Dyeing For Fashion
• Textiles by Michiel Martens and Jetske Visser (Colour Via, London Design Festival 2018).
Words by Tim Leeson
Photos from London Design Festival 2018, and Living Colour by Laura Luchtman & Ilfa Siebenhaar
This story was originally published in Issue 3.
Natural dyes are making a comeback. By drawing on traditional dyeing techniques while utilising the perks of modern technology, textiles designers are shaping a colourful new world.
Did you know that in the mid-2000s Nestlé stopped producing blue Smarties? It’s hard to believe there wasn’t a larger uproar. Due to potential health concerns, which allegedly included hyperactivity, asthma, skin rashes, cancer and chromosomal problems linked to the use of the E133 colourant, Nestlé ceased using artificial colouring for their Smarties shells. And it wasn’t until the discovery of a colouring extracted from seaweed that blue Smarties joyously returned to our bellies.
There’s a growing realisation that natural dyes are likely safer, less toxic and have a higher compatibility with the environment than synthetic colouring. Since Smarties got their blue back, the global application of natural dyes has been increasing – and nowhere is this trend more visible and vital than the fashion trade.
The clothing industry is the second-largest polluter in the world after the oil industry. Approximately 20 percent of industrial water pollution in the world comes from the treatment and dyeing of fabric, and about 8,000 synthetic chemicals are used to turn raw materials into textiles. According to the World Bank, levels of water pollution in Macedonia reach 44 percent. In Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, 719 washing, dyeing and finishing factories were found to discharge into adjacent rivers, generating as much as 200 metric tonnes of wastewater per tonne of fabric. Unsurprisingly, the extremely high levels of pollution are threatening the water supply for Dhaka’s 18 million residents.
Now realising that the health of both ourselves and the planet is important, sources and processing techniques of natural colourants are again being studied.
Natural colourings have been prevalent since ancient times – just cast your mind’s eye to stunning cave and rock art that has been discovered around the world. From approximately 2000BC to the arrival of synthetic dyes in the 19th century, rare colourants fell in and out of fashion. One of the enduring colours of status was royal purple or Tyrian purple, which was first produced in the Bronze Age by the Phoenician city of Tyre (modern-day Lebanon).
In 1744, a South America derivation of this imperial purple was described as “a lively and durable colour, which does not lose its lustre by frequent washings, but is rather improved … and does not fade through long-continued use and exposure”. A dye that actually improves with age and wear – sounds cooler than even the colour-changing Hypercolor tees of the early 90s. But there’s a catch. In his award-winning 1909 research, German chemist Paul Friedländer confirmed that Tyrian purple was derived from a predatory sea snail, yet it took approximately 12,000 snails for Friedländer to garner just 1.4 grams of pigment. No wonder the colour was reserved for royalty.
As JK Kumar and AK Sinha describe in their 2014 research, the art of utilising natural dyes declined globally after the synthesis of ‘mauveine’ by William Henry Perkin in 1856. Apparently we had a thing for purple long before Prince sung ‘Purple Rain’. The application of synthetic dyes quickly took off due to a wide range of applications in various fields like food, cosmetics and, more importantly, for textiles, due to ease in dyeing, and reproducibility in shades and lower cost.
Central to Martens & Visser’s work are the themes of movement and transformation inspired by nature, thereby sharing the thought of things being dynamic rather than static.
“If you look at our surrounding you see almost everything is static. If you look at nature instead you see everything is moving, a constant transition, evolution.”
But now, the excitement around going au naturale (at least for our dyes) is growing again.
Frequently called ‘bio-colours’ due to their biological origin, natural colours are typically extracted from plants and microorganisms. A recent paper by Stellenbosch University’s Dr Robert Pott describes a process of releasing bright blue biological pigment (C-phycocyanin) from live spirulina seaweed for food colouring that is potentially applicable at an industrial scale and more beneficial than current techniques. Other possibilities for natural dyes include using the waste from wine grapes to create a natural deep-red dye, rich in antioxidants.
In Australia, fashion designer, graphic designer and artist Clair Parker, a Takaringa woman from the Tiwi Islands, draws on natural dyeing techniques that celebrate her cultural heritage while promoting sustainable contemporary fashion through her couture label Clair Helen.
“My mother and aunties would go out to the bush to collect leaves and dyes for their basket weaving,” says Parker. “To make the particular colours there are different methods. Boiling that particular root and it’d turn yellow. To make the black dye they would soak it with a leaf for one week. To make the red dye they would mix the yellow dye with ashes to make the red. I was told that other Aboriginal groups do a different process of dyeing and that this is only done by Tiwi people.”
Kate McGreal, arts administration officer at the Aboriginal-owned-and-governed Injalak Arts and Crafts Association, which is located in Gunbalanya, West Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, says natural dyes are important to the renowned fibre art of Kunwinjku language speakers. The Kunwinjku are proud of their ability to create strong colours when dyeing the Pandanus fibre, using a hot-water process invented after the introduction of metal pots. A green colour is achieved by boiling the heart of the Pandanus plant. A yellow-orange dye comes from a root. The leaves of the quinine tree create a black dye, while the envied pink dye of the Kunwinjku is made from the seeds of the windlik plant. Colour and design variations reflect the artistic preference of individual weaves, location and the seasons.
"... we ended losing much of her knowledge of country and language,” she explains. “[So] I don't have that community knowledge of traditional dye techniques.”
• Storage furniture by LIGA STUDIO (Colour Via, London Design Festival 2018).
• OSIS panels by Ilot Ilov (Colour Via, London Design Festival 2018).
We’re on the precipice of an explosion of more complex and nuanced colours, which – remarkably – are less resource-intensive to apply.
But many other natural dyeing techniques in Australia have been lost. Teagan Jan ‘TJ’ Cowlishaw, creative director and founder of upcycle fashion brand AARLI, has spent years trying to retrieve traditional ancestral dye techniques. Cowlishaw’s grandmother’s name is ‘Hunter’, whose kinship lies with the Bardi people of the Kimberley, WA, while her grandfather’s family has links to Shanghai pirates. Her heritage is reflected in her label, as ‘AARLI’ is the Bardi name for fish.
“My Nanna was Stolen Generation, then she ended up getting dementia in her older age and we ended losing much of her knowledge of country and language,” she explains. “[So] I don't have that community knowledge of traditional dye techniques.”
Passionate about sustainability and ethical fashion, Cowlishaw believes in the importance of “learning from elders, for our future generations, about caring for our oceans and country”.
“I have been trying to go back to my grandmother’s country every six to twelve months to hang with community elders, aunties and cousins to retrieve family information and knowledge”.
To help revive traditional dyeing knowledge and better nurture the First Australians design and fashion industry, Cowlishaw urges consumers to support local art centres and do their research to ensure they are 100 percent owned and operated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. “Make sure the artists are gaining recognition, royalties and commission.”
Colour and materials consultant Laura Perryman, who curated the 2018 Colour VIA exhibition at London Design Festival, says there is a revolution occurring in our colours.
“A new wave of designers are actively challenging the way that colour has been historically applied,” says Perryman, who founded the London-based experiential colour design agency Colour of Saying. She says these new designers are “creating new approaches and outcomes that are not only challenging waste but even the nature of the colour itself, how it behaves, and fundamentally how it can transform an object or textile”.
Just like Cher, as designers “turn back time” by focusing dyeing methods on traditional techniques while utilising the advantages of modern technology, the possibilities for dyeing textiles are again being explored.
These days, designers are collaborating with nature rather than forcing its submission to create unique and vibrant colours. And some are exploring the possibilities of pigment-producing bacteria to do so.
The initial aim of Luchtman and Siebenhaar’s ongoing research project, Living Colour , was to direct the natural growth patterns of bacteria into geometrical patterns, created by exposing bacteria to sound frequencies while they grew on the textiles. Surprisingly, Luchtman and Siebenhaar ended up with all-over, evenly dyed textiles that had more saturated colour than the textiles dyed without sound. They believe this could be due to extra oxygen caused either by the resonance of the sound frequencies or “due to a more ‘stressful’ environment for the bacteria, which caused them to synthesise more pigment”. Apparently dyes – not just office workers – perform better while under the pump.
• Living Colour research project by Laura Luchtman & Ilfa Siebenhaar
Living Colour proposes a sustainable alternative to artificial textile dyes made from petrochemicals. Luchtman and Siebenhaar’s process of ‘biodyeing’ with bacteria produces a biodegradable dye with very little run-off, little water use and low dyeing temperatures, without the use of any toxic chemicals, textile treatments or fixing agents. Both natural and synthetic fibres can be dyed with this method, which is quite unusual, as typically natural dyes don’t attach well to synthetic fibres, while bacterial dyes do. Some of the bacterial pigments also contain beneficial antimicrobial and UV-protecting characteristics. The bacteria can be grown on vegetable scraps – a possible reuse of agricultural waste. The leftover pigment from the dyeing process could be reused for products that require less saturated pigments, like cosmetics or food colouring, creating a closed-loop process. The potential for a paradigm shift in the textile industry is right here.
In her research, New Zealand-based textile designer Sarah Hickey explores the dyeing potential of a rapidly growing bacteria (Serratia marcescens) that produces a vibrant red pigment and is found in soil. Hickey has also experimented with an orange and black pigment from fungi and worked on a single blue bacterium. She says the range of pigments achieved through each bacteria was “exciting” and demonstrated to her the importance of preserving our current biological colours for the future.
“From pink, blue, black and orange, it is about forming a ‘colour bank’ of bacteria and fungi from our natural environment and persevering this. With the depletion of fossil fuels and our natural environment around us, will this bacterium and fungi be lost, and so too this colour? The bacteria and fungi pigments I have established can be stored for future use”.
Promisingly, it’s not only textiles that can be dyed by biocolourants, but metals and ceramics too. Hickey’s most mind-blowing moment during her studies came after using bacteria to successfully stain metal. “To see how a living microorganism could penetrate such a dense compound was surprising, but looked so amazing when the vivid pink colour was left.”
By moving away from petrochemical-based or synthetic dyes and paints, large swatches of our material world could return to more natural and sustainable sources of colour – it’s an exciting prospect.
Upending the current status quo in the industrial colourant sector won’t be quick or easy, but consumers can influence this change. Embracing these new pigments, however, requires an understanding that, without the use of treatments or fixing agents, colours can fade naturally. As Laura Perryman suggests, “this shouldn't necessarily be seen as a bad thing! For instance, garments could be dyed in seasonal colours. Darker, more saturated shades in fall and winter that fade to brighter, softer colours in spring and summer.” Faded colour, she points out, “is perfectly acceptable in denim”.
Textile researchers and fashion designers such as Cowlishaw and Parker are working to “establish a new mindset, one that emphasises customisation and care”.
We’re on the precipice of an explosion of more complex and nuanced colours, which – remarkably – are less resource-intensive to apply. Young designers are connecting with their cultural heritage through the rediscovery of traditional techniques, while new biodesign techniques are revealing a dynamic palette that can evolve with time. Isn’t it time we stop dyeing for fashion and savour the taste of timeless colour?