Textiles Anonymous

Shalin's older brother, Shyamal co-operates a fashion design house with Bhumika, his wife. Together, they operate Shyamal & Bhumika. Below, is one of many articles about their work.



Here is their storefront. It's really beautiful. Their entire store would fit perfectly into any fancy street in LA, New York, or Tokyo.



The inside, and the clothing, are all blindingly colorful and lovely.



But where do all these clothes, materials, and designs come from? I can share a small amount of information, not because of any particular non-disclosure agreements that may or may not have been signed, but because I know very little.



Pictured below is Ishani (Shalin's cousin), a professional textile designer working for the aforementioned concern. She is designing a pattern in illustrator that will be embroidered onto a fabric.



She must consider not only the repeating composition, but also how it will be stitched as a continuous thread. Of course, it has to look nice, too. Embroidery, for those of you filling those shoes I, until only recently, occupied, means that thread is sewn into an existing fabric, creating a design. Those who are not squeamish about prematurely revealed endings, may scroll down to a hand embroidered detail below.



I never realized that nowadays, someone sits down and designs these patterns. I thought there were simply standard patterns that are copied and pasted. Not at all, it turns out. India has a long history of textile design & production. Ishani looked at lots of reference material before undertaking the above pattern. Some are created from her imagination, such as this bed sheet design (below).



She says that India has a huge library of traditional designs and art to draw from. By way of example, here is a curtain from Shalin's house.



The designer/philospher Christopher Alexander comes to mind, who claims that good designs reuse historically, organically, evolved patterns. The fifteen properties Alexander argues are fundamental to the universe and good design, such as strong centers, symmetry, and boundaries, are all obviously at play here, as well as the traditional Indian visual design language.



Here are our eponymous heroes, hard at work.



Bhumika is discussing design, and directing her staff. Actually, I have no idea what she's doing, because the conversation is not in English. But, familiar with game production & design, a similarly industrialized creative process, I immediately understood what was going on. Designs were discussed, samples reviewed, feedback given, and direction decided. Bhumika is pregnant, and is still working very hard, despite the fact that the baby is due soon!



Many of their textiles are hand woven, hand embroidered, designed in house, and assembled in house. From sales to production to design, it's an entirely integrated operation. In a different location is a team of about 70 folks, if memory is correct, building the actual clothes. In house, they have a team of about 5 doing alterations, and prototyping materials and designs. Above, you can see a tailor with a test material he has produced, to be reviewed by the designers. Below, a tailor is assembling some clothing out of a hand-embroidered material.



I learned a few more things about the fashion industry. Those catwalks, populated by models, are a critical part of the biz. Right now, this shop is trying to complete a collection that will be displayed in Mumbai, alongside other designers' work. The catwalk is an advertisement for buyers. Buyers will put in orders, and ask for changes -- all in time for seasonal fashion changes.



Above, a detail of some hand embroidered clothing. Some of these wedding saris take 5 people 2 months to make, and the one I looked at cost approximately $600 USD. That's about a year of labor, total. 40 Rs (Rupees) is about 1 USD, and a meal in India is about 40 Rs. Their primary clientèle, I understand, are Indians living abroad.



Determined to learn more, Sulay (Ishani's brother, and Shalin's cousin) and I undertook an expedition to Ahmedabad's Calico Textile Museum. Tours by prior appointment. Photography not allowed. Words are, naturally, the wrong medium with which to paint for you what I have witnessed, but they must suffice.

If you find yourself in Ahmedabad, this tour is absolutely worth undertaking. The grounds and architecture of the museum are alone worth the price of admission, which happens to be free. But even if it were not free, the grounds alone would be worth the visit to the museum. I saw parrots, peacocks, and humming birds in the gentle gardens that surround the place.

When I was young, I was always bored by museums like this. Now, using my imagination -- a hard earned Graphics History Visualization Engine (GHVE) -- I find it more enjoyable. If I look at a dull flag, I imagine it bright and colorful, as it once was, leading an army unit of Gujarati warriors, waving in the wind. Kids must be awesome bored here -- you need someone to bring it to life. Our tour guide, and the exhibits, feed my GHVE with enough data to go on. There's so much to see here, we barely touch a fraction of it on the tour, and I describe a fraction of what I've seen below.

We see a long hand painted scroll depicting a historical event. A storyteller, armed with a candle and musical accompaniment, would narrate the events depicted here. Ancient made for TV news drama. Alone, like history, it's just a scroll. With a storyteller, it's magic.

Textiles made in Gujarat were found in the Egyptian pyramids. Apparently, they were exported to royalty in Bali, Japan, and Egypt. Lots of interesting, and time consuming, techniques are used to make these fabrics. Paisley patterns have an Indian origin -- they are the bottom of a clenched fist dipped in paint. Tie-dye was originally, and remains, a technique for patterning a textile by applying minute drops of wax to carve out an elaborate pattern. I saw embroidery so detailed and rich that the detail above looks like a hack job. And some wacky Atari 2600 looking materials made from pre-dyed threads, which are then woven together, producing a pixelated pattern.

Most interesting to me is the link between how humans make dimensional structures, and how nature does it. We are, when we make origami, or spinning thread from shorter natural fibers, sewing, weaving, casting -- increasing the dimensionality of our materials into more and more sophisticated shapes, forms of higher dimensionality. We have devised elaborate technologies for doing so. Computers, which have simple linear memories, use software to fold this single linear thread of memory into complex data structures, three dimensional graphics, and sophisticated organizational structures. All of computer science is reducible, in some way, to this endeavor, much like organic chemistry, or textile production.



We're not too far off from how the natural world does it. In the case of many organic forms, elements are arranged in arrays, coils (threads), and woven into tissues, which are folded and glued into three dimensional organs. When we humans make clothing, we start from natural plant and animal fibers, leveraging what billions of years have naturally evolved for us. We turn these fibers into longer threads, which we then arrange into two dimensional fabrics, from which we create clothing, tents, bags, paper, and kinds of other beautiful and useful forms.

Ahmedabad Limited, part 1

Numerous readers have written in wondering what has happened to our expedition's publication. The truth of the matter, is that our staff is not only alive, but has been very busy conducting important research that will, if things go as planned, comprise a special four part issue on Ahmedabad, India. We now return to our narrative where it left off...

Some people wonder what it would be like to live on a spaceship. We are all passengers, according to Bucky Fuller, on the sun-orbiting Spaceship Earth. I have recently relocated from one compartment of the ship to another, from Israel to India, and my coordinates in this sphere have changed, phase shifting my daylight by three hours.



Lots of Israelis come to India to travel. Gal tells me that he backpacked through India in 1992. Once, an Indian man, most impressed with the number of Israelis he had met, asked him how many Israelis there are. Gal said about 6 million, to which the man replied: "Not in India, I mean how many are there in the whole world?" That's how many Israelis come to India. Most come after completing their army service, and working to save some money. Why do so many come? We'll have to conduct further field research -- it's too early to say. One reason might be that Israel is so small, and the folks who live there aren't warmly welcomed in their neighbors' countries. Na'amah says most Israelis are here to party, which might very well be true. Some of them were really, really, obnoxious on the plane. I've also met some very sweet ones. For the time being, I'm totally clear of the Israeli backpacker route.

Every place on Earth has its own smell. When I arrived in Tel-Aviv, things smelled familiarly Israeli. Like accents, or the smells of individual people, we don't notice these things unless we encounter something really foreign, or somehow manage to pay particularly close attention. Perhaps it's the food, the soil, the material and energy inputs of a place -- who knows. In the Mumbai airport, my nose felt like I was in India again.

I have an eight hour layover in Mumbai. Unfortunately, I'm awesomely tired, jet-lagged, and slightly sick, so I spend about five hours curled up in a cafe upstairs, eating, drinking, sleeping, and napping. There are worse fates, I suppose. The irony, of course, is that my cold came on in Israel, but I've gotten better in India. Last time I was in India with Yotam and Naomi, we all got sick, and I think one of our problems was that we didn't eat enough. One can never eat enough.




The airport in Mumbai is surrounded by what appears to me to be a large shantytown. You can see in some of the aerial views of Mumbai this very organic structure creeping between the apartment blocks. It comes right up to the airport wall, where it comes to a hard stop. You can see many small children flying kites. In fact, the trees and houses around the airport, and the green on the Ahmedabad airport, are papered with tiny, colorful, handmade kites. It seems everyone dreams of flying. According to my sources, I just missed a huge kite festival, the biggest in the world, by just a few days.



Ahmedabad is the capital of the Indian state Gujarat, and was the home of Gandhi. Reliable sources inform me that most Indian people you meet outside of India are Gujarati, who are well known the world over as accomplished traders and business people. Vik's, in Berkeley, is Gujarati, and at the Mumbai airport I met two Gujaratis who live in Mozambique.



At the Ahmedabad airport, I was picked up by Dipak, Shyamal & Bhumika's driver, who saved me from two very persistent Indian taxi operators. Shyamal is Shalin's older brother, whom we met in issue #3 of Phases Crossed, and Bhumika is his wife. They are both very sweet, and I had met them both in Berkeley last summer. Together, they own & operate a fashion design shop called Shyamal & Bhumika, which we'll cover in an upcoming fashion and textile technology edition of Phases Crossed.



You can see in this traffic photo that things in Ahmedabad can get pretty hectic, not to mention smoggy. According to Bucky, life creates anti-entropy, and wealth self-replicates -- a fundamental law of the universe. Technology and knowledge compound, giving us more with less. So many motorcycles equals so much wealth! And now Tata has a $2500 USD automobile, the world's cheapest car. Bucky didn't account for the problems with the environment we have the world over, though, as we asymptotically approach what some might call a technological singularity. Maybe the singularity is something else...



I've been adopted into Shalin's family -- there's simply no other way to describe it. Above, our intrepid explorer with his new parents, dressed for a wedding (stay tuned for an upcoming special matrimonial edition of Phases Crossed.) My new brother, sister, grand-parents, cousins, and parents are unbelievably sweet and kind. Now I understand why Shalin is so nice. Shalin and I both agree that his grandmother is particularly cute (pictured at left).



Like any good grandmother, her encouragement to continue eating never stop. Through careful research, I've determined that the probability P, that I am encouraged to eat is a function: P=f(time into meal, rate of eating, food on plate), where y = (1-t) * 1/r * (1-f).




I'm staying in Shalin's room (pictured above, alongside a neighborhood street). He has an old 33600 bps modem on the floor by his (old) computer. Respect. Below are pictures of the house, and the family cook making something delicious.




Everyone, his brother & sister-in law (Shyamal & Bhumika), his father's parents, his parents -- all live in a really nice house with some servants. Gujarati food is incredible, and like Southern US cooking, is a bit sweeter. For dinner the first night we had some south Indian food, plus some sweets, and a Western casserole dish. They also have the best Masala Chai I've ever had in my entire life, which is now changed forever.



Here are some photos of the house and garden. This is a green tea plant. It smells... unbelievable. Shalin's grandfather, the head of the household, says I have a keen sense of smell.



Why? We walked into the garden, and I went on about its keen aroma, and asked him excitedly what in the garden smelled so nice. He laughed and said it was his hair. Well, yup.

Did I mention that they have the best Chai in the world here, in this house? Every time I am offered some, I take it. One morning, I had some for breakfast, and the grandfather (who was once a rockstar cricket player for India), said he had put some of the green tea into the Chai. I observed that it tasted like lemongrass. Ah, it turns out it is lemongrass green tea. Maybe I do have a good nose, after all.