While much of the Chinese fashion world seems to be focused on big-name labels like Chanel and Gucci, designer Kathrin von Rechenberg turns to ancient Chinese methods for her inspiration.
The Beijing-based designer creates haute couture clothing made from tea silk, which is produced by a process indigenous to Southeast Asia. Silk is dyed multiple times in a stew made from yam roots and finished up with a final soak in the iron-rich mud of Guangdong province. It is dried under the sun. (Traditionally the fabric was washed in a soup of leftover tea, but Ms. Rechenberg no longer uses tea in the washing process.)
Sometimes called xiang yun sha („fragrant cloud gauze“) or gambiered Guangdong silk, the fabric ends up looking and feeling like soft leather. The process has been used since the Ming Dynasty (14th to 17th centuries) by people who prized the result for its durability, comfort and water resistance, Ms. Rechenberg says, but few people nowadays use tea silk for common clothing.
The Munich-born Ms. Rechenberg, 44, fell in love with tea silk, China and the Chinese man who became her husband after she arrived in the country 14 years ago. Trained at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the same school that taught Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino and Karl Lagerfeld, Ms. Rechenberg first learned of tea silk in Taiwan, where she worked with the designer Sophie Hong.
(Image: queeniedress black homecoming dresses)
After she moved to mainland China in 2000, she found a wealth of tailors but few who understood the high-end fashion world involving patterns or bias cuts. But she developed a business and a following, eventually moving to a tucked-away studio in Beijing’s northeastneighborhood, where she built a showroom and atelier in a place that once stored coal for the homes in the neighborhood.
Ms. Rechenberg isn’t the only high-end designer to use tea silk. Chinese fashion designer Liang Zi, for example, uses it in her fashion line Tangy.
But Ms. Rechenberg’s work stands out not just for the fabrics she uses but also for the look: asymmetrical dresses, blouses, jackets and pants that combine Asian elements—a Mandarin collar or Chinese button knot, say—with chic, flowing designs. While many of the pieces reflect the dark brown and reddish-brown color of the Guangdong earth, she has recently branched out into using white cotton-paper fabrics and silk dyed with patterns she found in old Chinese pottery.
The haute couture items come with haute couture prices, starting from 900 yuan ($144) for a small item to tens of thousands of yuan for some dresses, she says. The average cost for pants fashioned with tea silk is 4,000 yuan.
But the elaborate, yearslong process of bringing the work to the showroom means that those high price tags don’t translate into a huge profit margin for the designer. It begins with her purchase of neutral-color silk, generally from Hangzhou. The silk is then sent to a dyeing center in Guangdong, where it is repeatedly soaked in the yam-root dye and then laid out on a grass-covered field to dry under the southern sun, as many as 30 times over.
This takes 10 days if the weather is sunny, and even longer if it rains. Added to that elaborate process is the fact that there are only about four months a year—April, May, September and October—when the sun is at the right intensity to dry the fabric and there isn’t too much rain to upset the process.
Finally, the silk is soaked in the iron-red mud found in the Pearl River Delta and dried once again. After the mud is washed off, the fabric is usually black on one side and reddish-brown on the other.
Ms. Rechenberg then stores the fabric to „fix“ the tannin and plant-dye color and allow the fibers to age and mellow. This step may last several years, or even longer—in fact, some of the fabric she uses on items today was dyed in the 1980s.
Only then come the design, the hand-stitching and the final fitting to bring an outfit to a client. Ms. Rechenberg insists on hand-stitching, which means that a process that might take a tailor using a machine one day will probably take three.
The process is complicated but the end result is simple, and the opposite of what Ms. Rechenberg calls „cut-and-paste designing,“ in which she says a garment’s problems are hidden by adding „a nice pocket and a nice flower, and a nice button.“ As she puts it, „the cleaner the cut and the clothes, the more you will see.“
„If there’s something not necessary in the cut, I leave it out,“ Ms. Rechenberg explains. „If the dart isn’t necessary, I don’t do it, if the pocket isn’t necessary, I don’t do it. If the button isn’t necessary I don’t do it.“ The simplicity of her work is what helps it stand out, she says.
Ms. Rechenberg’s work is available at her showroom and at the Aman at the Summer Palace hotel in Beijing.
Also Read: http://www.queeniedress.com/homecoming-dresses-2013-2014