Visiting Hebei’s “intangible cultural heritage” original village homespun cloth: Chinese homespun cloth featured in Milan Fashion Week
Amidst the sound of pedals, the shuttle quickly passed through the dense yarn… In the Tubu Cultural Industrial Park of Yuancun, Zanhuang County, Hebei Province, Cui Xueqin sat on a traditional Demonstration of homespun weaving skills in front of a handloom. On the loom, a piece of white and green striped homespun cloth is gradually taking shape.
Sixty-year-old Cui Xueqin is the inheritor of the Hebei Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage Project “Zanhuangyuan Village Homespun Textile Skills”. With 16 years of hard work, she not only passed down the nearly lost traditional hand-woven textile skills in the local area, benefiting more than 1,300 rural women, but also brought homespun cloth abroad through innovation, which amazed the Milan International Fashion Week.
According to Cui Xueqin, homespun cloth is a hand-woven craft among Chinese people for thousands of years. The original village homespun cloth weaving technology includes 72 processes such as elastic cotton, spinning thread, weaving, shrinking, and cutting. “Original Village” is not a village, but refers to all the villages in Zanhuang that weave cotton cloth, implying the use of original craftsmanship to produce “authentic” homespun cloth.
Different from the old homespun cloth with rough texture and monotonous color, the original village homespun cloth is soft, comfortable and rich in colors. Cui Xueqin said that this is because the quality of the raw material cotton has improved, and the process has been improved, from pulp production to pulp-free production. At the same time, in order to make the homespun cloth greener and healthier, the dye only uses mineral pigments or plant extracts such as leaves and grapes, and does not contain chemicals such as formaldehyde.
Cui Xueqin is the third generation inheritor of the original village’s homespun craftsmanship. Her maternal grandmother was the local “number one weaver” during the Anti-Japanese War. Later, Cui Xueqin’s mother inherited this craft. In 2005, Cui Xueqin, whose clothing business failed in Shijiazhuang, followed her mother’s advice and returned to her hometown to study homespun cloth skills.
Starting from borrowing money to purchase 7 hand-spinning wheels and 5 old looms, Cui Xueqin’s homespun cloth business quickly became prosperous after “taking the right path”. As she became wealthy, she never forgot her sisters in the village. In 2007, she organized more than 60 middle-aged and elderly women in the village to set up a professional cooperative to train peasant women to learn homespun cloth skills and become “weaver mothers”.
After more than ten years of development, the cooperative currently has 1,000 hand spinning wheels and more than 350 homespun looms, and has led more than 1,300 women from 17 villages in 6 surrounding towns to seek common development.
Cui Xueqin believes that “homespun fabrics can be ‘high-end’ and fashionable in an ‘international style’”. For this reason, for more than ten years, Yuancun Homespun has insisted on standardized production to ensure quality. It has also established a design studio in Hangzhou and hired designers to conduct a comprehensive and systematic design of homespun from variety to style. . These efforts gave Cui Xueqin the courage to “go out“.
In 2017, Haramura Dobu established a foreign trade department and participated in the Frankfurt Home Textile Exhibition in Germany and the Flemish International Trade Fair in Belgium. Later, he was invited by Mario Boselli, the honorary chairman of the Italian National Fashion Chamber, to attend the Milan International Fashion Week.
“When I participated in exhibitions in Europe, foreign friends gave me a thumbs up: China’s traditional craftsmanship is amazing and Chinese farmers are great.” Cui Xueqin said with a smile that Yuancun’s homespun home furnishing series products have been popular among people in Germany and Italy. family.
Since 2020, Cui Xueqin has won honors such as the “National Endeavor Award for Poverty Alleviation” and “National Advanced Individual for Poverty Alleviation”. She said that “honor is also a heavy task” and she must “reinforce efforts” in future rural revitalization. Now, she is planning to rely on the intangible cultural heritage culture of Yuancun Tubu and the ecological environment advantages of Zanhuang to unifiedly plan nearby villages to build a “Yancun Tubu Cultural Tourism Town”.
“The town divides the 72 processes of homespun textiles into sections for household production, making the production of homespun cloth more scalable. At the same time, it develops homestays, specialty foods and agricultural product processing.” Cui Xueqin said that this will promote the production of homespun cloth and also It will improve the rural living environment and increase farmers’ income.
“We are very confident about the future.” Cui Xueqin firmly believes that in the rural revitalization, through the hard-working hands of weavers, we will be able to get rich together. (End)
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