There are moments when two places at opposite ends of Eurasia suddenly look strangely familiar.
In Austria we have Blaudruck: cloth is covered in selected areas with a resist paste, dyed with indigo, and when the resist is removed a pale pattern appears against the blue.
Then you travel several thousand kilometres east into the mountains of northern Vietnam and find Hmong women doing something based on the same wonderfully simple principle – except that instead of printing the resist with wooden blocks, they draw elaborate patterns by hand using hot beeswax.
Obviously, this does not prove that somebody carried Austrian Blaudruck to Vietnam on a particularly adventurous donkey, or vice versa.
Resist dyeing developed in many parts of the world, and wax and indigo make a very sensible combination wherever both are available.
Still, these are the little parallels that wake up the researcher in the back of my head and make me want to follow old trade routes across Eurasia just to see what else turns up.
But that is a different rabbit hole.
For now: Hmong textile art.
Clothing that starts with a plant
Hmong communities live across the mountainous regions of southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. In Vietnam, many live in the northern highlands, particularly in provinces such as Hà Giang, Lào Cai, Sơn La and Yên Bái.
Traditional Hmong textile work can involve an astonishing number of individual steps before anybody even starts sewing a garment.
The cloth itself is traditionally woven from hemp.
The fibres have to be prepared, spun into thread, woven, washed and worked until the cloth is sufficiently smooth. Depending on region and method, the fabric may be polished and softened mechanically before decoration begins.
Only then does somebody sit down with the beeswax.
Drawing with wax
The principle of wax-resist dyeing is easy to explain.
The execution is somewhat less cooperative.
Where wax penetrates the fabric, the indigo dye cannot. So if you draw a pattern in wax, dye the entire cloth blue and later remove the wax, the original pale fabric reappears as the pattern.
The Hmong use a small specialised drawing tool, usually with a bamboo or wooden handle and a metal nib that holds a little molten wax.
And there is the first practical problem: beeswax has opinions about temperature.
Too cold and it stops flowing properly. Too hot and it runs too quickly and ruins the line. So the wax has to remain warm while the artist works, traditionally over a small stove or fire.
The basic equipment is remarkably modest:
- handwoven hemp cloth;
- beeswax;
- a small wax-drawing tool;
- a container for keeping the wax molten;
- a source of heat;
- and, eventually, an indigo dye vat.
The difficult part is the pair of hands operating it.
No Ctrl+Z
Many traditional motifs are geometric: repeated lines, spirals, crosses, borders and combinations of forms constructed with extraordinary precision.
What fascinates me is how little technological assistance there is between the idea and the finished line.
No printer. No plotter. No undo button.
You dip the tool into the wax and draw.
The motifs and combinations vary between Hmong groups and regions, and clothing itself can help communicate cultural and regional identity. There is no single universal “Hmong costume” any more than there is one universal European traditional costume.
What they share is an enormous amount of accumulated textile knowledge.
Then everything turns blue
Once the wax drawing is complete, the fabric goes into indigo.
For a deep colour, this is not necessarily a single dip followed by a triumphant unveiling. Traditional indigo dyeing can involve repeated cycles of dyeing and drying until the desired shade is reached.
The beeswax protects the areas beneath it throughout the process.
When the dyeing is finished, the wax is removed with hot water, revealing the pale design against the dark indigo background.
And that may still not be the end.
Embroidery and appliqué can add reds, greens, pinks, oranges and other colours over the indigo base, building layers of pattern on top of pattern.
This is where photographs tend to become slightly misleading.
You see a colourful skirt or jacket and think: pretty.
You do not immediately see the growing of fibre, spinning, weaving, washing, polishing, wax drawing, repeated dyeing, wax removal, embroidery, sewing and years of learned technique sitting behind it.
Which brings us back to one of the recurring themes of Avanova: somebody had to do all that.
Tradition is not a museum exhibit
I am wary of writing about traditional crafts as though their makers should be preserved behind glass together with the objects.
People change. Clothing changes. Markets change. Techniques move into new contexts.
Traditional Hmong textiles today appear not only in full traditional garments but also in bags, purses, accessories and contemporary designs.
Our partner Chie is one of the people working with this material.
Some of her designs use newly made Hmong textiles, while others incorporate sections from older garments into new pieces. A panel that once belonged to clothing may become the central feature of a bag rather than disappearing into a cupboard or being discarded.
I like that.
A traditional technique does not remain alive because nobody is allowed to touch it. It remains alive because people continue to know how to do it, value it, use it and occasionally find something new to do with it.
Across Eurasia and back again
And so I inevitably return to the Austrian Blaudruck comparison.
Not because Hmong beeswax batik and Austrian blueprinting are secretly the same tradition. They are not.
What fascinates me is something broader.
Give people cloth, colour, wax or paste, tools and enough generations to experiment, and human creativity starts finding solutions. Sometimes those solutions are astonishingly different. Sometimes people thousands of kilometres apart arrive at ideas that make you stop and look twice.
Those parallels are one of the reasons Eurasia has never felt to me like two neatly separated worlds called “Europe” and “Asia”.
There are too many roads in between.
Trade routes, migrations, borrowed ideas, independent inventions, coincidences and cultural echoes, some demonstrably connected, others merely tempting enough to make you wonder.
And sometimes all it takes to start thinking about them is a piece of indigo cloth.
More stories about the people, workshops and crafts connected to Avanova can be found in People & Craft.