23 Sep Provenance & Purpose

The Focus/24 House Guests That Put Equity on a Par with Beauty

“If you are mindful about your purchases and have some insight into how something is made, you are more appreciative of them,” says Jeannine Birch, the founder of Focus/24 House Guest Coral & Hive, which makes handwoven rugs from South Africa and India. The importance of provenance – and beyond that, brands that have a higher social or ethical purpose – was a recurring thread for the House Guests at Focus/24.

Coral & Hive runs Suth Africa’s largest loom, with a team of 18 weavers. “The weaving community in South Africa is small compared to the rest of the world. We’re bringing it back to life,” says Birch. “We’re definitely about making a positive impact.”

Turquoise Mountain, the charitable initiative founded in 2006 by His Majesty King Charles III, currently works in Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma) and the Middle East; at Focus/24 it showcased heritage-inspired fabrics from Myanmar, hand woven by master artisans. The collection provides viable incomes for women artisans in a country severely affected by conflict, and preserves exquisite traditional weaving skills by training the next generation of artisans. Its creative projects manager Tashi Goldring says that “increasingly, designers and their clients want a story, and they are interested in what impact that things make. They choose this work because it’s beautiful but also because it leads to profound change.”

Turquoise Mountain supplies high-quality yarns to its weavers, and has some say on the scale and colour of the finished fabrics to ensure that they are suitable for the interior design market, but at the same time “it’s really important to honour the patterns and motifs that are integral to each local group of weavers,” says Goldring.

It’s a similar story at Routes Interiors, where founder Agharad Allsop (pictured opposite, on right) works with Mayan communities in Mexico to make textiles woven on backstrap looms, a technique stretching back 6,000 years. “Every textile comes from a different community, and I would never change the motifs because they have their own meaning: the butterfly as a symbol of transformation, example.”

Allsop keenly feels the importance of knowing where a product comes from, and who made it, having worked as a fashion buyer previously, where “I felt such as disconnection to the way textiles were made; it was just take take take, with nothing being given back.” She has recently worked on a UN development project: a training programme that will enable more rural Mayan women can tap into the demand for these exquisite fabrics.

Supporting makers – and traditional industries – can happen closer to home, too. At The Monkey Puzzle Tree, Charlotte Raffo translates the work of fine artists into fabrics and wallcoverings. “We’re passionate about supporting local manufacturing. Everything’s made within 100 miles of Leeds,” says Raffo, who explains that the artists she collaborates with get 20% of the sale price as a royalty for using their work. “Everything’s got a story or a bit of humour behind it, and people really connect with that,” she continues. From risqué lace voiles with hidden figures up to no good (‘Body Lace’) to the new ‘Celestial Promenade’ fabric made with embroidery artist Saima Kaur, with its complex, multi-layered printing, Raffo’s viewpoint is a refreshing one, and her values are emblematic of a new breed of design brands with a social conscience.