In the last few years digital printing processes have brought innovation into the fashion industry on a technical and visual level. Yet there have also been companies trying to improve traditional techniques to create new and exciting patterns for textiles.
Vlisco has recently collaborated with Ozwald Boateng, an English fashion designer of Ghanaian descent co-founder of the Made in Africa Foundation, to create a series of fabrics with an architecturally intriguing three-dimensional depth made by combining the company's unique wax technique with the design of the drawings.
Vlisco's fabrics may be synonymous with African fashion, but the history of the company dates back to over 160 years ago when, in 1846, Dutch entrepreneur Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen established a textile company named P.F. van Vlissingen & Co in the city of Helmond.
The company sold batik - made on the Indonesian Island of Java - in Europe and, later, on the West African coast. Batik textiles were made applying hot melted wax to the cloth and then dipping it in dye. Clinging onto the fabric, the wax seeped through it, preventing the dye from penetrating the material. A complicated series of dyeing, drying and waxing stages allowed to create intricate designs in rich colours.
Women in West Africa soon adopted the fabrics and, from the '30s on Vlisco's textiles acquired a more marked African style with bolder colours. As the years passed, the company developed, producing combinations of Indonesian batik, Dutch design and African heritage, and Vlisco also established offices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and Nigeria among the other countries.
In the last few years many prominent fashion designers, but also artists such as Yinka Shonibare, adopted Vlisco fabrics in their collections, but the company also launched special projects with fashion designers who came up with exclusive new patterns in eye-catching colours.
The textiles designed for Vlisco by Boateng - who has often employed the company's fabrics in his menswear jackets - are characterised by strong colours and a special depth that gives the illusion the pattern has a three-dimensional quality about it.
These patterns are usually built up layer by layer on the white cotton, from the application of the drawings using the wax technique in the first stage, to the step-by-step application of various colours.
These effects give the product a hand-made, diverse and layered appearance and the uncontrolled blending and shifting of colours is part of the final design.
One intriguing point for people interested in the narrative power of textiles is the Vlisco page recounting the stories behind specific patterns, which also explains the origins of the names of the fabrics.
A pattern covered in swallows refers for example to this bird as a symbol of good luck, but also hints at the process of asking for a favour.
In Ghana the print refers to the transience of riches and to the fact that you may be rich today and poor tomorrow since money has wings and can fly away; in Togo the pattern is called instead "Air Afrique" because the fabric was also used in the uniform of the local airline company.
There are plenty of stories on the Vlisco page and, the best thing is that - if the site visitors genuinely like them - they can always order the fabrics linked with those stories and reinterpret them in their own styles and fashion.
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