Pre-loved has made us fall in love again with the clothes in our wardrobes, but there remains an enduring cultural value to the craft of making.
Tamay and Me was created to celebrate and maintain the textile heritage of the Mien people, a minority group in Southeast Asia. The garments are made following the traditional designs to celebrate the New Year.
The project grew out of a friendship between Hannah Cowie and Tamay after they met in 2008 in a market in rural Vietnam. Admiring the embroidery on the locals’ traditional jackets Hannah asked Tamay about them. After chatting for a bit Tamay said ‘come back tomorrow at 9am and I’ll show you how to do it.’ Accepting the invitation, Hannah returned to learn how to wrap the silk around her toes to embroider in the traditional method.
Back in the UK Hannah found a lot of peace working on the embroidery piece she had begun. Two years later, wanting to show her handiwork to Tamay, she was able to visit Vietnam again.
Glad to see her Hannah again but perhaps only moderately impressed with her friends embroidery, Tamay’s response was simply ‘good.’ Communicating in essence ‘well done, you’ve got the idea’. The ‘good’ line was echoed by other women in the community. But through sharing in their craft a strong bond was formed between Hannah and the ladies.
Wanting to support her new friends, Hannah began buying older embroidered jackets to sell in the UK. The jackets were a hit but it was becoming harder to find jackets without synthetics and the traditional skills were being lost.
With this in mind, Hannah motorbiked up and headed to the hills. There she found people who still had the traditional skills, as well as communities growing cotton on a small scale. Hannah asked them what they would like to be paid to make the jackets and talked with them about a longer-term project.
With agreements reached, the label Tamay and Me was born, with the majority of proceeds going direclty to the artisans. The jackets are made with the traditional panelled design, a necessity due to the narrow looms the fabric is woven on and with the added benefit of reducing textile waste. The little fabric left over from the arm sections is twizzled to form the distinctive knotted buttons.
Cotton and indigo
The cotton and indigo are homegrown, without pesticides, in one village in North Vietnam.
Tamay goes on a 3-hour motorbike journey to buy the cloth directly from the producers. The White Thai spend all year coordinating the planting, nurturing, and harvesting of rice, cotton and indigo. Once the cotton is harvested, it is beaten and stored, then spun and woven. Indigo dyeing is a fermented alchemic process that mostly happens during the winter. The cloth is dip dyed over the period of a week, from 6 to 21 times - giving it a range of colours from a rich, medium-dark blue all the way to black.
Village life and embroidery
Taphin is a small mountain village in the North of Vietnam near Sapa and the Chinese border. Most of the people who live here are Mien and speak Mien as their first language. They identify themselves through their tiny counted-stitch embroidery. Every year, Mien women spend the whole year making new clothes for themselves and their families to wear at the Lunar New Year celebrations, they then use these clothes through the new year until the next. The more beautiful the embroidery, the more respect a woman will have in the village. The symbols within the detailed work represent village life, rice paddies, children, parents, grandparents, trees, plants and fertility.
The jackets
The future of traditional textiles in Taphin village, and surrounding areas, is uncertain. In the last twenty years, homes in the village have been connected to electricity, people now have rice cookers, lighting and smartphones. Children have had access to free education for many years now. The next generations' prospects have shifted and there are many more opportunities for work. Vast numbers of tourists visiting the region for many years now have brought jobs and a sense of cultural pride but it does come at a cost to the environment. The change in mountain life has been incredibly fast.
Tamay’s wish is to keep the textile traditions alive for future generations. Together, Tamay & Me have created the jackets to provide flexible work that fits within a traditional way of life and celebrates the traditional cultures of the Mien, Thai, Tay and H’mong. Their handmade, entirely natural jackets are both beautiful and important. The teams who craft them hope to share and celebrate their traditions, encouraging their continuation for generations to come.
