heritage | Caring For Textiles

How many of you have a beloved sweater, jeans, or your mother’s shirt or father’s scarf?

Textiles can be transformative, alive, sharing their stories by context, memory, and touch. A baseball cap might be just a baseball cap until your hero signs it. You now hold what the other person once held. A central principle of preserving textiles is the recognition that they are expressions of life, touchstones of memory, and reminders of our common heritage— This is the work of Caring for Textiles.

Photos Caring for Textiles. Love Jeans collection of the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Va.

My belief in textiles as ANIMATE has always been a pillar of my conservation practice. It is how I move through my work, whether I am preparing a 1910 suffragist banner for display, or creating a mannequin for Mohammad Ali’s boxing coat. This belief underpins the cleaning of the yellowed lace of a christening gown or the repair of an ancestor’s tattered quilt. Each item tells its own story – they are deeply important to people; possessing the power to instantly connect us to a place, time, or person.

- “all life is inter-related”, wrote Martin Luther King Jr, “…we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” (Letter from Montgomery Jail, April 1963)

My destiny was tied to Mike Heffner through old family friends, my neighborhood, and as we soon discovered – a love of textiles. The first time I met him, with his exuberant energy and gorgeous traveling computer (where all my photos looked sensational) it was all about our passion for color, texture, pattern, and what each motif meant, how to weave it into a story, into a vibrant happy and accessible website. He was eager to tell my stories, and the stories of so many whom with I work. My vocation to repair, preserve and display textiles entwined with Mike’s skills to interlace our worlds into a single garment of destiny together.

Central image: Textile by MULTICOLORES Cooperative, Guatemala.

Mike loved the colorful batiks of Pekalongan, North Coast of Java

Wherever I was in the world and no matter what time… teaching workshops in Java on the care of batik, or preserving monastic textiles in Bhutan, trying to untangle the path forward for preserving the clothing of the victims of genocide, Mike answered my texts and emails. ‘of course I’d love to craft a blog with you’. His enthusiasm spurred me on, made my own often repetitious work, feel really alive and relevant. He checked sources, added marvelous pithy intros, emojis, and made my blog and website a source of excitement for us at CFT and beyond.

A few nights before Mike passed, he reached out to me….”this may be an odd request”, he said, “so first get a glass of wine”. He asked me to make sure he was shrouded and surrounded with beautiful textiles to journey on with him, and celebrate his life. All my hope that he would live, was sucked from me… and I now had the most important textile project of my life.

At Mike’s memorial service, a selection of my colorful batiks and silks were stretched and festooned all around the alter and large portraits of Mike. It reminded me of funerals in Asia and Africa; a true celebration of life and the living. It was sacred and festive; we posed beside his beautiful image and cried and laughed and danced. The edges of textiles made our world, all the people who had known Mike, free, loving and wild.

Our strongest feelings linger in our tactile surroundings and someone’s beauty and memory is held in a blouse, wrap, or favorite t-shirt. Mike’s family had gathered up many of his favorite clothes and textiles, and torn them into strips. A large frame loom sat beside the alter, and one by one, two by two, we all selected a memory of Mike and wove it into a whole cloth. There were so many people weaving, that the loom was carried to the reception where the very last inch of the warps was filled. I carry a piece of blue and red Lao silk that I had given Mike for his wedding four years prior. It is a touchstone for me.

At the end of Mike’s celebration of life ceremony, I met a young woman wearing one of Mike’s favorite shirts. A small pattern soft to the touch sport shirt…I imagined her selecting this tenderly from Mike’s closet and wearing it in his honor, loving it close to her body, sharing this second skin. I just wanted to touch her shoulder, caress that piece of Mike, the sacred ‘dust’ and memory of him.

I’ve spent my career asking a set of questions about damage and repair, how to care, what to leave alone? How do I do this humanitarian and spiritual work, which is about people?

Caring for textiles at its core is about remembering, comfort, healing and peace. And with Mike it was a journey we took together over 15 years, sharing our stories of love, and falling in love, adventure, children, work, beauty, hand skills, and finally loss.

Mike’s blogs live on like stars, the stories they are. He shined a beautiful light on them so they could shine and inspire others.

Dedicated to Mike Heffner, 1967-2023, Partner of 202Design.

Nei Ho

I last visited Hong Kong (HK) in 1970, then a magical city of orange-sailed junks crisscrossing the waters between islands, and crowded streets with banner-like laundry hanging off every balcony. It was the Star Ferry, Bruce Lee, and The World of Suzie Wong that we had read about and seen in the movies. Now a chic, cosmopolitan world financial center, Hong Kong’s streets seem paved with the gold that hangs in the shop windows of its luxury avenues. The city seems to build where no others would dare, jutting out of rocky cliffs and hanging over narrow streets and staircases; a mass of glass and human glory.

Into this metropolis of old and new, bounded by a typhoon and historic Democracy protests, came 500 conservators (and me) for the International Institute for Conservation 2014 Biennial Congress (IIC2014). Themed An Unbroken History: Conserving East Asian Works of Art and Heritage, presentations included fascinating research on lacquer, scroll painting, textile, stone, glass and wood.

The conservation team from The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, with whom I consult, presented our project to blend tradition and innovation; chronicling textile preservation practices and plants from elders in Thailand. In contrast to the many technical case studies presented, our research takes a larger cultural view, embracing both the tangible and intangible, in an effort to define textile conservation in Asia today.

Click on the image to download a PDF of the chart that we researched and presented.

The project, still in its infancy, has interviewed 50 subjects and compiled a database of 30 regional plants formerly used to clean, remove stains and repel insects from textiles. We now hope to partner with botanists and scientists, collect plant material, replicate recipes and make comparisons with current synthetic detergents used in textile conservation practices. We hope that present day protocols may soon incorporate these traditional practices.

Joining my Thai colleagues and Sarah Foskett from Glasgow for divine dim sum at City Hall.

Between receptions at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Asia Society, we drank tea, glorified the old and explained our craftsmanship, sharing hundreds of stories with new colleagues from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Europe.

And then there were textiles…

NovBlog-RED-IMG_6135 At the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, I saw red – it is the color of the Ching dynasty silk birthday hanging, and also of the bridal palanquin cover that were being meticulously conserved with fine stitching and selective patch supports.

QSMT sends a big thank you to Ms. Alice Tsang and Angela for such a splendid tour!

At Heritage Museum’s newly opened Cantonese Opera Hall, add gold for textiles that would have turned Liberace green with envy! The Opera Hall boasts a theatre with bamboo scaffolding, star’s dressing rooms with swinging neon bar lights, cases of sequined clothes and sparkling jewelry, and profiles of some of the famous artists from the 1930’s to the 1980’s. I learned about the early troupes, called ‘Red Boat’ troupes, who lived on the Pearl River, and about the spread of Cantonese opera to Singapore, Cholon, Saigon, Bangkok, and San Francisco by 1850.

These costumes are spectacular! Cirque du Soleil meets 17^th century Catholic cardinals. Characterized by large robes with sweeping sleeves and vertical collars, each heavily embroidered and sequined costume has fantastic footwear, crowns, and headdresses, jewelry and make-up to match.

Ms. Chung Siu Lei was known for her acrobatic agility. Here is her intricate blue sequined armor-like dress from the 1950’s (left).

Later costumes were influenced by Beijing styles such as dragon robes, and western designs of a more gossamer, romantic nature. The elaborate opera houses dotted HK and with its stars becoming international celebrities. Even today, the influence continues as seen in next month’s production of Turandot at HK City Hall.

Also at the Heritage Museum is a fabulous exhibit to one of HK’s famous residents, Bruce Lee. This presentation includes a holographic Bruce Lee, footage of most of his films, and Green Hornet series, letters, library, family photos, and all his cool 1970’s clothes and aviator glasses. What a legacy in such a short time.

It was an enjoyable, educational and sometimes breathtaking revisit to Hong Kong. Although it has changed, it embraces the past, sharing old stories for new growth. Maybe there is less laundry hanging from its balconies, but Bruce Lee lives on in the bronze statue that watches the Star Ferry crossing back and forth in Victoria Harbor.

The textiles that bind us – in memory of Mike Heffner, 1967-2023