Ethical Clothing Australia re-accreditation August 7, 2014 12:52
I’m very pleased to announce that Tatyana Ariyan Design has been re-accredited with Ethical Clothing Australia.
Quality has always been important to me and one way to insure it is to manufacture locally. In my case, that also means in-house. All my garments are cut, embroidered and sewn in our Melbourne studio. Each garment emerges out of studio as a completed work of art.
The team who work on each garment’s preparation are artisans. They are people who have invested their whole life in the learning and perfecting of their skills. These skills are not ones that can be taught in a week or even a month. Some skills take years to perfect – like beading, silk embroidery, silk painting, French flower making and even glass blowing (yes there are glass blowers working on some of my garments!)
These skills cannot be taught by a book or even a video. They have to be passed down from the master to the learner in a very particular way. The master needs to demonstrate how to place the hand perfectly to achieve the right result; how to handle fabric in the right way; how to move the paint brush at the right speed; what colour galss should be before it is ready to be worked.
Yet demand to learn these skills is dropping so not only are we seeing the master craftsmen dwindle in numbers, it is also getting more difficult to obtain good quality tools and specialist equipment in Australia. Maybe it is because ours is a young country where there isn’t a long and respected history of master craftsmen that these skills are not valued as they should be. I want to change that. I want to showcase the beauty of a garment that has been constructed from fine materials by highly trained artisans in Australia.
Such garments do not get produced for nothing. Every artisan deserves to be paid a fair salary for their years of learning and production of high quality. When we visit countries like Italy, France and Spain with long histories of highly trained artisans we all want to buy a garment or piece which reflects that quality and tradition and we are prepared to pay the prices demanded for such quality. So why not in Australia? We are recognised on the world stage as leaders in so many fields why not this one as well?
Support the Ethical Clothing Australia movement and insist on Australian made. By buying fewer articles of clothing each year and buying good pieces that will look beautiful for a long time you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are supporting the continuity of artisans and craftsmen in Australia.