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Essay on Phyllis Barron Textile Designer
Globalization continues to be a major force as fashion moves. Import penetration into the world markets has grown in the past 20 years, reversing the historical trends for the industry to be mostly an exporter. Major sources of imports include Hong Kong, India, China, Turkey, Bangladesh, Greece and Portugal.
The 1960s was an era of revival for many types of handicraft, including textile making. Examples of batik, hand-dyed fabrics and weaving all show practitioners bringing new ideas and vitality to these crafts. This fitted in with the late 1960s philosophy that making a limited number of items by hand was preferable to commercial overproduction.
Batik is a technique for dyeing fabric that originated in Indonesia, an area colonized by the Dutch. Batik was first popularized in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, and was much practiced during the 1920s by figures like Madame Pangon in Paris and Jessie Marion King of the Glasgow School who used it to decorate scarves and shawls. The 1960s saw a renewal of interest in ethnic techniques.
Earlier in the 20th century, a number of practitioners distinguished themselves in the field of handmade textiles by weaving and printing with natural dyes. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Phyllis Barron, Dorothy Larcher and Enid Marx produced small-scale printed fabrics and Ethel Mairet wove cloth on a hand loom in her studio in Surrey.
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