Doing Something for an Ethnic Craft Takes More Than Sentiment | 100 People With Ideas

How many obstacles has designer Liu Bing hit trying to turn Guizhou Dong cloth into a modern product?

Guizhou Dong cloth is a fabric colored with natural plant dyes. It comes from the Dong ethnic minority in southeastern Guizhou and is an ancient ethnic handicraft.

Making Dong cloth is complicated. The cloth must first be woven by hand, then dipped again and again in indigo. Persimmon skins, chunks of coral ardisia root and other materials are pounded and pressed for their juice, which turns the cloth a deep blue-green shot with red. The cloth is dried, coated with egg white, and beaten with a wooden mallet for more than half a month until it gleams. Finally it is sized with a paste of boiled cowhide glue, which keeps the fabric stiff.

Locals weave and dye only in the farming off-season, and every step depends on the weather — glazing the cloth to bring up its shine, for instance, has to be done under the blazing summer sun. By tradition, Dong cloth is made just once a year, which is what makes it precious; locals wear Dong clothing only on special occasions.

But now designer Liu Bing hopes to turn this low-volume handmade material into something city dwellers buy.

"Dong cloth looks very modern — its sheen makes it look like leather," Liu Bing said of the first time she saw it. She had been wandering through Panjiayuan, Beijing's well-known antiques market, when she found an embroidered patch cut from an old garment; the embroidery had been worked on Dong cloth. "That piece of cloth looked like it had been washed many times, but the embroidery and the fabric were still in good shape, and the cloth had a beautiful sheen."

Before that, Liu Bing had studied spatial design at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Dijon in France, though product design always interested her more. She returned to China after graduating and worked on pavilion design for the Shanghai World Expo. Over meals, the designers on her team would argue about Chinese design — what to make of MUJI, for instance.

"Design in China today is shaped either by Europe and America or by Japan. Or people are still infatuated with the 'new Chinese style,'" Liu Bing said. "A lot of designers are asking where Chinese design should start from. I think we should look to the roots. Intangible cultural heritage is one way out — designers can take these crafts and make them contemporary."

After seeing the Dong cloth in that embroidered patch at Panjiayuan, Liu Bing brought in a junior schoolmate from her Dijon days, the French designer Maxence, and the two spent a month doing fieldwork in Guizhou. They named the project "EIBA," a word from a local Guizhou dialect meaning "great mountain."

Liu Bing and Maxence were not, of course, the first to go looking for ideas in Guizhou's traditional crafts. Local people had wanted to put these crafts to use too, but what they mostly produced were cheap souvenirs for the tourist market, in the gaudiest "ethnic style."

Jala Group, the Chinese cosmetics maker behind Chando, tried a different way of "developing" ethnic crafts — tying them to corporate social responsibility and the protection of ethnic-minority culture.

In 2011, Jala Group partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and donated $1 million to four projects: Mosuo hand-weaving at Lugu Lake in Yunnan, Huayao Dai handicrafts in Yuxi, Yunnan, Li brocade in Wuzhishan, Hainan, and Tujia xilankapu in Yichang, Hubei. Through an international trade fair, the Walabi Mosuo Handicraft Development Association won a 50,000-yuan order in 2013 from Tangs Singapore, a leading Singaporean fashion and lifestyle department store. Each scarf sold for an average of 200 yuan, and the craftspeople were paid about 100 yuan per scarf.

This kind of "subsidy" seems to work, but Liu Bing and her EIBA did not want to go that way. EIBA does not have that kind of money; Liu Bing and her teammates were still keeping it alive with income from other projects.

The first problem Liu Bing hit in turning Dong cloth into a modern product was colorfastness.

"Because the dyeing is purely natural, Dong cloth has a colorfastness problem — the color comes off, it doesn't last," Liu Bing said. "The only way to fix that is to substitute chemical reagents. But that one chemical step ruins everything that was purely natural before it, so some people pull out just the indigo-dyeing technique used in Dong cloth and use that on its own."

The colorfastness Liu Bing describes is a property of all plant-dyed cloth, and the indigo dyeing behind Dong cloth is not unique to China. Indigo was being cultivated in the Indus Valley more than 5,000 years ago, and the people of Mesopotamia were using it more than 2,700 years ago. Indigo plants grow all over the world — more than a hundred species, most of them shrubs. True indigo grows widely across the tropics and subtropics; China has Polygonum tinctorium, or dyer's knotweed, whose root is the main raw material for banlangen, a common Chinese herbal remedy.

Early Levi's jeans were dyed entirely with natural indigo. In the early 20th century, after the German chemical company BASF developed synthetic indigo, the purely natural indigo-dyeing process went into decline. That is also why, later on, only the top of the market was willing to go back and ask for natural plant dyes.

Another ethnic craft in much the same position as Dong cloth is Liuyang xiabu, a ramie cloth. This plain-woven ramie fabric also goes back a long way, to the Song dynasty, and was sent to the imperial court as tribute during the Jiajing era of the Ming. Handmade xiabu is often used in high-end garment making in Japan and South Korea.

In one sense xiabu has been luckier than Dong cloth. Machine-woven xiabu is already made at scale, while Dong cloth remains a self-sufficient handicraft confined to the Dong villages of Guizhou. Xiabu has also moved faster in another way: a number of Chinese designer labels — Meibian (Zhang Da), Kreuzzz (Hu Yulong), mymymy (cotton), Xiaohua Design (dooling), Su Renli — have all used it. In 2014 xiabu was brought to Shanghai Fashion Week.

Like Dong cloth, xiabu is hard to develop. And the question that seems to worry everyone reworking these traditional crafts is the same: once you upgrade a tradition, can you still promise it is "purely natural" and "purely handmade"?

Yi Hongbo, a graduate of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, founded Danrenpang Studio and in 2013 started Xiamu, a fashion label built on xiabu fabric. He has also pitched handmade Liuyang xiabu to Chinese clothing brands. Because Liuyang has lost its craftspeople and the skills have been dying out, the hand-dyeing step now has to be sent to traditional dye workshops in Yunnan.

Xiabu and Dong cloth share another problem: the cloth is only 50 centimeters wide. That was Liu Bing's second difficulty.

During her fieldwork in Guizhou, Liu Bing made a few bags out of Dong cloth and found that the most authentic Dong cloth limited what she could design, because of the width — and that this hand-woven cloth simply wore out too fast.

The "most authentic Dong cloth" is the cloth local people weave by hand, and it is only 50 centimeters across, about the width of one person. Because the force and speed of hand-weaving are hard to keep even, the warp and weft come out uneven — loose in some places, tight in others — and the cloth wears through.

So Liu Bing made a second compromise.

Once she saw that the hand-woven cloth would not hold up, Liu Bing bought a batch of industrially woven cloth on Taobao, had it shipped to the village, and asked that the dyeing steps be done on that instead. The villagers turned out to be open-minded about it, and did not object to industrial cloth replacing their own.

"Even though we want to use ethnic craftsmanship, we have nothing against industrial cloth. It depends on the design — whether it is decorative or has to be sturdy and hard-wearing. We only want to keep the parts of this cloth-making craft that carry real skill, like flat embroidery. The hammering that makes the cloth shine — machines should take that over," Liu Bing said.

Seen this way, the EIBA project is indeed infatuated with traditional Chinese handicraft, and does hope to find in these traditions the thread that is supposed to be unique to Chinese design. But what it is actually doing is upgrading Dong cloth. The bags it made last year all look thoroughly modern; the material is Dong cloth, and the handmade part is limited to the embroidery.

EIBA has since added members. The team is now one fashion designer, one product designer and two spatial designers. Besides bags, what they are developing together next are table lamps, curtains and accessories. "A mature product takes one to two years to develop. You can't do it all at once — there are still a lot of problems to solve," Liu Bing said.

But from beginning to end, the biggest problem facing Liu Bing and EIBA may be this: Dong cloth, with its long process, is still made and sold by the villagers themselves, and only one batch a year. Supply through retail channels can never reach scale, and costs will stay high. If the market ever does warm to a product like this, the failure to keep up with demand will kill the enthusiasm.

Liu Bing has run into every difficulty an entrepreneur faces, and on top of that she has to handle all the uncertainty of reworking a handicraft. The same situation exists at Shang Xia, Hermès's Chinese brand — except that its money and clout let it do far more than Liu Bing can, at greater scale and across more categories. These are all people working to carry an ethnic handicraft into the present, and what they are doing amounts to more than venting some sentiment.

Cover and in-text images from: vjiazu.com, smwh.cn.