The Hidden Luxury Textiles Found in a Rural Town in Guatemala
In 2023 I had the pleasure of visiting Guatemala for a couple of days. Since I had started communicating and receiving samples from a cooperative there some years earlier, I had totally fallen in love. In love with those fabric samples, their textures as well as their bold and expressive colors. I just knew I had to go there in person to experience where those beautiful textures where made, and by who.
I have to admit. I went there feeling a great deal of respect because of the warnings I had heard about the safety issues there due to violence in some parts of the country. Luckily, I had a quite smooth trip, except for a very extreme car sickness the first day due to a five hour ride bumper to bumper!
After an afternoon in the beautiful Antigua, which was also hosting the Flower Festival (the reason for the five hours and my car sickness) I started understanding that Guatemala was offering something that you don’t find a lot anymore. It was an intangible feeling of something. Maybe it was freedom. Maybe it was a connection to a rare essential feeling. Maybe it was just the beauty of the towns, their craft, and their extremely friendly people. Or maybe it was just watching the powerful volcanos that gave me some type of inner peace.
I was lucky enough to travel with Olga Reich who is the “go-to person” when it comes to working with textile artisans in Guatemala, who’s also specializing in indigo dyeing. Together we went to the final destination, a small town called Santiago Atitlán. On the way there I was impressed to watch the women in the small towns we passed by. As they all wore their traditional clothing in a very proud way, and the huipil, the embroidered blouse, that shined brighter than any other garment.
After a boat ride over the Atitlán lake, hypnotized by the volcanoes surrounding the lake, I was finally able to shake hands with the organizers and artisans of the cooperative that had created those beautiful textile samples that had taken my breath away.
Being able to watch the Mayan-Indigenous weavers working on the samples on backstrap looms, I now understood that this was another type of rare luxury textiles that you can’t find in many places anymore. It’s a feeling of creating something very limited, very exclusive, with a history and tradition so rich that every thread actually count. It's something that you can’t create volume of, and something that can’t be made with machines nor industrialized, because the result would never be near the same.
Before saying goodbye, the very warm and always laughing artisan Maria, agreed to be a model for the first jacket sample of the collection. I love how those photos turned out, they reflect the strong, colorful and powerful women that are behind those textiles.
