Pad (Jun 2020)
Textile Design between Tradition & Innovation. Interview to Brigitte Perkins
Abstract
Through a long interview with Brigitte Perkins, a French textile designer who has worked in Morocco for 25 years, we want to present not only the story of a female designer, but also a common story of women through the Moroccan traditional arts of weaving and embroidery, imbued with a very strong symbolic dimension, where the weaving of fabrics, carpets and embroidery are deeply inscribed in Moroccan culture, with economic, social & cultural implications. For many women, these traditional arts allow them financial autonomy, as well as a strong social bond. Between them, they weave relationships, exchanges of knowledge... These arts, transmitted from mother to daughter, through which regional and family traditions are perpetuated, are usually the representation of the deep cultural expression of a feminine world, too often set aside or ignored. Brigitte Perkins comes from the Parisian Fashion scene. In 1995, she founded the Atelier "Tadert Titbirine" in an old caravanserai in the medina of Marrakech, offering and re- visiting the old tradition of weaving, with men, and then spinning and embroidery, with women, developing a production of excellence and innovative high-end. The particular character of Brigitte’s project does not only reside in the conception of fabrics and products of remarkable refinement and quality, but above all in the methodologies that she established both for weaving and embroidery, which allow this level of excellence. Convinced that the aim of tradition is not to reinvent the invention itself indefinitely, but to preserve what has been transmitted, Brigitte, by modernizing traditional techniques, has indeed succeeded in perpetuating this knowledge and in restoring the value of a living testimony to a millennial tradition that defies time by mixing the dreams of yesterday and tomorrow.
