“Malian Women Create Beauty and Profit Through Local Fabrics” via @Africa_com #hwhtw @MakeWomenCount #myAWD

Love this article on Malian women fashion entrepreneurs!  Some highlights:

“Hand-dyeing bazin can be labour-intensive for the women who produce it. First they import the fabric — mostly cotton, but sometimes silk or wool — from Germany, the Netherlands or China. Then they cut it to standard sizes. Next they knot tissues tightly into parts of the fabric so that those parts remain undyed when the cloth is dipped into buckets of pigment and fixative. When the fabric emerges it bears coloured spirals, rings or patterns.

“Maureen Gosling, a U.S. filmmaker, is collaborating with Maxine Downs, an anthropologist, to produce a film on bazin called Bamako Chic: Threads of Power, Colour and Culture. According to Ms. Downs, they want to show how “self-empowered African women turned their artistic creativity and resourcefulness into a force for alleviating their own poverty.”

“Ms. Downs visited Mali several times to meet some of the women in the burgeoning industry. “When I went to Mali, I was shocked by the women’s resilience, their ability to create something out of nothing,” she told Africa Renewal.”

Read the full article: http://www.africa.com/blog/blog,malian_women_create_beauty_and_profit_through_local_fabrics,667.html