Tai-dai and other crafts: Why designers are carried away by dyeing fabrics
Uneven painted steel things caution to appear on the catwalks in past seasons, but this autumn there was a real boom: prints made in the technique of tie-dai or imitating it, showed MSGM, Prada, Proenza Schouler, Calvin Klein and others. To some, this trend reminds of the grunge of the 1990s, to someone about the “warriors” of the 1980s, to someone about the hippie aesthetics of the 1970s, but on the whole it’s understandable that the appearance of things that look like they were made independently in the kitchen, this is another nostalgic element of modern fashion. We decided to talk with local designers who are engaged in manual dyeing of textiles and develop this trend seriously.
TEXT: Svetlana Paderina
The Tie-Dye Maniac team (the guys are asked not to call themselves a fashion brand or brand) can be considered the pioneers of rational fashion in Russia - seven years ago they bought clothes in second-hand and experimented with dyeing techniques, tried classic tie-dai, and Eastern methods. Today Tie-Dye Maniac is a team of two designers who combine fashion, art and modern digital technologies. “It’s important for us to create a project from beginning to end - from labels to photos,” they say. “Every thing is sewn at a factory in St. Petersburg from high-quality natural materials and painted by hand in our studio.”
Designers admit that they work independently and do not focus on trends and seasonality, but they consistently produce several collections a year and regularly “support” the base line of things - underwear, socks, socks, pillowcases: “By selecting a theme for a new collection, we focus on what we care about now, be it art, cinema or theater, study new dyeing techniques, develop prints.We view tai-dai, on the one hand, as something that is understandable to the public, evoking associations with hippies, skaters, freedom. parties from It is a tribute to the digital age, where media and the same freedom rule from catwalks for huge money. A tie-dai shirt is the same as ripped jeans: holes on the pants did not appear from a good life, but suddenly became part of expensive collections " .
Manual dyeing techniques are good friends with street-style precisely because they were initially popularized not by designers, but by representatives of subcultures who always animated street fashion. And today, bright design ideas get along well with the practicality of “urban” clothes: for example, artist Masha Lamzina, who always produced complicated avant-garde things with manual textile processing, made a collection of laconic sweatshirts, decorating them with prints resembling checkered patterns from Soviet woolen blankets. However, Lamzin does not dye the fabric, but on the contrary - corrodes color with the help of chlorine bleach, and the shape of the pattern is created with the help of a stencil.
Another global trend is interest in the national heritage, lost techniques and attention to ecology. There is a growing generation of artists working with organic textile dyeing, with manual prints. Among them, Alena Selezneva, who creates textiles with botanical prints, and botanical in the most direct sense: to create them, vegetable dyes and fragments of flowers and leaves are used, leaving picturesque prints on the fabric. “I never studied it anywhere,” Alena says, “I am an engineer by my first education, an economist by my second. But I am from a hand-made family, we all sewed and knitted; and I always dyed yarn, then fabrics because white was always cheaper, and such shades as I wanted were impossible to find. Then I discovered the technique of botanical contact dyeing and realized that it was very close to me. "
Alyona works only with natural materials: flax, cotton, silk of different density and wool, as well as products made of felt. Dyeing with natural dyes takes a lot of time, there are stages of preparing fabrics, tinctures and decoctions, there are technological breaks. Each fabric, according to her, is born as a picture: first a background, then a print of leaves, then shades, shadows, highlights. For coloring are used leaves, berries, herbs, flowers, bark and roots of plants. She periodically releases clothing series under her own label, makes home textiles, including several collections for the Enjoy home bureau Nadya Zotova.
Among the designers who are engaged in self-dyeing textiles and create from it full-fledged collections, we can highlight St. Petersburg resident Daria Urkineeva. During her studies at the Stieglitz Academy, Daria did a lot of painting, and her current work is also painting, but it has received a voluminous form. Urkineeva manages to make not only single-piece art objects, but also small lots of dresses, blouses, trousers - and each product still has its own characteristics due to the fact that the fabric is unevenly colored.
Artist Anna Altabaeva creates fantastic textile objects inspired by nature: “I was born by the sea, in Sevastopol. That element that surrounded me in my childhood - colors, colors, including vegetable ones - is the most important tuning fork so far. Imagine, in summer, when the mulberry ripens, all the asphalt is painted black. I used to work with magazines as a stylist, illustrator, and now in Seasons magazine I met Alena Selezneva. Some first advice she gave me, and then I learned from experience that I can do everything with in The interaction of fabric and plants. My method of dyeing does not imply an exact result, it is based on improvisation, and I’m interested in exactly this unpredictability. I like how the dyeing techniques change the fabric, how it comes to life. As a rule, I make items to order - scarves, scarves "Sometimes I paint fabrics for making clothes - I really like that a thing that is on the thin line between craft and art can be used by a person in ordinary life."
Altabaeva, in turn, collaborated with Masha Andrianova, who creates minimalist clothes inspired by the old Russian costume, and with Ilya Varegin, designer of the Infundibulum brand — the designer made a series of complex scarves and scarves for his collection presented at the Florentine exhibition Pitti Uomo.
One of her favorite collaborations she calls work with Ilya Kuznetsov, who is engaged in the reconstruction of leather goods. Their joint project is six bags of old homespun cloth, which Anna painted. In addition to working with organic dyes, the artist uses cyanotype - a technique that appeared at the same time when the picture originated. A light-sensitive composition is applied to the fabric, and by interacting with the sun, it contributes to the appearance of amazing shades. With regard to the care of hand-painted things, you need to know the details of the technology: synthetic dyes, as a rule, are reliable and easily tolerate washing. Fabrics dyed with organic materials are recommended to be washed by hand - but simply because such things, in principle, require delicate handling; but cyanotype is generally not desirable to erase.
Cover: Tie-Dye Maniac
