This season, textile techniques are once again gaining celebrity attention, but they have long been part of the art scene in places like Nigeria and Japan.
When Jared Leto strolled around New York City last month in a multicolored tie-dye tracksuit from Los Angeles-based brand SPRWMN (pronounced “superwoman”), even he couldn’t have imagined the vibrant pattern would attract so much attention.
The British newspaper The Daily Mail pointedly noted that the star of the House of Gucci is “definitely not a wallflower.”
Then, at a casual New York Fashion Week event, Bella Hadid wore a red-and-yellow tie-dye vest from Barcelona-based Paloma Wool (“It’s so chic and glam!” raved Seventeen). Earlier this year, Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer attended the Vanity Fair Oscars party in a Rick Owens tie-dye denim dress that StyleCaster called “one of the coolest dresses” on the red carpet.
Despite its popularity, tie-dye is a traditional craft that spans cultures and civilizations, including first-century Peru and fifth-century China. Dennis Northrought, head of exhibitions at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum, wrote in an email that the basic process of tie-dye fabric — tying, folding or pinching the fabric, then dipping it in dye to create a pattern — remains largely unchanged.
When tie-dye re-emerged in Western fashion in the late 1960s, its unique effect—the pattern changed on each garment—was in keeping with the fashion trends of the time, and tie-dye “became part of a countercultural style in clothing and interiors” that rejected the individual mass market, writes Northluft.
Now, a few young designers, like Conner Ives, a New Yorker living in London, are making tie-dye cool again. He said he’s been using the technique to create an Americana style since launching his second collection in 2017. This season, he used ribbing to create bullseyes and other circular patterns on a cream-and-brown dress and bag made from deadstock synthetic suede. “I spent a lot of my childhood making T-shirts and stuff with my friends,” he said, so tie-dye seemed like a “natural next step.”
“It’s a craft that’s very much based on handwork,” he said. “The way you lace it, the way you finish it, you know, whatever you do with it, it’s almost like a unique fingerprint every time.” So while he plans to make a few dresses and bags, “technically each one will be unique,” ​​he said.
The Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria call tie-dye “adire,” where “adi” means “to tie” and “are” means “to dye.” Traditionally, tie-dye involves applying indigo dye to white fabric, and while the technique remains popular, it is now also available in colors such as orange and pink.
Oyenike Monica Davis-Okundaye, 71, CEO of the Nike Art Gallery in Lagos, has dedicated her life to dyeing, sewing and painting Adile fabrics, tracing her Adile lineage back five generations.
Her designs range in price from 10,000 Nigerian naira (about $23) per yard for cotton adire to 50,000 naira per yard for silk adire. They depict scenes from local life: drummers and dancers, farmers carrying water, and cooking over wood fires. Chief Davis-Okundaiye, who holds the title because of her family’s history with the Yoruba town of Ogidi in Kogi State, Nigeria, said she always carefully laid out the patterns so they could be seen when the fabric was turned into clothing.
Chiefs still make their own indigo and other dyes. Cacao beans are burned and water, which acts as a filter, is poured through the ashes into a pot filled with indigo leaves. The mixture is left to heat in the sun for seven days. “When the indigo is fermenting in the pot, you have to stir it for half an hour every day,” she said in a video interview, “and to see if it’s working, because sometimes the alkalinity of the water may not be right for the indigo.”
“After seven days, the indigo will float in the pan” — the dye will turn blue and rise to the top — “and then you’ll know it’s ready to dye the fabric,” she said.
The colors are derived from various natural products: yellow from sunflowers, dark brown from tobacco leaves, and orange from mushrooms, using the same process as for indigo. The chief also boiled parts of rosewood bark in water to achieve a neutral color, then applied it to the fabric using a foam sponge.
“I drew the outlines of the figures on the dress with charcoal, then used foam to trace all the figures, and then waxed the white spots I wanted,” she said, referring to the stencil she made to trace and copy the designs. The boss made the announcement in her handicraft workshop in a four-story gallery in the upscale Ikate district, where she sells fabrics and garments such as bubu (robes), dashiki (tops), shirts and jackets. She has three other art galleries across Nigeria, including one in the capital, Abuja, all of which sell works by local artists as well as her own work.
The hardest part of the process is painting the fabric with wax or cassava root paste (to create areas where the paint won’t soak in). “When you paint, the paint takes longer to dry, and it takes more than an hour to paint one character,” she said.
She developed several of her own techniques, such as foam rubber templates. Instead of tapioca paste, apply drops of beeswax to the fabric. “I discovered it by accident,” Chief Davis-Okundaye recalls of a visit to Ogidi in central Nigeria. “There was no electricity in the village at the time, so I used candle wax and dripped some onto the fabric.”
Other tie-dye makers are also upping the ante. In Accra, Ghana, Esther Amate, 64, CEO of Exmac Fabrics, and her staff experiment with tie-dye every two to four months.
Ms. Amat, for example, has developed a process that combines tie-dye and batik techniques on a single piece of fabric. “First, I wax the fabric,” she said. “Then I dry it and put it in wax. Then I tie it and paint it.” The final step is to remove the wax from the fabric to reveal the finished design.
For Adebayo Oke-Lawal, creative director of Lagos-based clothing brand Orange Culture, who has used Adil since creating his first collection for the brand in 2011, it is becoming increasingly accessible as more women now make it collectively at home. As such, Adil “is a profitable technology in itself, and people see it as a viable business opportunity, as well as a way to preserve the culture and richness of our traditional fabrics,” Mr. Oke-Lawal said.
Chief Davis-Okandaye noted that learning how to make adire was once a secret, “passed down through generations in the family.” But now, places like hers offer classes; she plans to hold online workshops next year; and she has revived plans to build a textile museum on her land in Abuja within the next two years (she wanted to do this back in 2002, but the plan never materialized).
“I have enough fabric,” she said. “I just need to build it and hire staff to run this textile museum.”
Hiroyuki Murase, CEO and creative director of fashion and interiors company Suzusan, is also a fifth-generation tie-dye master, having been taught the art by his father.
The word comes from the Japanese verb “shiboru,” which means to twist, press or squeeze. Mr. Murase said the process basically consists of three steps: tying knots, sewing and ironing.
According to the World Tie-Dye Network Foundation, tie-dye is characterized by its three-dimensional form, as the fabric can be sewn and gathered, pleated and tied, or folded and clamped between two or more wooden blocks, then tied and dipped in dye. The foundation was founded by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, a tie-dye textile artist from California, USA.
Mr. Murase said it is this diversity that makes tie-dye unique, noting that Japanese artisans have developed more than 200 techniques since the craft began more than 400 years ago, while other tie-dye cultures have only, as he put it, “one or two different techniques.” (Chief Davis-Okandaye said there are more than 10 tie-dye techniques.)
For example, one of the sweaters from Suzusan’s spring 2023 collection incorporates five stitches and knitting techniques to create the shapes of flowers, stems and leaves.
Shibori differs from adire in that “the fabric is heated in a large pressure cooker using heat and steam. That’s why it keeps its shape,” Mr. Murase said.
“The fabric is usually plain and then hand-tied with cotton thread,” he said of the technique called hand tie-dye. The fabric and dye, purchased from suppliers, are then heated to 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees Fahrenheit) because “heat is needed to fix the color,” he said.
Mr. Murase, 40, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany, where the company handles design and marketing; his home and studio in Arimatsu, near Nagoya, handles production and local distribution.
Murase initially decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue tie-dye art, so he began studying art in the UK and then at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 2004 to 2011.
But early in his studies, he visited an exhibition of his father’s work in the northern English town of Harrogate and found that other visitors “didn’t understand tie-dye at all,” he said. So in 2008, Mr. Murase, who was still a student at the time, and Christian Dietsch co-founded Suzusan; Mr. Dietsch left the company in 2020.
“For Europeans, this is a wonderful new textile,” Mr. Murase said on a video call from a showroom in Paris, where he was presenting his spring 2023 collection to retailers.
Mr. Murase applies tie-dye to Western-inspired pieces from cardigans to pillows, using unusual fabrics like cashmere and, this fall, wool jackets and houndstooth pants. But the fabrics and contemporary designs he uses can sometimes make tie-dye tricky. Take this fall’s navy cashmere sweater with the word “Love” in light gray tie-dye ($980). “It’s really hard to sew on soft fabric because it can get damaged,” he said. Plus, the gathered fabric needs to be tied tightly, “otherwise the dye will bleed into the folds,” and you won’t be able to see the pattern, he said.
Still, the tie-dye technique is certainly still popular with artists like Ana Lisa Hedstom, a Los Angeles-based textile artist known for using pomegranates and tea to dye her wool wall hangings indigo, and 2018 LVMH Prize winner Masayuki Ino of Doublet, whose tie-dye technique has been used this season to create studded denim jackets, sweatshirts, and more.
For Mr. Murase, the appeal of tie-dye is its unpredictability. “You always have to wait until you see the results,” he said. “So each process takes time, and after you dye, you pull the thread down, and then you can see the results.”
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the location of Ogidi. The town is located in Kogi State, Nigeria, not Kogi State.
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