Fabrex: showplace for traditional craft skills and the challenge of new fibres

Press, 10 November 1983, Page 16

Fabrex: showplace for traditional craft skills and the challenge of new fibres

LEONE STEWART

continues her series on

Fabrex, Britain's big fabric fair, in London. She was a guest of the British Overseas Trade Board and Fabrex.

Design and creativity in British wool cloth are very much alive and well up north. This is the land of textile’s limited editions. Handloom weavers who are part of the Master Sett attracted a lot of attention at the tenth Fabrex fabric fair in London last month.

The Master Sett is a marketing arm of Scottish development agencies. Its weavers excel in the design an’d crafting of high quality, small lengths of cloth, up to 10 yards. Even the somewhat larger quantities that are’ woven by Scottish mills

from the weaver’s original design are limited in length. The strength of the Master Sett keeps growing. Some of the weavers have sold very well in New York. Their success illustrates an irony of modem times. Now that we can produce almost anything by computer programing, the most sophisticated societies seek the hand-made, the human element. Clad in his kilt, Donald Fraser cuts a dash among the conservative business suits at Fabrex. Self-taught he is a born-again craftsman, seeking refuge from the city life. Like fellow weavers, his cottage industry near Aberdeen attracts New Zealand visitors. There, he creates and weaves his individual, flexible designs. Some are adapted from checks the big Scottish estates made their own. Others take up the elements of the landscape, the heather tones of the Scottish moor, the patterns and colours of stones and water. Many Scottish weavers use mill-spun yarn — often New Zealand wool for heavier weight cloth — though Tom Kilbride, one of the four Master Sett exhibitors, has his own flock in the far west of Scotland. The Scottish weavers have a personal attitude to their cloth. They want to retain the handloomed craft, which precludes large quantities. .

Quality matters to them. They want to encourage a trend away from “disposable clothing.” Increasingly, they encounter an awareness of quality fashion, and a move to investment dressing among women. Men have always expected an expensive suit to wear well. Weavers are aware that Scottish mills are facing increasing competition for their raw material. Concern is felt that the Japanese could at any time enter the market and buy up the Australian wool clip.

Its fine merino wools are particularly valuable for lighter-weight speciality cloths. The mills are also up against increasing home consumption of Chinese mohair. The diminishing quantity of cashmere on the world market is forcing up the price, recently reported to be about $163 a kilo. New Zealand technical developments to enable our coarser crossbred wools to be used as mohair blends are under way at Lincoln. If successful, they could fill what looks like being a fast-growing gap in the market. The presence of handloom weavers under the expansive roof of Olympia exhibition hall at the Fabrex show underscored the fabric fair’s coverage of the field. The traditional skills of the Scots were well repre- ■ sented, as were the English. It was all go at the stand of Jonathan Thorpe. The Huddersfield mill specialises in knitted fashion fabrics, principally of natural fibres. The fashion-conscious Italian buyers were also attracted, as ever, to the ranges of John Foster and

Son’s Black Dyke Mills at Bradford. Amid all this traditionalism were the international giants. Courtlands Fabric Group occupied a number of stands, running snappy fashion parades to show effectively their fabrics in action. For the first time 1.C.1. was also at Fabrex, strongly promoting its latest developments. Tactel, billed by Anthony

Moreton of the “Financial Times” as a challenger to the workhorse polyester, is a new family of polyamides, part of the long-neglected nylon group.

Interest in Tactel at Fabrex was high. The first cloths in the fibre are now being shown. With the versatility of nylon, the

easy-care of polyester, and the look of cotton, it is bound for the booming lei-sure-wear market. The stretch quality of nylon makes Tactel especially suitable for sports’ wear such as leotards. Along with recent polyester stars, Mitrelie and Terinda, Tactel is seen as the twenty-first century fibre that will get 1.C.1. Fibres out of the red. Mitrelie is a fibre that can be woven to look and feel remarkably like silk. At Fabrex it was shown stunningly fashioned in crinklepleated, after-five dresses — a 1980 s version of the fabulous Fortuny gowns. A knitting yarn, Terinda looks like suede and has a pleasing, almost velvety touch, ideal for sports wear, and leisure wear. Europe’s fabric manufacturers were well represented at Fabrex. The Austrians had 23 companies exhibiting. The Austrian Trade Commission was the host for a special reception for Fabrex exhibitors and visitors at Olympia.

Among all their contemporary trends, the Austrians

drew on their traditional strengths to produce beautiful embroideries and trimmings to rival the French. Nottingham lace was still a stand-out in all this European glory. Not necessarily “British is best,” but certainly equal in what it does well. Coming from New Zealand it is curious to hear among the British echoes of an inferiority complex about “overseas.” By which it means continental Europe. The British textile industry feels bound to confront the big bogy of what it conceives as Italian design genius. The Italians are indeed very gifted in fabric design. They are dynamite with colour. British lack of confidence in the creativity of its indigenous design talent is accentuated by the assertiveness of the Italians. The Italians are chauvinistic marketers of their own product. They also employ many of the bright young designers that Britain’s highly developed network of design colleges produces to degree level.

Mrs Jane Molteni is an economic journalist specialising in the textile industry, and one of a party • of 10 overseas journalists ; attending Fabrex. She pointed out that many ’ Italian companies go to Fabrex to study British design as much as to sell their products. • Italians particularly ’ respect the inherited skills of the British in their traditional woollen textiles. All - the talk of colour ex- ‘ asperated her. Colour is not of itself, she ; declared, important. It is merely a device manipulated from season to season by clever publicists, like the - rage for Mexican styles one year and Indian the next. ' These outbursts of enthusiasm for costume dress she put down to business * deals struck in the country - of origin. ’ “One year a big manufac- •, turer will have a good deal ; with the Mexicans. Another J year with Indian cotton. So * it goes with colour,” she * insisted, dismissing any no- » tion of Italian mystique. * “The continuing, good • quality of the fabric design is what matters most.” L

'Good -quality fabric design matters most'