Adire the term for handmade tie and dyed cloth of the Yoruba of Nigeria was traditionally produced by women.
Tied and knotted with raffia, painstakingly threaded with tiny stitches or delicately drawn with feathers this resist style of transferring indigo dyed patterns to fabric has become a symbol of West African textile craft.
In 1987 a group of Nigerian women in which I was included formed their own association of Adire lovers called Friends of Adire. Our first excursion was to seek out the purveyors of this craft and watch them at work. The next project was to stage an exhibition of Adire cloth that included vintage cloths that were really collector pieces as well as contemporary examples.
Those collector pieces were examples of intricate and painstaking labour : rows of tiny stitches worked in thread or raffia, or traced out in in tiny strokes from a feather dipped in liquid starch and repeated across yards after yard of cotton fabric. One of our members, a graphic artist created the poster of the classic pose the women we visited adopted as they worked. Beauty requires patience, even pain is one translation of a popular Pidgin English expression, that explains it all. The vitality of Nigerian hand drawn lies in the term. It is made by hand, not by machine like, for example wax print where the pattern can be repeated exactly , mechanically, a hundred times over.
A shift in movement, breath; the heat of the rising sun contrasting with the coolness of the morning air, a phone call you perhaps should not have answered, could affect the curve of the shape you were drawing and almost without noticing you have created a one of a kind piece that is similar but not an exact repetition of what you did an hour ago.
This fabric purchased in 1979, is an example of vintage adire. The pattern at the bottom of boubou is produced by tying up tiny pinches of fabric with thread or raffia strands. The pattern on the fabric above that is the effect of stitching the fabric into a pattern with raffia thread. After dying the stitches create the contrasting pattern. I wear the boubou with the raffia tufts still showing after all these years. It adds special textural interest to the boubou with its four different examples of adire dying in one garment.
Nowadays organic indigo has given way to modern internationally sourced dyes that hold their colour . Contemporary versions of this historic fabric come in chiffon, crepe and polyester , macrofibre, no longer simply cotton or silk. Old design methods required hours of stitching, tying and knotting . Contemporary styles now employ stamping which was primarily done by men and the drawing by hand of geometric and linear shapes, quicker to apply in a craft that is still essentially a slow fashion industry. Lengths of fabric, 5 yards at a time are drawn and dip dyed to layer colour over colour in a process that ensures that each piece is a one of a kind. Elements like temperature, time of day and acidity of the water, sleight of the individual artists hand ensure that each piece of Adire produced has its own individual character.
Our Skirt Set is an example of contemporary adire with different tones and shifts in pattern from individual artists in a workshop on different days.
We have tried to give the skirt the ease and versatility that was an inherent part of traditional Nigerian fashion—as in one cloth, many ways to wear it. Loose or tight to fit your mood or comfort level; knotted at the centre front or the side of your waist; single flounce with one end tucked inside and under the tie belt; double flounce and tied and secured with a decorative kilt pin along the thigh.
