMS Printing the past and the future By Grace Warde-Aldam 54 ACTING THE GOAT Vedat Demiralp’s Revival of Turkish Rugs By Ptolemy Mann COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 60 HANDSPUN Thibault Van Der Straete spins a good yarn By Anne Laure Camilleri, photographs by Kristin Perers p20/21 ROYAL OPERATION Inside the Wardrobe at the Royal Opera House I’m in the basement of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden looking at costume treasures. Here are the thirty-six snowflake tutus for The Sleeping Beauty, double-layered and decorated with elaborate detailing. There’s the sweeping blue cloak worn by the mysterious magician Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker, with its trick pockets for his magic tricks. I wander past rails of soldiers’ tunics, dresses for garland girls and even a wolf outfit, where the tail neatly passes through a hole in the tights, allowing the dancer full body movement. It’s a wonderful insight into the backstage life of The Royal Ballet. The Royal Opera House is home to the largest collection of theatre costumes in the UK. Each year it lays on over fifty productions on its main stage alone. No wonder head of costume Fay Fullerton presides over a one hundred strong team (plus around sixty freelancers), with a department that extends over four floors of the building. With nearly everything – from props to dresses to wigs – made on site, the process involves long hours spent handcrafting each bespoke garment. Costumes are made to last (some are still being used by the Royal Ballet forty years later). For each revival they are brought out of storage and fitted to the new cast in the workshops at the Opera House. Tailors work from the ‘costume bible’, that details original designs and subsequent revivals, to make sure that costumes stay accurate to their original design. Faded colours are re-dyed, worn darning is repaired. Working on five to six opera and ballet productions at a time, carrying out around 6,000 fittings per season, it pays to plan ahead. They buy in a small number of costumes for some contemporary productions: but where possible, if a show is not in use any more costumes are recycled for other shows. Designing for live performance is different from designing for film because costumes have to be larger than life, so the audience can see them from any seat in the house. “Everything has to be more defined. with more depth to it. The colours also have to be stronger otherwise they just disappear on that stage,” explains Fay. “Costume tells the story,” she continues. “It develops the character, it plays a big part in the whole picture. But when performers go on stage they shouldn’t be thinking about the costume. As it should become part of their body.” Their most important job is to support the dancers. For ballet, the movement and lightness of the costumes is all important. For opera it’s more about the singer being able to breathe naturally. “Obviously the way period costume used to be made, they were a lot heavier than they are now,” Fay explains. “Techniques and fabrics change over the years. Most ballet bodies have a small element of stretch in them even if it’s velvet. Things have evolved quite quickly in terms of what we can do to make the dancers more comfortable.” They can fake a heavy suit of armour or a bulky Tudor gown so it looks heavy. “With the older productions in the repertoire, if they can’t find those fabrics anymore, we can copy them.” The Opera House has “an amazing dye department where they do printing, hand-painting, everything you need to develop a fabric” and a digital printing machine that prints anything you want. “You just take a picture and you can recreate it on fabric, be it velvet, silk, cotton, chiffon.” Six months before opening night, costume fittings start for the chorus and the corps de ballet. Principals’ fittings take place alongside rehearsals about six weeks before the first night. Once the costumes are made, they are then handed over to the ‘running’ team – who look after them for the duration of the shows, cleaning and preparing the costumes for each performance. The two big winter shows this year are The Nutcracker (with costumes designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman) and The Sleeping Beauty (with costumes inspired by Oliver Messel’s original designs). The cast for Sleeping Beauty is huge; most wear three different costumes on stage, plus ballets have different casts on different nights. “We’re talking about 400 costumes,” says Fay dryly. Fay studied fashion design and period costume at the London College of Fashion, then did a one year tailoring course. She joined the ROH as “the most junior costumier” in 1977, and worked her way up to her current post (she was appointed in 2013.) “I’ve worked in most areas of the Costume department, so I know how fabrics work, how they should be cut, what will work best for the dancers and singers – as soon as I look at a costume I know how much it will cost.” Fay is the queen of historic period costume, but she and her team also get to work on radical new ballets4 SELVEDGE 26 SELVEDGE 26 SELVEDGE 27 p26/27 HAND ME DOWN Friends of Handicraft combine Tradition and Innovation Friends of Handicraft, or Handarbetets vänner in Swedish, is an extraordinary textile institution with a rich and colourful history, intimately intertwined with the women’s rights movement and the innovation of textile art in Sweden since the late nineteenth century. Today, however, this combined textile studio and school is surprisingly little known among the general public. The historical building housing the institution is located in the beautiful Royal City Park Djurgården in Stockholm – the destination for Sunday walks and family picnics, and with popular neighbours like the Nordic Museum and Open Air museum Skansen – but until recently there were no signs whatsoever of the magic happening inside. Now, this is all about to change. A couple of years ago former Swedish Fashion Council CEO Lotta Ahlvar was brought in with a brief to raise the profile and relevance of the institution in contemporary culture. One of her first measures was to reopen the ground floor gallery and to reintroduce a shop, offering textile materials – primarily for the students of Friends of Handicraft – but also literature, sewing kits and craft objects. The beautiful little gallery – with huge display windows facing the street – now lures in passers-by with a wide range of textile art related exhibitions, including anything from Friends of Handicraft exam students to Swedish and international textiles art luminaries. “We are seeing a great resurgence of interest in textiles art today, for the first time since the hayday in the 70s,” Lotta Ahlvar says while showing me around the building. Apparently the somewhat odd height of the steps in the main staircase was once lowered to accommodate the floor-sweeping skirts of the ladies at the turn of the century. It is undeniably fascinating to imagine generation after generation of (mostly) women climbing these very stairs on their way either to the School of Friends of Handicraft or to the Studio. Sophie Adlersparre, one of the three founding members of Friends of Handicraft in 1874, had a clear vision for the enterprise. In a time of rapid industrialisation and a blossoming national romantic movement, her aim was to establish an institution for the preservation of traditional peasant textile craft. An institution that would collect samples of folklore textiles and also make sure that the ageold knowledge survived by making it relevant for contemporary life. Tradition and innovation, a dual ambition, is very much still in evidence today. Friends of Handicraft was also innovative in that it was the very first financial venture in Sweden to be run entirely by women. Sophie Adlersparre was an avid women's rights activist and as the founder of the women’s rights organisation Fredrika Bremerförbundet, as well as an editor of an influential woman’s magazine, she was an influential leader. At her side she had the artist and dress reform activist Hanna Winge, the first of many great artistic leaders that have pushed for creative and technical innovations while at the same time keeping traditions alive. During the golden years of Friends of Handicraft, in the mid twentieth century, the famous textile artist Edna Martin took the helm of the enterprise. The Studio of Friends of Handicraft is currently one of Europe’s few remaining studios for textile art and craft and the only one of its kind still in operation in the Nordic countries. The Studio employs six full-time weavers and needle workers (all women). The church and the military are the two main customers, keeping the studio busy with orders of ecclesiastical textiles and heraldic standards. When I visited, one of the master embroiderers was working on an impressive military standard. She told me that before it is ready and delivered, she will have spent about 1,500 hours working on it. On another stitching table a lavish gold needlework for the church is taking shape. One of the Studio’s claims to fame is, by the way, a beautiful 1911 standard for the international woman suffrage alliance, still in use today. Public artworks and collaborations with artists have always been of great importance to the institution and continue to be. Famous Swedish artists like Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn and Bruno Liljefors, at the turn of the century, then Siri Derkert, Karl-Axel Pehrson and Olle Baertling in the twentieth century and, today, Karin Mamma Andersson and Andreas Eriksson have all had their works realised by the skilled craftsmen at Friends of Handicraft. Some of the most famous grand-scale public textile art works produced by the Studio can be found in the Stockholm City Hall, the Swedish Parliament and the United Nations headquarters in New York. The School of Friends of Handicraft was established in 1881 as a weaving school and is today housed on the floor below the Studio, with classroom after classroom filled with wooden looms from the nineteenth century – still in use. Offering both full-time programs and short courses in advanced textile handicraft and textile art, the three-year full time program boasts forty-eight students per year, and it is growing increasingly popular. “We have seen a steady increase in applicants in recent years,” says Lotta. “And we have also been able to introduce a couple of new short courses this year, in shibori as well as silk shading and pearl embroidery.” A promising sign it would seem, of the imminent comeback for textile arts and crafts. ••• Susanna Strömquist www.hvtextil.se SELVEDGE 36 SELVEDGE 37 p36/37 Previous page left; Martin Roth, untitled persian rugs installation 2012 Previous page right; Liquid, Faig Ahmed, hand knotted carpet, 466 x 266cm 2014 Opposite; Rudolf Stingel Installation at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2013 Following page left; Suzan Drummen, Lighten up Bagage Hal Loods 6, Installation 6 x 4 meter, 2007 Following page right; Jason Seife, Quiet Mouth, Loud Hands acrylic and ink on canvas 152 x 100cm 2016 and woven across the gallery space.The skeletal carpet has been eviscerated, and destruction forms an important aspect of Ahmed’s inspiration. In a 2014 interview, he said of his work that it, “has given the carpet either new life or a total death because the old meaning was destroyed completely; but at the same time it’s got a whole new meaning.” It is tempting to side with ‘total death’. To make one piece, Recycled, Ahmed sought out an old, rare Azerbaijani carpet. He turned it into a sculpture of the recycling symbol suspended above the remains of the ancient, beautiful carpet, in tatters on the floor beneath. ltenburger, Courtesy the artist Atefan S The way Ahmed draws inspiration from carpets may seem simplistic. It is not innovative to take what is visually familiar and subvert it by reconfiguring it into a psychedelic, seemingly digitised warp. Yet his work reflects an unresolved tension of our age. Crafts such as weaving rely on a vocabulary of image and design which is prescribed by tradition. In the case of contemporary art, however, originality is paramount and subversion praised. Ahmed has described finding himself a ‘hostage to tradition’, a situation he answered with aesthetic violence. Whether ‘nothing perishes’ in Ahmed’s work, or if instead the death of tradition is the point, whether it represents destruction or deconstruction, carpets are the conceptual crux. Decay, in an earthier way, is also the theme of the artist Martin Roth. He lays valuable carpets on the floor of an exhibition space, cultivating beneath them a grass lawn.The palimpsest effect is not unbeautiful, but each layer will eventually destroy the other. Ephemerality and transience are conveyed pretty poignantly, but once again it is difficult to shake the impression that the aesthetic achievement is rather pyrrhic. At best, Roth’s work embraces the process of inevitable decay in a sensitive and poetic way.At worst, it is a desolate gimmick. Rudolf Stingel has also exploited the visual potential of textiles. His 2013 installation at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice covered the walls and floors of the building in Oriental carpet. Stingler’s installation is clever. It satisfies that key contemporary challenge: to alter the expected spatial relationship between artwork and viewer. Spreading over all interior surfaces, it produces an uncanny, enveloping, almost imprisoning aspect. Yet, similarly to Ahmed, Stingel’s work is not about the textile itself in a conventional way. Neither the deep red colour nor the stylised geometric designs and their probable origin are a real concern of the work. Stingel in fact hung his paintings on the carpeted walls, rendering the textiles a backdrop. Yet when oriental carpets were first brought to Venice, from the Byzantine and later the Ottoman Empire, they were not regarded academically. They were decorative objects of luxury. When used to effect in a palazzo the impact of such carpets perhaps remains the same, even in the hands of Stingel. 4 SELVEDGE 41 p 40/41 SELVEDGE 4
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COLD COMFORT Keeping warm in Siberia SHOP TALK NO 3 Jane Audas shopping at The Shop Floor Project This series of Shop Talk articles has been about shops you can walk into and experience the tactile pleasure of objects and the tacit pleasure of knowledgeable customer service. The other retail to appreciate is the visual, laid-back browsing experience of a great website. The Shop Floor Project website is run by mother and daughter Denise and Samantha Allan. Both are fine artists by training, and it shows in how their site looks and in the products they sell. The site isn’t your usual ecommerce offer. You can’t, for instance, filter stock by price. Instead they give us stories about makers, stories behind objects and then they photograph the objects in a suggestive manner, encouraging a ‘click to add to basket’ before you know it. The Allans are based in scenic Cumbria: with an online business you can live somewhere very pretty indeed and sell the world over.They describe what they do with Shop Floor as ‘curating, designing and co-curating’. The site began because they were both interested in how things were made and sourced. It was called The Shop Floor Project as at first they didn’t quite know how to define what they were hoping to do: hence ‘on the shop floor’ and ‘project’ as it allowed them time to form their selling practice. The stock selection is quirky and unapologetic too. It includes waxed cotton fisherman’s coats and armorial cutlery by Japanese designer Mitsuhiro Konishi; hand-woven baskets made by the women of the Tuareg, a nomadic African tribe; graphic Scottish lambswool blankets and painterly cushions featuring naive collages of writer’s houses by Amanda White; as well as other treasures. The site changes as stock comes and goes. Some products, however, are recurring, like sconces and chandeliers by Malin Appelgren and bird ceramics by Michaela Gall. Increasingly the Allans are designing and codesigning the products they sell, and have an adjacent business designing products for museums, which Samantha knows well from a previous work life.They have just designed new scarves inspired by ancient Greek and Roman glass in the British Museum. The names of the scarf colourways alone make them covetable – clay, plaster pink and rust. Product development takes anything from months to years but it is without a doubt worth the wait. The new animal paintings from cult Japanese artist Miroco Machiko were a long time coming – but how grand and dramatic they are. Pleasingly, they have smaller Miroco Machiko animal calendars for those of us saving up for a painting. Andrea Shemilt Kashanipour’s candlesticks are inspired by 19th century Staffordshire figures and they are joyous enough to perk up any mantelpiece. And Japanese maker Yukihiro Akama’s wooden houses, carved in Yorkshire, epitomise the unusual combinations present in many of the Shop Floor’s projects. The Allans have just celebrated their ten year anniversary running Shop Floor. That is a long life in Internet years. So many ‘lifestyle’ websites come and go. Mind you, ‘lifestyle’ is a grim word, reducing the things we live with to something here today, replaced tomorrow.A life lived with style is a different thing and is something The Shop Floor Project site can certainly help you with. ••• www.theshopfloorproject.com SELVEDGE 62 PERMANENT COLLECTION The philosophy behind the Korean label Oma LOFTY AMBITION Fibre from the roof of the world SELVEDGE 74 It covers eight time zones, stretches from the Ural Mountains in Western Russia to the Pacific coast in the Far East and takes about seven hours to fly across in a jet. Siberia is vast. From the air, much of the northern part of Siberia looks like a wilderness, seemingly endless forest and tundra interspersed by the occasional river, road, town or village. It may appear empty from the air, but it’s home to at least nineteen different groups of indigenous peoples. Some of these cultures have existed there for a thousand years or more. In the Soviet era they were often referred to as the ‘Small Peoples’, the name having more to do with their population than stature.Today, the smallest group are the Entsy, who number just 227 people, while the largest group is the Nenets who have a population of over 44,000. The primary activity of most of these northern Siberian peoples is reindeer breeding, along with hunting, trapping & fishing. It is fur from the reindeer they breed and the animals they hunt and trap, that provides them with the materials they need for making their traditional clothes. Siberia can be bitterly cold during the winter months when temperatures can plummet below -60°C, but native people cope with this by using fur for their winter clothes. Reindeer skin is used by peoples around the Arctic to make coats, parkas, trousers, boots, hats and mittens, as well as bags and household items. It is remarkably durable, as well as being windproof and water repellent. It also offers the best insulation against the cold and is much more effective than goose down or man-made fibres. The reason for this is that reindeer have a thick under fur close to their skin which traps air; and also, reindeer hairs are hollow which gives excellent insulation against even the severe cold of a Siberian winter. Most reindeer skin clothing is made from summer hides as the hair is shorter, making it less bulky. Making skin clothing is a lengthy process and there is a huge amount of work involved in preparing a reindeer skin for sewing. It has to be cleaned and any trace of fat or meat removed. The leather is then worked on using scrapers and other tools until it reaches a stage of softness that can be sewn easily. For items of clothing where just the4 p46/47 SELVEDGE 63 p62/63 “An object in a museum case... must suffer the denatured existence of an animal in the zoo,” observes Bruce Chatwin’s narrator in his novella Utz. “In any museum the object dies – of suffocation and the public gaze – whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch.” Chatwin’s Utz is speaking of porcelain, but he voices a sentiment that regularly troubles the revival of traditional craft skills. Museums archive examples but keeping skills and knowledge alive – rather than offering custodianship of objects – is a different challenge entirely. “I started to think about precious things,” explains the Korean designer Oma when I enquire about the origins of her eponymous design label. Based in Seoul, Oma now spends several months of each year overseeing hand production in the picturesque region of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. The launch of her first clothing collection in 2010 at the celebrated Livingstone Studio in Hampstead was prompted by her sense that traditional textile production methods in Korea were dying out. “I was ashamed to see ancient textile practices disappearing,” she explains; hand crafted textiles were visible “only in a museum or gallery – but not really alive.” Oma’s approach offers us an antidote to fast fashion, although she is quick to correct the assumption that fashion alone is the culprit.“It is not fashion and textiles only. All consumption is going so fast,” she reminds me, referring to our “speed obsessed environment”. Fast fashion is sold to us as an expansion of choice. Don’t like what you see this week? Come back next week: colours, hemlines and cuts will have changed. Bored with your look? Minimal investment can correct it all: bin everything and start again! Oma doesn’t subscribe to this logic, instead seeing that “mass production potentially narrows choice.” We may now be awash with volume, but as consumers we do not enjoy much variety of choice. In response to this quandary, Oma set about sourcing textiles made by hand that could become the basis of the collections she designs. “We work by hand as much as we can – it has different energy – a human spirit.” Admittedly, it is a business approach fraught with challenges. “There are very few artisans left in Korea,” she explains. A technical rather than hands-on education is popular throughout the region and traditional techniques do not – at least for now – interest many emerging Korean designers. (Oma’s own textile education in Korea focused on technology and she admits her interest as a student in studying natural dye recipes from the elderly women still practising was hardly a popular course of action at the time.) Today her inspiration continues to come from “an artisan’s way of working”. She sees the steps to textile production by hand such as spinning or weaving as “processes that are spiritual” and cites the Indian textile design company Raag as a model of inspiration, again taking the local but working with a sophisticated contemporary eye.4 p64/65 For centuries people have used animal hair or fleece for clothing without harming the animal who continues with its life. Such materials can be found in all sorts of wild terrains including the steppes, sierras and plateaux of the world’s highest mountains. Tengri is a luxury, yet sustainable, fashion label designed in London and made in the UK and USA using natural, undyed yak fibre from central Mongolia’s isolated mountainous Khangai region. It was founded in 2014: CEO Nancy Johnston trained as a social worker and lived with nomadic Mongolian herder families before setting up her company to perpetuate their community and culture. She is engaged in this ethical fairshare business with 4,500 nomadic herder families, thinking long term about conservation and the Mongolian environment – its people, traditions and ecology. ‘Tengri’ appropriately signifies the sky god that protects humans and the beauty of the earth. Living above the snowline, the yak has a thick coat with shaggy, long hair. At the onset of winter it produces dense soft down as an extra layer of protection – this is collected by hand-combing once a year during the seasonal moult. Yak fibre has many inherent properties that make it desirable – lightweight, strong, insulating, breathable, elastic, hypoallergenic, lustrous, pill, odour and water resistant – it is ultimately weatherproof. Nancy Johnston has teamed up with Italian knitwear designer Carlo Volpi to make clothing and accessories using this precious material that is often compared to cashmere. The wonderful colouration of the indigenous semi-wild Kanghai yaks takes precedence as Tengri avoid damaging bleach and dye chemicals; preferring instead the natural colours ranging from the deepest blacks through chocolate browns, tans and greys to pure white and even (but rarely) gold. By keeping the Tengri label small and using mainly British manufacturers, Nancy can better oversee the spinning, knitting and tailoring processes. www.tengri.co.uk 4 SELVEDGE 75 p 74/75 EVENTS dates for your diary AS YOU SEW – SEW SHALL YOU REAP: Re-cycle, Re-use and Re-think Textile production, A symposium in association with Bucks New University, 15 July ETHEL MAIRET LIVING LEGACY: Natural dyeing and weaving masterclass at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, 3-7 April SPRING FAIR The Bath Assembly Rooms, Bennett St, Bath BA1 2QH, 25 March SUMMER FAIR The Dovecot,10 Infirmary St, Edinburgh EH1 1LT, 19 August AUTUMN FAIR Charleston, Firle, Lewes, East Sussex, BN8 6L WIN gifts and offers for our readers 80 SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS This issue the first 100 three-year subscribers will receive pieces from Kaffe Fassett’s cosmetics range, together worth £53 83 PRIZES THIS ISSUE A chance to win a wool and silk Botanical Inlay shawl, worth £125 along with a hand-beaten brass Wall Sconce by Malin Appelgren, worth £265 and a print from the 17th Century Paint Chart, from the Shop Floor Project: www.theshopfloorproject.com; A kindling basket made by Annemarie O’Sullivan, worth £310, www.annemarieosullivan.co.uk; A throw from Tengri, worth £225, www.tengri.co.uk INFORM the latest news, reviews and exhibition listings 03 BIAS /CONTRIBUTORS A letter from Polly Leonard and comments from our contributors 07 NEWS Unmade, From Sweden to Sardinia, Sidney Nolan, Weaving Futures, Kaffe Fassett, Kangan Arora, Grayson Perry 09 HOUSE OF CLOTH Wool, Cotton and Silk Khadi 80 SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS This issue the first 100 three-year subscribers will receive three pieces from Kaffe Fassett’s range of cosmetics, together worth £53. 82 BACK ISSUES Complete your collection while you still can! Many issues are sold out or have limited stock. All issues available for digital download. 84 READ Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters, Charles Fréger, reviewed by Marcella Echavarria. The Carpets of Afghanistan, Richard D. Parsons, reviewed by Helen Yardley. 86 VIEW On The Grid: Textiles and Minimalism: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, reviewed by Jo Ann C. Stabb. Cary Wolinsky: Fiber of Life, Fuller Craft Museum, reviewed by Joanne Dolan Ingersoll. Fiji Art & Life in the Pacific, The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, reviewed by Angela Youngman. Kimsooja: Archive of Mind, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea, reviewed by Jessica Hemmings. 95 COMING NEXT The Endeavour issue SELVEDGE ('selnid3) n. 1. finished differently 2. the non-fraying edge of a length of woven fabric. [: from SELF + EDGE] SELVEDGE 5

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CONTENTS

INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 13 HOW TO Make a tide beret from Knitting from the North By Hilary Grant 15 HYGGE A heart-warming lesson from Denmark By Polly Leonard 62 SHOP TALK Jane Audas goes shopping at The Shop Floor Project 74 LOFTY AMBITION Fibre from the roof of the World By Sarah E. Braddock Clarke

GLOBAL textiles from around the world 16 FIERCE AS FOLK Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann 32 PERENNIAL PRINTS Josef Frank’s Striking Botanicals By Lesley Jackson 36 HAND ME DOWN Friends of Handicraft Combine Tradition and Innovation By Susanna Strömquist 46 COLD COMFORT Keeping warm in Siberia Photographs and text by Bryan Alexander 68 UP THE MOUNTAIN FOR DOWN June Cashmere Unlocks a Kyrgyz Treasure Chest By Amy P. Swanson

ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 22 NIGHT BLOOMS Fashion is suffering from a case of Tulip Fever By Kate Cavendish 26 ROYAL OPERATION Inside the wardrobe at the Royal Opera House By Liz Hoggard 96 SWATCH Favourite Fabric No.34: Burel Felt By Sarah Jane Downing, illustrated by Georgina McAusland

ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 44 ALPINE INSPIRATION Moncler’s subversive yet traditional collection By Nicola Donovan 64 PERMANENT COLLECTION The philosophy behind Korean label Oma By Jessica Hemmings 70 GO WITH THE FLOW Annemarie O’Sullivan’s aesthetics of movement By Ptolemy Mann, photographs by Alun Callender

CONCEPT textiles in fine art 38 UNRAVELLING TRADITION Carpets in contemporary Art By Cosima Stewart 57 THE GOSPEL TRUTH Ethel Mairet picking up the threads of tradition By Donna Steele

INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 31 FLORAL FREEDOMS Printing the past and the future By Grace Warde-Aldam 54 ACTING THE GOAT Vedat Demiralp’s Revival of Turkish Rugs By Ptolemy Mann

COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 60 HANDSPUN Thibault Van Der Straete spins a good yarn By Anne Laure Camilleri, photographs by Kristin Perers p20/21

ROYAL OPERATION Inside the Wardrobe at the Royal Opera House

I’m in the basement of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden looking at costume treasures. Here are the thirty-six snowflake tutus for The Sleeping Beauty, double-layered and decorated with elaborate detailing. There’s the sweeping blue cloak worn by the mysterious magician Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker, with its trick pockets for his magic tricks. I wander past rails of soldiers’ tunics, dresses for garland girls and even a wolf outfit, where the tail neatly passes through a hole in the tights, allowing the dancer full body movement. It’s a wonderful insight into the backstage life of The Royal Ballet.

The Royal Opera House is home to the largest collection of theatre costumes in the UK. Each year it lays on over fifty productions on its main stage alone. No wonder head of costume Fay Fullerton presides over a one hundred strong team (plus around sixty freelancers), with a department that extends over four floors of the building. With nearly everything – from props to dresses to wigs – made on site, the process involves long hours spent handcrafting each bespoke garment.

Costumes are made to last (some are still being used by the Royal Ballet forty years later). For each revival they are brought out of storage and fitted to the new cast in the workshops at the Opera House. Tailors work from the ‘costume bible’, that details original designs and subsequent revivals, to make sure that costumes stay accurate to their original design. Faded colours are re-dyed, worn darning is repaired. Working on five to six opera and ballet productions at a time, carrying out around 6,000 fittings per season, it pays to plan ahead. They buy in a small number of costumes for some contemporary productions: but where possible, if a show is not in use any more costumes are recycled for other shows.

Designing for live performance is different from designing for film because costumes have to be larger than life, so the audience can see them from any seat in the house. “Everything has to be more defined. with more depth to it. The colours also have to be stronger otherwise they just disappear on that stage,” explains Fay. “Costume tells the story,” she continues. “It develops the character, it plays a big part in the whole picture. But when performers go on stage they shouldn’t be thinking about the costume. As it should become part of their body.” Their most important job is to support the dancers. For ballet, the movement and lightness of the costumes is all important. For opera it’s more about the singer being able to breathe naturally.

“Obviously the way period costume used to be made, they were a lot heavier than they are now,” Fay explains. “Techniques and fabrics change over the years. Most ballet bodies have a small element of stretch in them even if it’s velvet. Things have evolved quite quickly in terms of what we can do to make the dancers more comfortable.” They can fake a heavy suit of armour or a bulky Tudor gown so it looks heavy. “With the older productions in the repertoire, if they can’t find those fabrics anymore, we can copy them.” The Opera House has “an amazing dye department where they do printing, hand-painting, everything you need to develop a fabric” and a digital printing machine that prints anything you want. “You just take a picture and you can recreate it on fabric, be it velvet, silk, cotton, chiffon.”

Six months before opening night, costume fittings start for the chorus and the corps de ballet. Principals’ fittings take place alongside rehearsals about six weeks before the first night. Once the costumes are made, they are then handed over to the ‘running’ team – who look after them for the duration of the shows, cleaning and preparing the costumes for each performance. The two big winter shows this year are The Nutcracker (with costumes designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman) and The Sleeping Beauty (with costumes inspired by Oliver Messel’s original designs). The cast for Sleeping Beauty is huge; most wear three different costumes on stage, plus ballets have different casts on different nights. “We’re talking about 400 costumes,” says Fay dryly.

Fay studied fashion design and period costume at the London College of Fashion, then did a one year tailoring course. She joined the ROH as “the most junior costumier” in 1977, and worked her way up to her current post (she was appointed in 2013.) “I’ve worked in most areas of the Costume department, so I know how fabrics work, how they should be cut, what will work best for the dancers and singers – as soon as I look at a costume I know how much it will cost.” Fay is the queen of historic period costume, but she and her team also get to work on radical new ballets4

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HAND ME DOWN Friends of Handicraft combine Tradition and Innovation

Friends of Handicraft, or Handarbetets vänner in Swedish, is an extraordinary textile institution with a rich and colourful history, intimately intertwined with the women’s rights movement and the innovation of textile art in Sweden since the late nineteenth century.

Today, however, this combined textile studio and school is surprisingly little known among the general public. The historical building housing the institution is located in the beautiful Royal City Park Djurgården in Stockholm – the destination for Sunday walks and family picnics, and with popular neighbours like the Nordic Museum and Open Air museum Skansen – but until recently there were no signs whatsoever of the magic happening inside. Now, this is all about to change.

A couple of years ago former Swedish Fashion Council CEO Lotta Ahlvar was brought in with a brief to raise the profile and relevance of the institution in contemporary culture. One of her first measures was to reopen the ground floor gallery and to reintroduce a shop, offering textile materials – primarily for the students of Friends of Handicraft – but also literature, sewing kits and craft objects. The beautiful little gallery – with huge display windows facing the street – now lures in passers-by with a wide range of textile art related exhibitions, including anything from Friends of Handicraft exam students to Swedish and international textiles art luminaries.

“We are seeing a great resurgence of interest in textiles art today, for the first time since the hayday in the 70s,” Lotta Ahlvar says while showing me around the building. Apparently the somewhat odd height of the steps in the main staircase was once lowered to accommodate the floor-sweeping skirts of the ladies at the turn of the century. It is undeniably fascinating to imagine generation after generation of (mostly) women climbing these very stairs on their way either to the School of Friends of Handicraft or to the Studio.

Sophie Adlersparre, one of the three founding members of Friends of Handicraft in 1874, had a clear vision for the enterprise. In a time of rapid industrialisation and a blossoming national romantic movement, her aim was to establish an institution for the preservation of traditional peasant textile craft. An institution that would collect samples of folklore textiles and also make sure that the ageold knowledge survived by making it relevant for contemporary life. Tradition and innovation, a dual ambition, is very much still in evidence today.

Friends of Handicraft was also innovative in that it was the very first financial venture in Sweden to be run entirely by women. Sophie Adlersparre was an avid women's rights activist and as the founder of the women’s rights organisation Fredrika Bremerförbundet, as well as an editor of an influential woman’s magazine, she was an influential leader. At her side she had the artist and dress reform activist Hanna Winge, the first of many great artistic leaders that have pushed for creative and technical innovations while at the same time keeping traditions alive. During the golden years of Friends of Handicraft, in the mid twentieth century, the famous textile artist Edna Martin took the helm of the enterprise.

The Studio of Friends of Handicraft is currently one of Europe’s few remaining studios for textile art and craft and the only one of its kind still in operation in the Nordic countries. The Studio employs six full-time weavers and needle workers (all women). The church and the military are the two main customers, keeping the studio busy with orders of ecclesiastical textiles and heraldic standards. When I visited, one of the master embroiderers was working on an impressive military standard. She told me that before it is ready and delivered, she will have spent about 1,500 hours working on it. On another stitching table a lavish gold needlework for the church is taking shape. One of the Studio’s claims to fame is, by the way, a beautiful 1911 standard for the international woman suffrage alliance, still in use today.

Public artworks and collaborations with artists have always been of great importance to the institution and continue to be. Famous Swedish artists like Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn and Bruno Liljefors, at the turn of the century, then Siri Derkert, Karl-Axel Pehrson and Olle Baertling in the twentieth century and, today, Karin Mamma Andersson and Andreas Eriksson have all had their works realised by the skilled craftsmen at Friends of Handicraft. Some of the most famous grand-scale public textile art works produced by the Studio can be found in the Stockholm City Hall, the Swedish Parliament and the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The School of Friends of Handicraft was established in 1881 as a weaving school and is today housed on the floor below the Studio, with classroom after classroom filled with wooden looms from the nineteenth century – still in use. Offering both full-time programs and short courses in advanced textile handicraft and textile art, the three-year full time program boasts forty-eight students per year, and it is growing increasingly popular. “We have seen a steady increase in applicants in recent years,” says Lotta. “And we have also been able to introduce a couple of new short courses this year, in shibori as well as silk shading and pearl embroidery.” A promising sign it would seem, of the imminent comeback for textile arts and crafts. ••• Susanna Strömquist www.hvtextil.se

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Previous page left; Martin Roth, untitled persian rugs installation 2012 Previous page right; Liquid, Faig Ahmed, hand knotted carpet, 466 x 266cm 2014

Opposite; Rudolf Stingel Installation at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2013

Following page left; Suzan Drummen, Lighten up Bagage Hal Loods 6, Installation 6 x 4 meter, 2007 Following page right; Jason Seife, Quiet Mouth, Loud Hands acrylic and ink on canvas 152 x 100cm 2016

and woven across the gallery space.The skeletal carpet has been eviscerated, and destruction forms an important aspect of Ahmed’s inspiration. In a 2014 interview, he said of his work that it, “has given the carpet either new life or a total death because the old meaning was destroyed completely; but at the same time it’s got a whole new meaning.” It is tempting to side with ‘total death’. To make one piece, Recycled, Ahmed sought out an old, rare Azerbaijani carpet. He turned it into a sculpture of the recycling symbol suspended above the remains of the ancient, beautiful carpet, in tatters on the floor beneath.

ltenburger, Courtesy the artist

Atefan

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The way Ahmed draws inspiration from carpets may seem simplistic. It is not innovative to take what is visually familiar and subvert it by reconfiguring it into a psychedelic, seemingly digitised warp. Yet his work reflects an unresolved tension of our age. Crafts such as weaving rely on a vocabulary of image and design which is prescribed by tradition. In the case of contemporary art, however, originality is paramount and subversion praised. Ahmed has described finding himself a ‘hostage to tradition’, a situation he answered with aesthetic violence. Whether ‘nothing perishes’ in Ahmed’s work, or if instead the death of tradition is the point, whether it represents destruction or deconstruction, carpets are the conceptual crux.

Decay, in an earthier way, is also the theme of the artist Martin Roth. He lays valuable carpets on the floor of an exhibition space, cultivating beneath them a grass lawn.The palimpsest effect is not unbeautiful, but each layer will eventually destroy the other. Ephemerality and transience are conveyed pretty poignantly, but once again it is difficult to shake the impression that the aesthetic achievement is rather pyrrhic. At best, Roth’s work embraces the process of inevitable decay in a sensitive and poetic way.At worst, it is a desolate gimmick.

Rudolf Stingel has also exploited the visual potential of textiles. His 2013 installation at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice covered the walls and floors of the building in Oriental carpet. Stingler’s installation is clever. It satisfies that key contemporary challenge: to alter the expected spatial relationship between artwork and viewer. Spreading over all interior surfaces, it produces an uncanny, enveloping, almost imprisoning aspect. Yet, similarly to Ahmed, Stingel’s work is not about the textile itself in a conventional way. Neither the deep red colour nor the stylised geometric designs and their probable origin are a real concern of the work. Stingel in fact hung his paintings on the carpeted walls, rendering the textiles a backdrop. Yet when oriental carpets were first brought to Venice, from the Byzantine and later the Ottoman Empire, they were not regarded academically. They were decorative objects of luxury. When used to effect in a palazzo the impact of such carpets perhaps remains the same, even in the hands of Stingel. 4

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