A Place in Hangzhou Called the "Library of Textile" Wants to Show Off Both the Appeal of Fabric and the Business in It

Have you ever seen the 20 different textures and finishes a single fabric can take on?

Polished concrete floors, pale gray walls, black beams: a vast rectangular hall. More than 20 garments, all pure black or pure white, hang on mannequins, spaced with a careful irregularity that suggests a line of models on a runway. Milky light falls from the ceiling and bounces off each fabric differently.

The exhibition, called the "1-20 Fabric Project," seems at first to be about fashion design. A plainly cut white shirt has sleeves gathered into little bud-shaped ruffles. An oversized men's coat, like a wizard's robe, trails on the floor. Irregularly pleated fabric has been cut into strips and woven together like warp and weft into an openwork vest.

Beside each garment hangs a slip of paper printed with the name of one of the 12 independent designers in the show and their idea for the piece, plus a combination of letters and numbers no one knows how to read — something like "LT-13."

Reach out, rub the different fabrics between your fingers, and you may start doing what you do in a shopping mall: guessing shrewdly by feel whether this one is cotton, linen, silk or wool.

All of these judgments, drawn from what an exhibition has always been, are wrong. The design of the clothes is not the point.

The whole show is a small joke by its curator, Mary Ma. Only after you have walked the floor admiring the garment designs, and watched the accompanying documentary, does it hit you: for all the differences in style, shape and feel, every garment on display is made from the same piece of fabric.

That base fabric is nothing special — an extremely ordinary piece of 100% polyester. In Mary's words, put it in front of a designer and it is the kind of thing that "might get thrown away."

What can one piece of 100% polyester do? Untreated and used as a single layer, it seems good for little beyond sportswear and T-shirts.

But manufacturing technique can turn that "1" into "20" — 20 versions, each with its own feel, sheen, pattern and function, which designers can then make into garments of different styles and textures.

For a trench coat, a three-in-one process bonds two layers of the plain polyester face to face, so the cloth resists fraying and picks up the hand of cotton.

To imitate leather, printing plus sanding and embossing raises a mottled, cracked texture on the surface.

Even pleating comes out differently depending on the method. Heat-shrink laminating leaves fine lines, some shallow, some deep. Irregular pressed pleating gives rock-like ridges stacked in layers. High-temperature pressing produces a crisp, papery feel and a dense pattern of slightly raised texture across the cloth.

"I can't believe it's all made from one piece of fabric!" Many visitors say some version of this when they reach the last area, where all 20 fabrics are displayed.

That is the effect Mary wanted.

The "1-20 Fabric Project" opened on November 12 as the first exhibition of the Library of Textile, and drew more than 200 people that day.

It felt like a gala. People stood at high tables holding wine glasses, talking fast. Move through the crowd and you caught unfamiliar subjects — "pineapple fiber," "corn fiber," "synthetic fiber can be very high-end too" — and processes such as "laser cutting."

The fashionably dressed crowd fell roughly into a few groups: fashion designers, fabric dealers, material developers, apparel brand owners, distributors, manufacturers and ordinary members of the public.

These are the people the Library of Textile serves — and in the future they may even help develop materials themselves.

As founder Mary Ma imagines it, the Library of Textile is a platform for "building together, living together, helping and inspiring each other," and its main job is to "explore the possibilities of materials." Anyone with a passion for materials can take part and develop new ones alongside her professional team.

Underneath the name, Mary explains, "this is a center for material design and development. The Library of Textile is just what we call it."

The single-story space, close to 2,000 square meters, is divided by function into six parts.

The first thing you see on the way in is the exhibition area, which shows the results of work with artists, designers and independent material institutions in China and abroad. Off it run five style halls, organized around themes — "outdoor, sport, urban, nature and art" — each hung with fabrics, finished garments and accessories in that vein.

Every fabric that has been put to use this way also turns up in the library's display hall, where samples are sorted by color on stainless steel racks that anyone can pull out and handle. Each material carries a QR code; scan it with a phone and you can read about the material's properties, uses and manufacturing process.

The other three areas are a workshop, a seminar area and multi-purpose hall, and a studio for a resident designer. The workshop is for making materials: designers and other users can run all kinds of experiments on machines that perform the standard composite-material techniques — heat stamping, laser bonding, pattern-cutting. The seminar area and multi-purpose hall invite designers and material-development specialists from time to time to give public talks and hold other events about material design. The resident designer's studio has the equipment a designer needs, so they can stay and work inside the library.

This is a non-profit, and with a reservation most of it is free to use. To keep itself running, it charges fees for taking fabric samples and for renting the library's equipment and space.

Spending her own savings at thirty to build a non-profit is something many people cannot understand.

Mary has worked in materials for 18 years and has never changed fields. But "she is not like most fabric dealers" — designers who have worked with her tend to agree on this.

Mary entered the industry at a township enterprise with 22 branch offices, as secretary to the president. The job lasted nine and a half years and taught her the groundwork: "It covered everything — making the fabric, dyeing, printing, finishing, and later on the logistics and the finished garments."

In 2007 she founded Hangzhou Maishuang Textile Technology Co., Ltd. It began as an export business and only started selling at home a little over four years ago. She gradually found that in the domestic market, material was treated as "a component," a commodity waiting "to be chosen," and that she was more a brand's fabric supplier than, as she had been abroad, someone in "a relatively respected role."

She had trouble adjusting. She used to talk with designers and brands overseas as an equal, and what they said about fabric led her to develop many new materials the market wanted. Back home, plenty of apparel companies walked in and asked: "That fabric such-and-such brand used — do you have it?"

The copying and sameness in Chinese fashion design, she believes, has a lot to do with the sameness of the fabrics being used.

Among her peers she is an outlier. Where others push the materials they have developed on everyone, hoping to sell the same cloth to as many buyers as possible, she believes "materials have to be custom-made": "Different people have different sensibilities, so you have to give different people different things, things that suit them. Even if two brands of the same type come to us, even if they are drawn to the same base fabric, what we give each of them may be different. Only then does what gets made not feel like everything else."

That refusal of sameness is where she and many independent designers meet.

Orders in "small runs," orders where "some of it is very complicated," orders "a lot of factories don't want" or "won't modify" — she takes them. And when a client asks for "a piece of cotton fabric," she does not just hand one over.

Designer Li Yunjia told QDaily: "When I said, 'I want a fabric with a cotton feel,' she would give me a fabric that really does feel like cotton, or a blend of cotton with something else, or a purely synthetic material worked into the feel of cotton, or something else again."

Before she met Mary, Li Yunjia used only natural fabrics, because the synthetics on the market all had a high sheen she disliked.

Later she learned that "the structure of the yarn, and the finishing that comes after" can change a fabric enormously, and that synthetic fiber can be matte too: "Looking at what a fabric is made of is only the first, most basic step. A 100% cotton fabric can cost 10-odd yuan a meter or more than 100 yuan a meter, and that is all in the processing. Before, all I could say was, I want a cotton fabric, I don't want it too shiny, I want it hazy, sanded. I didn't have the professional words for it. Now I do."

Working with these designers is how the idea of the Library of Textile took shape: "Materials have material design, and there is a name for people who work with them — materials people. We are not only suppliers of material, and cloth is not only a transaction. Beyond the commercial side, beyond being bought and sold, material should also be something everyone can create and develop together."

She wanted to build "a fairly good space for making materials." Inside it, designers would not simply pick materials for clothes; the existing manufacturing processes could spark something and let them "become material designers themselves": "A lot of what I see now from brands and designers still treats material as something you just take — grab it and cook with it. But if you start from the material and have something genuinely your own, then as a designer you go much deeper."

A little over a year ago she began designing the space herself. Throughout it she used two materials: wood and concrete. To her they stand for natural fiber and chemical fiber, and she put them together in tables and pendant lamps that are half concrete, half wood. She wanted to break a few prejudices — for instance, that "you hear 'polyester' and think the garment is bad, and 'cotton' and think it's good."

She calls her own attitude to fabric "very essential": she has no favorite. A fabric, as she sees it, only shows the processes of the past; depending on what is needed, it can be remade into something else entirely.

The "1-20 Fabric Project" is the way she decided, after long thought, to introduce the Library of Textile. By sharing what she knows about materials and technique, she wants people to see that "a material is not what you see in front of you. You may look at a material and find it plain, and throw it away because it isn't what you wanted — but with what you have learned, it can be developed in your hands and put to use. That is its great appeal."

She chose the address on purpose: the Zhebao Building at 88 Yuzhang Road, Jianggan District, Hangzhou, 13 kilometers from West Lake, surrounded by low farmhouses, a place hard to connect with words like design, fashion or creativity. Because "it screens a lot of people out," it won't have its threshold worn down by people who go to museums "for the sake of going to museums."

Far as it is from the center of town, it sits near Hangzhou East Railway Station and the airport, with an elevated road nearby that makes shipping easy, and the rent is relatively cheap. To Mary it is a place that can last.

A month after opening she is still covering costs from her own savings, and on when the library might pay for itself she says it is "still hard to say."

What pleases her is that architects, home designers, boutique buyers, schools and art museums — none of whom she had worked with before — have started booking the library's services. She reads these changes as a freedom she never had: "What [the Library of Textile] does is essentially the same as what I did over the past four years. It hasn't been completely overturned, but it keeps changing, and inside the vagueness there is something to hope for. It gives you enormous freedom, the same freedom as our creative work — it isn't a box. That is what gives me enormous confidence."

Cover and in-text images: courtesy of the Library of Textile