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2008-0929 - IHT - Weaving a story in Laotian silk

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/29/style/rsilk.php

International Herald Tribune

Weaving a story in Laotian silk

By Linda Hervieux
Monday, September 29, 2008

VIENTIANE, Laos: Anou Thammavong dips a giant ladle into a bubbling caldron, scoops up some dark liquid and grimaces.

Inured to the pungent cloud rising around him, Thammavong is distressed because this batch of dye, which he has cooked up from dried coconut shells, is hardly the gentle shade he was shooting for. "It should be pinky beige," he said, pouring the brew, which was the color of a blood orange, back into the vat.

It is a recurring problem at the Laotian workshop of Thammavong, a French designer of Laotian descent who is creating high-end silks that he hopes will crack the upper echelons of the fashion world.

His stoles, cushion covers and custom fabrics, which translate traditional Laotian designs into more muted and modern color schemes, are sold at a handful of exclusive shops from San Francisco to Tokyo and have high-profile customers like the designer Ralph Rucci and the architects Peter Marino and Michael Graves. But despite the attention, Thammavong's company, Soie de Lune, has not been able to attract the regular flow of large orders that is the lifeblood of a small atelier.

"Everyone who sees the textiles says, 'Wow!' The 'wow' factor is there but the reconnaissance isn't there yet," Thammavong, 37, said, using the French word for recognition.

"We don't know what it takes to get a name."

Like other start-ups in an unpredictable industry, the question facing the five-year-old company is whether to stay the course, producing small scale and custom orders, or to seek a larger presence in the marketplace by hiring a sales staff or seeking investors and increasing production.

"The big houses can put out hundreds of samples a year," said Daniel Marcus, 48, a telecommunications executive in Paris who is also the director of Soie de Lune and who has invested more than $40,000 in the company as its sole investor. "We can't."

With a shoestring budget and a staff of seven, including himself, Thammavong has his hand in every element of the business, from dyeing the silk he imports from France and China to preparing the looms for his complex designs. He often can be found on the telephone, drumming up orders, although he relies on the company Web site, www.soiedelune.com, to tell the company's story.

On a sweltering spring day, things were busy in the atelier adjacent to the large house that Thammavong rents in the bustling Laotian capital. His four weavers, who come from northern Laos, were creating samples to send to interior designers, who Thammavong hopes will place orders for bolts of fabric costing as much as $525 per yard, or $480 per meter.

Large stoles, the gems of the collection, retail at $700 to $2,500. They take about one month to make, with some designs requiring 350 movements for every 4 inches, or 10 centimeters, of weaving. Cushion covers and scarves start at about $200.

What Thammavong does is unique, said Susanna de Vienne, owner of Boyac, an Australian company that sells fine textiles. "It's priceless really." She has two Soie de Lune stoles, one in light pink and beige and the other in an inky black that is shot through with taupe threads, evoking one of Thammavong's most elaborate designs: stripes and shapes that on closer inspection depict stars and suns.

The pattern could easily overwhelm, but thanks to muted colors, the look is spare and modern, not distinctly ethnic. All of the patterns, inspired by Laotian history and Buddhist ceremony, are adapted from those woven by Thammavong's grandmother before the family fled Laos when the Communists took over in 1975.

Anouphanethong Thammavong, who was 4 years old when the family fled, grew up in France, where a great-uncle had served as the Laotian ambassador. It was not until Thammavong went back to Vientiane in 2001 to celebrate his 30th birthday that he discovered his love for the country he had all but forgotten.

It was a chance meeting with his grandmother's aging master weaver that convinced him to establish Soie de Lune, which translates as moon silk. Part of the philosophy behind the company was to invest in a developing country and to do some good while exploiting the rich tradition of Laotian silk weaving.

"We had a dream to raise the level of these silks to international standards with the kind of care European craftsmen use, like Rubelli in Italy," Marcus, the director, said, referring to the family-owned company based in Venice.

Rejecting traditional color combinations like red and gold, Thammavong, whose background is in public relations, set about creating a more subtle color palette to serve as a canvas for images representing the mythical creatures known as nagas, monsoon rain, peacocks and orchids.

The first collection made its debut in autumn 2003 on the walls of IBU Gallery in the Palais Royal in Paris. The gallery director, Cyril Ermel, said: "His work is like contemporary art. The composition, the fabrics, the geometry."

The exhibit generated some high-profile introductions and a place for Soie de Lune silk in a window display at Hermès in Paris. Another break came two years later when an associate of Rucci spotted the gray-black stole around Thammavong's neck in a Prada boutique. Since then, Soie de Lune stoles in browns and black have appeared on the runway at three Rucci ready-to-wear shows in New York and Paris.

Those somber hues were not in evidence on a recent visit to Soie de Lune's workshop. It was ablaze in color, with cheery yellows mixing with bright pinks and moody blues from aquamarine to midnight. Color is extremely important to Thammavong, who uses only environmentally friendly natural dyes from sources like the indigo plant and the Indian trumpet tree. His intense pinks come from the scaly cochineal bug.

"It's very easy to reproduce colors with chemicals but it's not as easy on the eyes," he said. "It's nature's harmony."

Like the top-quality silk he buys, the process of creating Thammavong's palette is expensive. Natural dyes are seasonal and getting the colors right can be maddening. To achieve the deep, almost-black violet that is one of his favorite colors, Thammavong and his gardener, Sai, repeat five times a boiling bath of logwood infused with vinegar and rusty nails. The iron infusion stops the purple dye from fading to gray over time.

"It's just experimenting - a bit of this, a bit of that," he said, admitting that he had no idea if the vinegar did anything in the process. In the end, "you never really know the color."

That imprecision can make it difficult to fill orders. One Hollywood star's recent request for 71 yards of silk in ice blue and celadon, to outfit a bedroom, was particularly challenging because Thammavong feared he would not be able to recreate the precise shade of blue that the actress wanted. (Thammavong had agreed not to disclose her name.)

Happily, the order was a success. But the job highlighted the challenges Thammavong confronts daily. Such issues were never a consideration for his aristocratic grandmother, who wove fabrics for her personal use and to give to her well-heeled friends, including the queen. "She didn't need the money," he said.

Soie de Lune's future may be unclear, but Thammavong is optimistic. "I trust in my product," he said.

"I know that what I'm doing is beautiful and high quality."

International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

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Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
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University of California, Riverside
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justinm at ucr.edu