The central industry of modern civilisation, tending, because of its control over materials, to spread into and ultimately incorporate older industries such as mining, smelting, oil- refining, textiles, rubber, building, and even agriculture in respect to fertilizers and food processing.
I think when we talk of craft we talk of a certain set of processes, whether that be clay of glass if jewelry or textiles, and we look back through history instantly.
Anyway, what is a country? When people say, "Tell me about India," I say, "Which India?. . . . The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?"
We'll be potters, we'll be painters, we'll be textile designers, we'll be jewelers, we'll be a little this, a little of that. We were going to be the renaissance people [when we were young].
If you don't have customers to sell to, you can't commit to anything with textile factories or manufacturing factories because you don't know if you'll be able to sell the quantities they're asking you to fill.
We're not handling things anymore before they arrive on our doorstep. I like to feel how thin porcelain can be, run my hand over a textile, see if I want to sit in a chair.
I want to combine a business major with studies in clothing and textiles.
I realized early on, maybe better than some of my competitors did, that a textile business can run only if you have scale. I decided to horizontally and vertically integrate, adding everything from spinning, dyeing, weaving, and stitching to processing and packing.
To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.
The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [. . . ] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War.
I went to school for clothing and textiles and thought this is what I was going to do. Then I started working in costumes and literally said, 'I don't know if I can take the actors. '
We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.
Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection.
My parents had a factory, so I was linked to the textile and fashion industry.
I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don't have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.
Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.
That [silk-screen process experience] carried over when I returned from the Army and took more graphic classes at the Institute. And Alix [MacKenzie] and I actually began to produce a line of textiles, which had silk-screen patterns on them.
The evolution was always to greater scale and speed. Other countries did that here and there - GB in textiles, Germany in steel - but we went in that direction almost across the board.
I guess the big thing is that I don't buy anything first-hand. It's a personal policy I have for all sorts of reasons. If you research to the textile industry yourself, you'll know why. I came to it personally.
