How 100% Silk wants to change the minds of people who still consume too much fast fashion.
Like many entrepreneurial young fashion creatives, Lee Dekel didn’t go to fashion school. Instead, she studied the history of science and majored in material culture at university. On the side, she took courses in weaving, dyeing, and patternmaking at a nearby art college. The two curriculums, “might seem like a surprising combination,” she says, “but they really informed each other—you can learn so much about a society by examining how cloth and garments are made.
Describing 100% Silk, she says, “I wanted to combine the traditional textile techniques I’d explored in Ghana with idiosyncratic color palettes and the style of the clothes I wear.” For her first outing, she hand dyed, cut, and sewed all of the garments herself in her apartment. The second collection was a little more complex. “I spent over a year designing and making textiles from scratch with artisans in Ghana and Uzbekistan” she says.
The Spring 2020 collection incorporates the work of three equal partners in her business, one located in Uzbekistan named Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov, whom Dekel met through a UNESCO connection and is a fifth-generation ikat dyer and weaver in the country’s Fergana Valley. The second artisan is the eldest son of a family in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, that has specialized in gold embroidery for the last 70 years.
Dekel’s approach toward slow fashion is very much on point with an industry that is focusing more on sustainability, circularity, and the value of the handmade. “I definitely see a shift towards conscious consumption, especially in how people are buying high-end garments,” she says. “Trends are so easy to copy that consumers aren’t seduced by them anymore. If they’re going to spend the money, they want an emotional connection to the clothes.
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