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ContentsINDULGEtextilestobuy,collectorsimply admire 15 Good enough to eat Polly Leonard offers a selection of delicious shopping treats that won’t ruin your exercise regime 19 The Selvedge Horticultural Show Photographer Katya de Grunwald shoots prize winning fabrics in the form of flowers, cakes and vegetables in the beautiful grounds of Fenton House 76 People person Pero designer Aneeth Arora is inspired by the folk around her. Seemoreof herworkatSelvedgedrygoods,www.selvedge.org

CONCEPT textiles in fine art 62 COVER STORY Flying free Dr Sue Marks provides an overview of the work of prolific American quilter Nancy Crow. Seepg80forthechancetowinticketstoNancy’sV&AlectureinOctober

INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 32 Gold standard Where have all the high tech fabrics gone? Marie O'Mahony argues that the sporting world should embrace, not restrict, textile innovation 44 Chuck Taylor, All Star The True Story of the Man behind the Most Famous Athletic Shoe in History. AneditedextractfromthebookbyAbrahamAamidor 52 Making waves The story of Jeckells sails Clare Lewis, author of Adventure Walks for Families, findsouthowanaccidenttooksailmakinginanewdirection

GLOBAL 26 COVER STORY Suzhou silk The heart of silk production in China lies on the banks of the Jiangnan canal. Tom Bird visits the ancient city and finds a modern approach to textiles and a new respect for the old. PhotographedbyLiZhengDe 47 Perfect over The making of a cricket ball. Rahul Bhatia discovers that it takes high standards, skill and plenty of patience to create a cricket ball PhotographedbyRiteshUttamchandani

COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 56 Ebb and flow Time moves slowly on Emma Freemantle’s houseboat. Elizabeth Machin visits an unusual abode and finds a creative free spirit. PhotographedbyCraigFrodham

ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 30 Good sport Ian Wilson recalls the personal indignities of PE lessons and finds out he is not alone in shuddering at the sight of gym shorts 40 Enjoy the ride Athene English explains how the craft of saddle making showcases a wealth of traditional skills and modern ingenuity 50 Spheres of influence Suna Erdem looks back at the evolution of the balls used in rugby, tennis, baseball and more. Illustrated byKellyLasserre 71 COVER STORY Making a Splash Catherine Clavert traces the rise of Jantzen’s classic diving girl logo and the transformation of modern swimwear

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Section C – Baking and Preserving

Class 2: A 1lb (454g) jar of jam or jelly selv edge.org

Preserves Vintage French Jam jars, from £5, T: +44 (0)1993 811 655, www.fade@fadeinteriors.com, Hand carved wooden spoons, from £10, www.kirstenhecktermann.com, Jam lids, Les Indiennes Block printed fabrics, from £75 per mt, T: 01 518 537 3735, www.lesindiennes.com, Rosette, block printed cotton handkerchiefs, £2-£4, www.anokhi.com Courgettes left to right Ovals, Sky/Celadon, linen, £220 per mt, Galbraith and Paul at Tissus d'Helene, T: +44 (0) 20 7352 9977, www.tissusdhelene.co.uk, galbraithandpaul.com Flower Power, Celadon, linen, £220 per mt, Galbraith and Paul at Tissus d'Helene, as before Donuts, Chocolate, linen, £220 per mt, Galbraith and Paul at Tissus d'Helene, as before Candy Stripe, Saffron, linen, £220 per mt, Galbraith and Paul at Tissus d'Helene, , as before Jaisilmir, Lime, linen, £147 per mt, John Stephanidis at Tissus d'Helene www.johnstefanidis.com, as before Basket Weave, Pear, linen, £194 per mt, Galbraith and Paul at Tissus d'Helene, as before, Thomas Smith's trugs from £40, incl. p&p, T: +44 (0)1323 871640, www.sussextrugs.com

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Suzhou silk

FROM THE BANKS OF THE JIANGNAN CANALS

In the village of Luzhi, there are indications that the people of Jiangnan had dress-sense long before spiffy Shanghai was on the map. The Luzhi Cultural Park hosts a daily performance of Jiangnan folk songs. Clad in colourful embroidered shoes and cloth-buttoned floral waistcoats, these fair and fetching Suzhou maidens really say something about regional sensibilities. Round here, even the peasants have style.

Getting to Luzhi is not easy. As the canal boat has lamentably given way to the combustion engine, one has to brave a long and bumpy public bus ride from downtown Suzhou. Like so many of China’s ancient sites, the village is hidden from the roadside behind a façade of soviet-era block buildings, factory-outlet stores and grubby eateries. Disquiet is only elevated after a short rickshaw ride, as the charming old quarter comes into view.

Luzhi’s scenic canals are the principal attraction for sightseers, Marco Polo once praised Suzhou as “The Oriental Venice”. These waterways were the highways of old China, criss-crossed by prosperous Jiangnan shipping taking venerated Suzhou silk north to the celestial capital in Beijing. Flanked by i Zhengde

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cobbled stone paths, visitors are able to amble along the water’s edge, past crooked stone dwellings and over ancient arch-bridges.

It costs tourists forty yuan (£4) to take a lazy river cruise. The sight of Chinese gondoliers adorned in bamboo hats goes someway to justifying the much-touted ‘Venice of the East’ moniker. Yet in the midst of this quaint slice of history, the thought that ultra-modern, ultra-chic Shanghai is just a 50-mile hop to the east is a tad difficult to digest.

“Bamboo slippers, ten yuan, ten yuan!” cries a villager in a language barely recognizable to a Mandarin-speaker. According to my guidebook, the local “mellifluous” dialect is one of the qualities that make Suzhou’s women so enchanting. But as the lady tosses her wares onto the street and begins her shrill pitch, it’s difficult to ascertain quite why this form of Chinese is a cut above the rest.

“How about eight?” I manage to enquire, despite the rumpus of curious onlookers.

“These are handmade. At the very least ten.” “How do I know they’re handmade?” She shows me her hands. They’re certainly worn. But it always pays to be wary in modernday China. Despite justifiable lapses into romantic incredulity, if you’re not careful and questioning, you could easily find yourself heading home clutching an expensive but mass-produced item.

It wasn’t always this way. The ancient Chinese were renowned for their fine produce and principled business methods. Suzhou, with its silk industry and community of literati, typified this refined civilization.

City of “six thousand bridges, clever merchants, cunning men of all crafts…” is how Marco Polo saw things. The Suzhou Museum offers a crash course in the crafts Polo refers to. Entrance is free and exhibitions are housed inside a stunning old-meets-new premises

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IAN WILSON RECALLS THE PERSONAL INDIGNITIES OF PE Good sport selv edge.org

Baggy cotton shorts – in the school colours of black with a white stripe up the sides – billowed around our five year old legs, and white singlets flapped in the gusty winds of early autumn as we stood in a circle around our kindergarten teacher and embarrassedly chanted:

“Stand up straight like letter ‘I’ Hands at side and head held high – If you stand like letter ‘C’ Curly-wurly you will be.” Focusing perhaps rather more on instruction in posture and elocution (“Ian and Hugh, do speak clearly, stop gabbling.”) this was, nevertheless, my introduction to PE.

However, many of us were to remember with nostalgia piping Miss Deane’s gentle doggerel while her flailing arms conducted this awful choir. All too soon we had graduated to the untender tutelage of an ex-army PE instructor with a penchant for punishments. An excruciating example was that the last boy to get dressed after the lesson – and thus guilty of ‘being as slow as an old woman’ – had to leave ‘the gym’ wearing an enormous woman’s hat which the “Captain” had borrowed from the school’s costume wardrobe.

It was this business of getting clothes on after PE which forced me to confront the moral coward within myself. William was an unhappy, unattractive person – all too often his nose went unwiped and on two shameful occasions he had wet himself in the classroom; he endured snubbing rather than bullying, but it was tying a tie which was his undoing.

Along with slews of rules which the school implemented, was that we had to undo and retie our ties after PE, nothing as slovenly as simply stretching it into a loop which could be slipped over the head and then tightened. William could not make a tie-knot and suffered agonies and punishment. I felt sorry for him, but fear of rejection and torment from classmates held me back from doing the decent thing. One evening I asked my older sister who – quite possibly of finer moral fibre than myself, and equally possibly because she was wholly uninvolved – tolerated no timorous shillyshallying on my part: “You have to help him, there are no two ways about it.” The thought of what awaited me made the lesson into a penance and when the dreaded moment arrived, I was a martyr about to mount the scaffold. The simple humanitarian act was clumsily carried out on William, who was sitting in despairing helplessness scrunching his neck-gear in his big, boney fingers. He never thanked me, we never became friends – but two miracles did occur: I wasn’t blackballed and the next week he was able, at least on a certain level, to fasten the damn thing around his neck.

It was the clothing as much as the PE activities which surfaced when I set about ransacking people’s memories of school sports. Female friends recall the Airtex shirt and bloomers which were deemed de rigeur kit for exercising the limbs, while a colleague told of the slightly curious practice, in an Irish convent, where the students performed gymnastics in their knickers, an oddity in a context where covering up and the stressing of modesty were carried to extremes.

With a gently ironic smile, an acquaintance recollects the imitation ‘classical’ loose, pastel green tunics which she wore when ‘Greek movements’ replaced the more conventional PE class. Her succinct comment on this state of affairs was that it always seemed to be the least likeable girls who put the most ‘expression’ into their swaying, gesturing and fluttering.

Another friend recalls, with a certain fondness, the wraparound skirt worn for sport, as it was generally felt to possess more potential charm than any other garment associated with PE. This same person makes no pains about the embarrassment mixed with tentative showing-off when under the gaze of the teenaged boys

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from the neighbouring institution who were gawking at the girls’ netball sessions through the hedge and playground railings.

A Scottish ceramicist recollects, with a shudder, that in the weeks preceding Hogmanay, PE was replaced by Scottish Country Dancing in preparation for the New Year ceilidhs. Chris hated the necessary skipping motions and remembers not only the baleful warning (“Put some heart into your skipping, laddie, or you’ll get the belt”), but also the painful enactment of the threat.

The leather-covered horse worn to a sheen by the thousands of hands propelling bodies – sometimes graceful and confident but more frequently awkward and desperate, the smell of plimsolls, the burn of the rope on the palms of one’s hands, folding your towel into a rat’s tail to flick bottoms painfully in the shower-room: these are just a few examples of the memories elicited.

Another aspect of PE was the many excuses manufactured in order to evade this part of the school syllabus: the knees and ankles which caused such sudden pain, the migraines which unfortunately manifested themselves, the vaguely described and poorly feigned ‘problems’. A safer route was persuading or browbeating parents to ‘write a note’. However, there were schools of such laxity that friends could ‘swap’ PE for Art or Maths Higher, or simply ‘disappear’ by virtue of never signing-up for sports teams. There was the excuse proffered, successfully, when a pupil in Aden, by a now renowned eye-surgeon, who with assumed shamefacedness told the principal “I’m so bad at PE that I would bring disgrace on the good name of the school.”

The two boys in my secondary school who excelled at PE were wildly different characters: one a solemn, religious proselytizer and earnest bodybuilder, the other a good-looking young Flashman – who gave off an aura of a life more dangerous and thrilling than our own. (He was also rumoured to have been the first in our class to have precociously tasted certain adult delights.) After this star duo came the great lumbering mass of us, and finally, those poor souls who were truly desolate, dreading the barked orders which required of them performances of strength and dexterity of which they knew themselves incapable.

However, there was the excitement surrounding the arrival of summer when medicine balls, vaulting bucks and pommel horses were exchanged for the bliss of swimming. That those who shone on the parallel bars, springboard and balance benches were also the ablest performers in the unnaturally blue waters of the notvery-large school pool, mattered so much less when out-of-doors, splashing in the summer sunshine.

Many of those I questioned felt little enthusiasm towards PE, but enjoyed sport. Textile artist Michael Brennand-Wood loathed organized classes, but loved “competing against myself” while running long distances through the Lancashire countryside. I spent Double Latin on Friday afternoons gazing out of the window at the tennis courts where, in my fantasies, the brilliant drives which flowed off the cat-gut strings of my wooden racquet would soon be burning up the base-lines.

My Olympic Games television-viewing, this year – as in the past – will focus not on the drama of the men’s 100m final, nor on the diving events. It is the gymnasts, especially their feats of utterly unimaginable skill involving incredible balance on slender bars, or supporting oneself, motionless, on the rings, that keep me enthralled. This absorption, however, is accompanied by slightly rueful thoughts concerning my own far distant and distinctly mediocre achievements in the PE arena, and an unexpected, albeit grudging, acceptance of the loss of youth’s agility.

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Power lines STELLA McCARTNEY’S WINNING STYLE

It’s fitting that Stella McCartney, a graduate of London’s Central St. Martin’s, was selected to be the creative designer of Great Britain’s Olympic kit, as the clean, unfussy lines of her fashion collections often recall performance-driven athletics wear.

Her Spring/Summer 2012 line contains crisp short, white dresses that conjure up tennis whites. Their undulating trim, fashioned from layers of white embroidery that Hamish Bowles for Vogue.com calls “rococo volutes,” swirls down the silhouette. With these re-embroidered curves, calling to mind the arc of a javelin’s flight, a swimmer’s reach during the butterfly stroke, the arch of a high jumper’s back, McCartney merges fitness with fashion. These dresses are for jumping into, rather than for jumping over a net.

A dominant feature of this sports-inflected collection is the athletic tank-top bodice: McCartney scoops from the outside of the tank, revealing a more muscular silhouette that is tempered by delicate fabrics and mesh inlays that evoke a fencer’s mask. McCartney plays with these cut-aways, sometimes proportioning them symmetrically, other times creating a one-shoulder silhouette with a scoop that winds its way across the body with a palpable energy. Her clothes are alive with motion.

If the garments in McCartney’s S/S 2012 integrate athletics, the women’s presentation jackets she designed for the Olympic kit are pure style. Although she adheres to the traditional zipped warm-up jacket, McCartney cinches it at the waist with a smart tie belt, giving the jacket considerable polish. Her competition wear also pays attention to this area: triple jumper Phillips Idowu wears a sprint-suit that’s anchored by the ‘power web’ X at his midriff, designed to stabilize his core muscles.

This technologically enhanced detail is meant to complement Idowu’s performance, but its elegant corset-belt features might also garner compliments from the fashion set. And here form meets function. The dialogue that McCartney initiates between the running lane and runway style ensures that Great Britain’s ing

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athletes look like champions even before they mount the podium.

McCartney’s Olympic designs are not without controversy, however. A somewhat invisible concern is regarding the manufacturer of the kits. Made by the German company Adidas, for whom McCartney also designs a luxe athletics line, the range is not manufactured in the United Kingdom. Kate Battrick, London stylist who holds an MA from the London College of Fashion, expresses disappointment at this choice. “This was a clear opportunity to help an industry and inject a truly British feel into the Olympics,” she said. “McCartney has shown exceptional talent with sportswear but it would be nice to see all British designers inject some enterprise into their own country where relevant.”

A more visible matter is the representation of the Union Jack, which McCartney renders in shades of indigo, using red as accents on cuffs, collars, shoulders, socks and shoes. In an interview with the BBC, she explained her approach to integrating the flag. “For me, it’s one of the most iconic flags in the world,” she said, and spoke of how she chose to distinguish the familiar red, white, and blue of the Union Jack from similar colours in other countries’ flags. “I wanted to bring the flag into the graphic, but I wanted to dismantle it and make it slightly more delicate. I wanted to bring more texture to it and wrap the body in a 360.”

Of course, other British designers have worked with the Union Jack to great effect – Alexander McQueen has emblazoned it on accessories from shoes to clutches; Vivienne Westwood interprets the flag in watercolor on her pillows and rugs; Nadia Wilcock cuts and pieces the flag back together in her artfully seamed floor-length gown with a train. McCartney follows this tradition as she remaps the Union Jack. Her 360-perspective “wrap-around” vision simulates 3D computer-generated graphics of athletes used for training purposes: she has created a flag that travels over the body.

Like the athletes, this flag is kinetic. And because McCartney’s flag is in motion, she highlights its elements, rather than its entirety, but always makes sure that its blues and whites unfurl a compelling story, punctuated with bursts of red. She also worked with individual athletes to study their movements, to ensure that their physical expression would complement the placement of the graphic. So heptathlete Jessica Ennis’s jumps and runs are highlighted in her threequarter–length leggings with the flag at the edge; tennis player Andy Murray’s strokes call attention to the flag on his chest.

McCartney knows how to frame the body with both print and cut. In her spring/summer 2012 collection she incorporates tiny geometric prints – inspired by men’s traditional silk neckwear – into her fabric for silhouettes that showed off a woman’s toned physique. But she also uses the silk foulard print for less body-conscious, yet still sports-inflected designs that propel their energy, in part, from the lively prints.

As Battrick notes, McCartney has always delivered what she calls “clothes that play more on femininity as a class act and has not sexualized her collections.” McCartney demonstrates her restraint in loose silk paisley jumpsuits (one of which she wore to the Tower of London to present her Olympic kit) that combine the utility of the ‘gi’ worn in judo with the comfort of pajamas. She pairs over-sized, whisper-thin polo shirts with matching pants and pool sandals, sometimes shrugging a bomber jacket over top. With McCartney’s sure cuts, the floaty fabrics did not overwhelm, but rather hinted at the strength of a woman’s body beneath them.

Like a gymnast navigating the beam, McCartney designs with balance. As she told the BBC, the first question she asked the Olympic athletes was “What can I do for you?” in order to design competitive wear that would not only abide by the rules and regulations of each discipline, but would also enhance performance while looking sharp. Her spring/summer 2012 collection follows that same principle: by balancing athletics with aesthetics, McCartney makes clothes that both suggest and invite movement. And that’s a good fit. Kate Cavendish s e l v e d g e . o r g

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Enjoy the ride

SADDLES SHOWCASE A WEALTH OF TRADITIONAL SKILLS

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A traditional English saddle possesses understated beauty which belittles the complexity of its construction. At first sight it appears to be a moulded object – a carved object, a thrown object – but behind its smooth, elegant exterior lies layers of different materials, all selected for a particular use, married together by the skill of the craftsmen. But when the saddle is complete all the beholder sees is its simplicity with a function.

“Anything else is a piece of cake really,” laughs former saddler and owner of The Great English Outdoors, Athene English, when she recalls the complex set of rules she had to master to produce her first saddle. “The skills you learn are transferable so if you give me leather I can fashion a bag, belt... most things really.” It is, nevertheless, a qualified statement. “I couldn’t bind a book,” confesses Athene. “I can repair a riding boot but couldn’t create a dress shoe. Learning saddlery makes you multi-talented but not master of all trades. I’d find it more difficult to work with very fine leathers.”

Of course a number of famous companies that have their roots in this area of expertise have made the leap to fancy goods – many have diversified as the centuries have passed. Hermès may bring silk scarves to mind but their horse-drawn carriage logo – a light calèche called a duc to be precise, reveals their equestrian origins. Their flagship store at 24 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, Paris, may be filled with designer goods: but on the top floor is the Hermès workshop where impeccable saddles are still made by a leather craftsman with over 30 years of experience and a handful of apprentices.

In England the town of Walsall in the West Midlands, has been the centre of saddle making for centuries. Barnsby, a local company founded in 1793 hold a Royal Warrant as supplier of Saddlery & Lorinery to H M Queen ibrary

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Elizabeth II. A ‘loriner or lorimer’ (a wonderfully rare word), makes the metal parts of harness and tack. Barnsby manufactures saddles for the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery and The Household Cavalry, the seats of which are still made on the same wooden seat forming blocks originally used in 1900. Things in this industry are made to last... Athene’s training was almost 28 years ago but she still has the first saddle she made. “They last forever,” she insists – and they should as a fine saddle is an expensive item. A handmade English saddle could cost £5,000 and up. Athene’s training was an investment really as she was trained in classical dressage and rode competitively.

The function of the saddle is to carry the rider on the back of the horse in the most comfortable way for both horse and rider, and enable the rider to deliver the aids of weight and leg pressure to the horse to control its movement and direction. For this the horse, with the help of the saddle, is able to carry the weight of the rider away from the movement of its spine for hour upon hour at any speed, slow or fast, over any terrain, smooth or rough, up or down, without the weight or height of the rider above its back causing friction on its spine.

Beyond this basic requirement it is the style of riding that influences the shape of a saddle. At a midpoint in its evolution it developed in two different directions, branching into the modern English and Western saddle. Traditional English saddles have a hand made wooden frame. This frame or ‘tree’ is shaped like an open harp with a high arc or ‘pommel’ at the front, which takes all the movement and weight of the rider away from the ‘withers’ of the horse. The withers are at the base of its neck, and must be completely free to move as the action of the front shoulders and legs of the horse come from this point. The round open seat of the saddle which cushions the rider’s seat is at the back and is called the ‘cantle’. It rises at the rear to cushion the back of the rider and prevent them slipping. The middle section of the saddle is called the ‘waist’, and is kept slim to fit snuggly on either side of the horse’s spine. Simply formed, it is a brilliant piece of design which has remained unchanged for a hundreds of years.

Saddle trees were traditionally made from laminated beech wood. It has the flexibility necessary for the job in question and laminating it allows further flexibility as well as keeping weight to the minimum. Today many other materials are used, such as fibreglass, but none have the ‘wicking’ ability of wood. Technology is making its presence felt; in 2010 Hermès launched the Talaris saddle, from the Latin ‘talaria’, meaning ‘winged sandals’. Under its made-to-measure leather exterior the Talaris’s ‘tree’ is not made of wood but of injection moulded thermoplastic. Other parts are fashioned from carbon fibre and titanium, even stitching is shunned in favour of “three screwdrivers” to bolt the saddle together. The result is one third lighter.

However, if you are sticking to tradition, the next procedure after making the tree is a piece of time consuming craftsmanship in which the saddler uses hemp ‘straining’ webbing about 2” wide, fixing it length ways down the waist of the tree from the cantle to the pommel, and then across the narrowest point of the waist of the saddle. The hemp webbing has strength as well as wicking ability and will tighten with the use of a spray of water before finally being strained over the frame with pliers and fixed with nails. The process demonstrates skilful understanding of the natural materials and how they work. Athene is proud of her knowledge of these time honoured techniques; “Modern materials do not require these skills but nor do they have the absorbency of natural materials. The complexity is necessary – webbing is the precursor to making the seat,” she explains. “Wool (saddle serge) cloth is used as it is strong, flexible and warm. The serge is stretched and nailed into place over the webbed-up tree of the saddle. Beeswax is rubbed onto the serge in the middle of the seat and an incision made. Wool ‘flocking’ or loose wool is fed into the incision and teased into the seat of the saddle until just the right amount of padding or flocking has been put into the seat of the saddle. The incision is then sewn up. Any lumps and bumps in the flocking are removed using a “smasher” or large ball headed hammer and pointed bradawl.”

Even the smallest part of the process demonstrates incredible attention to detail. “When ‘blocking the seat’ – where thin pigskin is stretched, dampened and tacked onto the seat and left to dry so it will take the shape of the seat and keep it – it must be done in a certain way or the thin pigskin will tear. A welted seam is the answer. This is a strip of fine pigskin folded between the two leathers and then sewn together. This dissipates the friction between the thin and thick leather.” Representing, as it does, a rare display of ingenuity and tradition, it saddens Athene to see examples of turn of the century saddlery on sale for a fraction of their value at auctions, “They are worth so much more. In terms of craftsmanship every one is a museum piece.” The Horse, from Arabia to Royal Ascot, 24 May– 30 September 2012, British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG, T: +44 (0)20 7323 8299 www.britishmuseum.org s e l v e d g e . o r g