Boro, the fabric of life

Reviving threadbare cloths for survival

Kimonos, work clothes, trousers, futon covers... a collection of handmade pieces, repaired, patched, reworked by Japanese farmers between 1850 and 1950. All are made of leftover fabrics reused several times, mostly made of indigo dyed cotton. 

Boro comes from the Japanese onomatopoeic boroboro, which means something tattered or repaired, demonstrates esteem for our available resources, labor and everyday objects.

Boro textiles bring together essential principles of traditional Japanese ethics and aesthetics. They are sober and modest (shibui); imperfections are expressed by irregularity, incompleteness, rawness and simplicity (wabi-sabi); and, of course, regret about any waste (motttainai). All of these are far from today’s consumer driven society.

Arte povera

Until well into the 20th century, large parts of Japan were so poor that people could rarely buy textiles for clothing and bedding. In the North, cotton was precious and pieces of used fabric were purchased to make patch-work clothing or duvets. Many of these textiles had been mended repeatedly from generation to generation without being thrown away.

“Boro textiles were the domain of the ordinary man and represented a collective, impoverished past. They were largely forgotten after the mid-twentieth century when Japan’s society shifted towards mass-scale modernization and urbanization. However, they are the tangible embodiment of a cultural legacy which has only recently been accorded a formal name and has received critical consideration”, explains Mr. Szczepanek a New York based gallerist who collected most of these works. 

Rich patches of old traditional fabrics

The diversity of patches on any given piece is a veritable encyclopedia of hand loomed cotton indigo from old Japan. In most cases, the beautiful arrangement of patches and mending stitches is borne of necessity and happenstance, and was not planned by the maker.

Imagine that boro textiles were stitched in the shadows of farmhouses, often at night by the light of one dim andon, on the laps of farm women. This unselfconscious creative process has yielded hand-made articles of soulful beauty, each of which calls upon to be recognized and admired as more than the utilitarian cloth they were intended to be.

WHEN RECYCLING TELLS A STORY

Moreover, the irregularly patched boro textiles feature a stunning similarity to modern art’s collage aesthetics, reminding today’s viewer of works by artists Paul Klee and Robert Rauschenberg or Brazilian designers Fernando and Humberto Campana. Boro – The Fabric of Life illuminates a little known chapter of craft history and serves as a valuable source of inspiration for today’s designers, artists, aficionados and, last but not least, us as consumers.

Boro – The Fabric of Life

A travelling exhibition organised by CIRECA. The exhibition is designed in cooperation with graduate students from Parsons The New School for Design, New York. Boisbuchet presented this exhibition in 2013, which is now travelling.

http://www.boisbuchet.org/boro-the-fabric-of-life/