ContentsINDULGEtextilestobuy,collectorsimply admire 14 COVER STORY A breath of salt air PollyLeonardselectsnecessitiesforatriptotheseaside 18 COVER STORY Tides of fashion Nygårds Anna offer styles that will survive A look at the timelessandsimplefashionofthisSwedishclothingdesigner’srecentcollection76AnoldhandMarie-PierreGenestofLesToilesBlanchestransformsantiquelinens Aninterview with the founder of this company. Les Toiles Blanches products have been part of the Selvedge drygoodsrangesince2010.
CONCEPT textiles in fine art 32 COVER STORY Tied in knots AnillustratedguidetotyingyourscarfbyRCAgraduateLauraKnight, findmoreofhercardsandpostersintheSelvedgeshop.
INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 24 Straw poll Hat making in Caussade and Septfonds Paris based photographer, Anne Laure Camilleri,sharesthestoryoftheseFrenchhatmakingtowns. 73 Design file Susan Collier of Collier Campbell Afactfileaboutthelifeandworkofthisrenowned printedtextiledesigner. 96 Wind power Early textile technology Sarah Jane Downing looks back at the history of windmillsailsmadefromcloth
GLOBAL 54 Shuttle tour Travel the weavers’ road in Austria Written by native author and textile designer AndreaTierney,illustrationsbyChristopherCorr 60 COVER STORY Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo Award-winning filmmaker Mary Lance’s most recenttextiledocumentaryproject,photographybyBrianaBlasko 66 Pastel portrait Toulouse, where the roads are paved with ‘blue gold’ Abook extract from Le PastelenPaysd’OcbySandrineBanessytellingthestoryofwoadinToulouse
ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 37 Escape to the circus The working life of the Giffords troupe Alookbehind the scenes atan unusualnomadiclifestyle 41 COVER STORY Airborne The history of hang-gliding PrimroseTrickeruncoversthestorybehind thepioneerswhoturnedpiecesofclothintoflyingmachines 58 Check again Word perfect winner Geneviéve Woods traces the revival of Kelsch. Alookatthis traditionalclothfromAlsaceintheworkshopoftheGanderfamily 75 Fabric swatch No 5: Gingham Sarah Jane Downing uncovers the origin of this now familiar checkedfabric,illustratedbyNinaTakata
COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 48 Made to last Age holds no fear for Vaxbo Lin owners Hanna and Jacob Bruce photographed byAnnaKern,writtenbySwedishauthorandregularcontributorCiaWedin
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Following the circus out of town might be an appealing fantasy but few people actually act on the desire to join these glamorous, nomadic troupes. Probably because deep down they know it’s bloody hard work. Glamour is for the onlookers, graft is for the group of people behind the curtain, as Selvedge Listing Editor, Gemma Waggett, found out when she answered a small advertisment inviting hopefuls to 'run away with Giffords'...
“My escape to Giffords happened on a whim,” she explains. “I had visited the production a couple of years running and had always been in awe. Then one quiet November evening, in Stroud, the advert that I had seen earlier in the year re-entered my mind and I sent them an email. To my amazement, they replied overnight and after a couple of meetings with Nell and Toti Gifford – I packed my things, and Walter, my dachshund, and headed of to work as Set and Prop Manager on their 2011 show.”
That show War and Peace for the Circus takes Tolstoy’s Russian epic and transposes it to the Big Top. Re-imagined for a family audience, with costumes, choreography, circus artists and an original score by the Giffords Circus band, the show typifies what is rare about this particular troupe.
In an interview in the Telegraph newspaper Nell Gifford says she conceived the idea when she read Tolstoy’s novel a few years ago, and approached Irina Brown, a Russian theatre and opera director, who last year directed Prokofiev’s War and Peace for the Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and asked her to write and direct War and Peace for the Circus.
It’s an ambitious project, even for a circus that was always determined to be different. Toti and Nell Gifford started Giffords Circus in 2000. Their vision was of a miniature village green circus, packed, rowdy, glamorous - birds and horses and motorbikes bursting from a fluttering white tent - a show for rural families, farmers and filmstars. Since 2000 the Giffords Circus company of painted wagons has toured the rural Southwest, moving every week, and entertained over 250,000 people.
“The circus itself operates from a discreet HQ in Gloucestershire - there is no signage, the big top is certainly not up all year round and yet the magic lives on,” says Gemma. “An archive of costume is stored in a room nearby, next to a fabric and haberdashery supply cupboard that would rival Kleins. In wet and windy March when the actors, musicians and performers start to arrive every moment is considered a rehearsal. I quickly realised how lucky I was to be able to work creatively in this habitat. Somehow it doesn’t seem odd to have a colleague called ‘Tweedy the Clown’, or to look out of my office window and see a man riding two shire horses simultaneously by standing astride their backs.”
The job at hand was equally unusual. “Our biggest prop was a seven foot canvas-covered copy of War and Peace from which the characters emerge. We've also made a hobby horse, 10 metres of hand-sewn silk signalling flags, origami paper hats and a series of handcrafted mummer masks. Circus props have to be beautiful and they have to look the part but the key to circus life is making things robust – items must survive being packed and unpacked for weekly journeys, and, of course, life in the tent.” And Gemma’s props must do more than look pretty for the duration of the tour. The War and Peace show attempts to tell the story, not “just decorate it with acts,” says Brown. The set and scenery have a tale to tell too.
The tour in currently at the suitably literary Hay Festival and continues until September. By the time it finishes political commentators who speak patronizingly of ‘bread and circuses’ to appease the masses might have to find a new metaphor. Giffords delights the eye and offers food for thought. War and Peace for the Circus, Giffords Circus, Touring until 11 September 2011, for locations and tickets call T: 0845 459 7469, www.giffordscircus.com or see pg 80 to win a family ticket.
touts ‘Since 53’ – a jab at their Northern Californian rival, O’Neill, following legal wrangles on the origins of the wetsuit. That rivalry mirrors the titanic North-South rumble between Huntington Beach and Santa Cruz for the legal rights to claim the mantle of ‘Surf City, USA’, recently won by Huntington. The Meistrells marketed their suits under the name ‘Thermocline’ until 1965, when they hired a marketing pro to help them come up with the name ‘Body Glove’, as in ‘fits like a glove.’ Under the original Dive N’ Surf designation, Bill Meistrell has three U.S. patents since 1987.
On 26 July 2007, founders Bob and Bill Meistrell were awarded a prestigious granite stone on the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach in the category of Surf Culture for ‘creating the wetsuit’ but the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum does not acknowledge a wetsuit inventor on its website. And while Body Glove and O’Neill deserve accolades for pioneering advancements in the wetsuit, history shows that the story has another principle player.
Despite the inference by both O’Neill and Body Glove that they hold the key to the wetsuit’s origin, credit must be shared by a third man. In a Los Angeles Times article, Surfing whodunit, Dive N’ Surf founder Bev Morgan reported that while trawling the Scripps library in La Jolla, California he found a 1951 report on wetsuits for the Navy that said “Hugh Bradner invented the wetsuit, was the first to use neoprene and came up with the whole concept.”
An avid waterman from infancy (according to family lore, Hugh ‘Brad’ Bradner was chucked off a pier by his father into the water at the age of three to sink or swim… he swam), Bradner graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in physics and was one of the first Americans to make a deep water SCUBA dive. As a nuclear scientist, he was among a trio who established Los Alamos in 1943 and he worked as a research scientist at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley.
However, it was his work for the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory that led to his pioneering research on the wetsuit, as a means to keep Navy SEALS warm and insulated against underwater explosions. He rounded out his illustrious scientific career as professor emeritus at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at U.C. San Diego.
An active member of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), Bradner was qualified to fuse science with ocean exploration. He worked in an era when the security of the country was paramount and collaboration the most effective means to ensure it, which explains Bradner’s reluctance to claim his rightful role as inventor of the wetsuit. In a rare Scripps oral history interview in August of 1999, Bradner discussed his career and offered an insight into the origins of the wetsuit.
In college Bradner was a self-described ‘lazy’ competitive swimmer, who entered swim relays and high diving. While a graduate student at Caltech he began diving below sea level, rigging with another Ph.D. student some homemade diving equipment with a bottle of pure oxygen and a CO2 absorber in the pre-SCUBA days of 1938, five years before the Aqua-Lung was invented by the Cousteau-Gagnan team and more than ten years before that device was first marketed in 1949. It was SCUBA that made the invention of the wetsuit a necessity, increasing cold water diving time from mere minutes to hours.
Fresh out of Caltech, he did a stint at the Naval Ordnance Lab in Washington, D.C., working on mine warfare technology at the start of WWII before moving to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to contribute to studies on high explosives and implosion. Bradner then moved back to California and on to high-energy physics at Lawrence Labs in Berkeley. Despite his ‘7-day workweek,’ he was invited to join the National Research Council to advise on undersea swimming and warfare. It was here that the idea of a ‘wetsuit’ was spawned.
His primary focus was improving the equipment of underwater demolition teams (UDTs) and the frogmen who comprised them. A disciplined and multifaceted scientist, he quickly found that the contemporary ‘dry suits’ did not provide sufficient insulation for divers and concluded that some sort of rubber compound that trapped dead air would be an ideal solution. So he ‘messed around’ with other scientists going through unsatisfactory experiments in layers of rubber and wool. At the recommendation of a colleague in 1951, they zeroed in on a product called ‘neoprene foam rubber’ made by Rubatex.
On 21 June 1951, Bradner sent a ‘definitive’ letter to Larry Marshall at the Naval Office pointing out ‘you don’t have to stay dry to stay warm.’ By that time his group had built several ‘imperfect’ wetsuits to present at the December ‘Swimposium’ in Coronado, California, marking the first public airing of the concept. Water trials came next with the United States Navy Sea, Air and Land Teams (SEALs) and the first open ocean trial in April of 1952 in 51.8°F water in Punta Banda, Baja. Other trials took place in Echo Lake, as well as an ambitious test at Christmas time in icy Lake Tahoe.
There are early photos of Bradner and his team venturing out to Año Nuevo Island to test the new suits, 55 miles south of San Francisco. Bradner also recalled a test of the suit in shallow waters near the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco. Donning his equipment, he submerged in 3–4 feet of water while under the supposedly watchful eye of another scientist who broke away to get something from the car. As he peered up from the water, Bradner saw “a luscious woman running down to the beach – this completely deserted beach with nothing except this black-suited creature in the water – and threw off all her clothes to sunbathe.”
The most obvious question is: why didn’t he patent the design? Bradner stated quite clearly that, “the morality in those days was that one was not supposed to profit by anything done under government auspices”. The patent office treated the invention as a classified project and bounced the issue back to the government, which in turn decided it didn’t require any patent protection. That put the ball back in Bradner’s court and he discussed the commercial application of the wetsuit with the University of California. “In my wisdom, I said, ‘No, I think maybe fifty people in the country
(would use it)’.” A fateful admission, considering wetsuit sales topped $450 million annually in the recent industry statistics.
Though he was the driving force behind the wetsuit, Bradner was scrupulous about treating its invention as a collaborative venture. This also held true for his research into sophisticated diving equipment, including underwater contact lenses, a single-hose regulator and a decompression meter. Bradner even developed a loop system for quickly extracting the SEALs from the water via inflatable boats, similar to modern tow surfing sleds. Engineering problems were to be solved collegially, not unilaterally ‘claimed’ by any one team member. As he put it, “I don’t give a damn who thought of it first”.
Questioned by the Chief of Naval Operations about why “a good high-energy physicist spends his efforts on swimmers and divers when around him people were doing Nobel prize work,” Bradner responded, “I felt that a single person could make a greater contribution, a greater impact, in a war situation by diving than by any other activity that I knew. I still hold to that.” Little did he know that his research, motivated by the war effort, would also leave the legacy of year-round recreation for generations of divers and surfers to come.
A search at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reveals the earliest listing for an ‘Aquatic garment having an ergonomically curve opening’ incorrectly listed as a ‘wetsuit’, filed 31 January 1947.
Though extraordinarily detailed and impressive,
the patent appl i ca t i on clearly describes a dry suit, not a wetsuit;
“a water-excluding garment of rubber sheeting, with insulation provided by a thermal vest.” This leaves Bradner’s 21 June 21 1951 letter in place as the earliest documentary evidence of plans for a wetsuit.
While it is clear that we owe a debt of thanks the early developers of this critical aquatic garment, Hugh Bradner rates a special place in the pantheon of wetsuit development. Without the wetsuit surfing would be limited to the summer. Cold comfort in increasingly crowded line-ups, true, but infinitely better than using an itchy wool vest ill-suited to the rigors of sport.
Admittedly, there is no ‘Bradner Eliminator, Psycho II or Vapor’ wetsuit on the market today but Bradner is truly the father of the wetsuit. So the next time you pull on this thin, flexible, insulating garment, take a moment to appreciate not only its warmth, but its evolution and innovators too. Mike Wallace, www.surfpulse.com
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Head start THE MANY BENEFITS OF A STYLISH SCARF
Wear them, collect them, frame them – the headscarf is to be enjoyed for its design, colour and pattern – and its unexpected record of life in the 20th century. The scarf is an important a part of the modern wardrobe. So say authors Nicky Albrechtsen and Fola Solanke in their new book Scarves.
While women in many cultures, both past and present, have donned headscarves for modesty and traditional etiquette, others have worn them out of practical necessity whilst working to keep their hair from getting dirty or caught in machinery. Albrechtsen and Solanke attribute the success of the headscarf as a fashion accessory to the growing popularity of the automobile in the 1950s. “Scarves, worn to protect the hair and neck from the wind while riding in a car became an essential element of women’s leisurewear and a symbol of affluence,” they say. “By the 1950s stars of the silver screen had made the headscarf not s e l v e d g e . o r g selv edge.org
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industry
Strawpoll selv edge.org the men were employed in hat blocking or straw dyeing.
A century ago, the south west of France had a booming straw hat industry. Historically, these stitched straw braid hats were worn in rural areas and were designed to shield the face and eyes. Lightweight straw hats were popular during the summers of the 1820s. The boater hat was designed in the 1880s for sporting activities but soon became fashionable for men and women alike, as depicted in the Renoir painting Le Déjeuner des Canotiers (1881). Its popularity grew during the 20th century when it was seen in films starring Fred Astaire or Maurice Chevalier. In 1910, Coco Chanel designed her first boater and the humble hat remained iconic for half a century.
H AT MAKINGINCAUSSADEANDSEPTFONDS
In the Caussade district it began with Pétronille Cantecor, born Perette Gleye. The story goes that, while out herding sheep, she noticed the tall, thin, white straw that grew on the dry rocky land. She used this straw to make her first straw braid (paillole). The Occitan word ‘paillole’ became the generic term for straw hats.
Straw-hat making was seasonal and the industry a rural one. The process had many steps and was dependent on the skills of local peasants. The hats were not woven but were made by sewing together lengths of plaited straw in a spiral from crown to brim. Various shapes where created by altering stitching techniques before blocking and steaming. During the summer – the peak agricultural season – the hat factories would close but in winter, when farming activity was slow, farmers would return to plaiting and hat making to supplement their family income. But the rewards were meagre, women and young girls were paid by the piece for plaited and sewn work produced at home, while
Petronille had married Jean Cantecor, a farmer, in 1787 when she was seventeen. They moved to the nearby town of Septfonds and thirteen children were born between 1788 and 1809. Astonishingly she managed to open her first workshop in 1796 and began teaching straw plaiting to other women.
At the end of the 18th century, hat making was a small-scale and dispersed industry. Typically, women sold their plaits to dealers or at local markets. The Septfonds straw braids made their way to the hat manufactures of Lyon, Nancy and Grenoble.
André Rey, cousin of Jean Cantecor, started his workshop in Septfonds in 1830. When he opened a factory in Caussade in 1854
the Septfonds workers went on strike, setting up a roadblock and accusing him of taking jobs away. In the 1840s, the hatters
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in d u s t r y sought their independence from the city-based manufacturers. They reached out to foremen and workers in Lyon, Grenoble and Italy, and learned their millinery secrets. By 1849, Septfonds was producing finished hats adorned with embellishments. As new export markets rapidly developed, the control of raw materials was essential to the hatters. Conveniently, the nearby Quercy limestone plateau grew a tall, thin rye straw suitable for plaiting.
When Pétronille Cantecor died in 1846 her grandson Fortuné Cantecor inherited the family business. He embraced modernisation, built a new factory, manufactured more elaborate hats and began mass production with his first blocking press in 1868. He also imported straw braids directly from China in 1869, finally ending the British monopoly. His daughter Eugénie inherited the family business in 1890.
The French Legat foot pedal sewing machine was introduced to Septfonds in 1875. The heavy machine could simulate hand stitching and one person could sew 40 to 50 hats daily – five times the number that could be sewn by hand. As productivity increased, more plaits were imported from Italy or China.
Barely a century after Pétronille Cantecor made her first straw braid, the Tarn-etGaronne area was the third largest straw hat-making centre, behind Lyon and the Lorraine region. And Septfonds was the most prominent town, its population reached 2,200 and 25 local factories employed 2,000 people, many travelling from neighbouring villages. The introduction of electricity in 1896 increased productivity but some steps, such as trimming, were still done by hand.
The railroad reached Caussade in 1884 and placed the town at the centre of the millinery industry. The Tarn-et-Garonne hat trade reached its peak between the 1880s and the 1930s. Prior to WWI, Septfonds and Caussade manufactured seven and three million straw hats a year respectively. Cantecor, Rey, Bouzinac and Rey Cousin were the largest companies and their salesmen travelled extensively in France, Europe, North Africa and the French colonies. Universal Exhibitions were a great place for the hat trade and Rey Cousin won first prize at the World Fair in Paris 1900. Rey Cousin was the first millinery company to be listed on the stock exchange in the early 1900s. Raymond Laffont, Charles Mignot and Maurice Rousseau (Monocrin inventor) registered patents and won awards for their entrepreneurial ideas between 1870 and 1920. But of the 60 factories that once existed only two remain in Caussade and one in Septfonds, with a combined workforce of just 200 people.
Until the 19th century, hats were made from three types of material; straw, felt and fabric. Felt hats were a menswear staple and could be made all year round. The Belarbre Cie started making felt hats in the region in 1927 ending the seasonal nature of local hat making.
Hats were in turn practical, fashionable and they indicated social status. The World Wars and the Great Depression irrefutably damaged the hat industry, cheap plait imported from Asian countries assisted its collapse but it was the social change of the 1950 and 60s that s e l v e d g e . o r g
