Today's article was to be on a different aspect of lace design. However, I was approached by Etsy regarding the above video and was intrigued by the subject matter. The video deals with the seemingly age-old problem of machine versus hand production. The video itself deals with the situation in Cyprus where traditional lace embroidery is inevitably being led towards extinction by the importation of cheap machine produced lace, mainly from China. Cyprus is by no means the only area of conflict between machine and hand production and China is not the only culprit in flooding the market with cheap products. However, this video does highlight the acute confrontation between machine and hand production, which is mainly one of a personal and cultural mind set.
The problem itself is over two centuries old and entails most, if not all of the traditional crafts. However, textiles seems to have suffered perhaps disproportionately, with most of the industry at one point being exclusively hand produced, including both woven and printed textiles, along with embroidery, carpet and lace production.
The industrialisation of the textile industry started in Britain in the eighteenth century and has been enveloping every aspect of the industry ever since. Lace was one of the last crafts to be industrialised because of its human complexity, and even now mass produced lace work is obviously inferior to that of the hand crafted variety. Traditional lace workers across Europe produced work for domestic, and particularly fashion industries for generations. Each piece of lace was hoarded and protected so that samples often travelled down the generations through families.
Part of the appeal of lacework was the fact that it was so labour intensive and therefore expensive. It was also valued as a piece of human creativity, an individual piece of work that had been produced by human hands and therefore connected both human lace worker and customer. Part of the problem with machine production is the fact that, by its definition, it deals in quantity rather than quality. The casualness of bulk production severs the human link with the mass produced piece as it is now a relationship of machine and human rather than human to human, with the result that the casualness becomes part of both the market and the way that individuals treat the products produced by machine. They seem valueless and because of their relative cheapness and availability they are easily and readily replaced.
Unfortunately, this casual indifference has become part of the tragedy of a consumer culture that has nowhere left to dump its discarded casual buys. One thing that hand craft can teach us is about finite availability, rather than infinite availability. Rather than buying fifteen mock woollen tops over a year, which would then only last that year, we could buy one or two that had been hand knitted and would last perhaps a decade. Instead of buying cheap chipboard furniture every three years, we can buy good hand produced furniture that although expensive would only need to be bought once in a generation. A good hand produced rug should last an entire lifetime and then still be useful to another generation.
The argument is always that hand production costs too much for the average wage earner to buy. While this is true, it is also part of a mind set. While good hand crafted products are expensive, they should last much longer than those spewed out by the mass produced market. Therefore, saving for choice pieces of furniture and accessories, rather than filling a home with cheap but voluminous items, makes sense particularly as far as the environment is concerned. Because we are told that it is our duty to consume in a market economy, does not mean that we have no choices to make. Many in the world survive on an a much smaller range of creature comforts.
This is not to say that the hand craft industry can change the world and save the environment. Many of our every day products cannot be produced by hand and are such an integral part of our life that we are loathe to give them up. However, there is no reason why the hand craft market cannot be much larger than it is. A proportion of the consumer market could well be sourced from the traditional crafts, and although it may well mean that the fashion led market of in built obsolescence would have to be reduced in scale and size, it may well help us to take control of our seemingly runaway dumping of machine made goods.
There are still many professional craft makers across the globe, and an increasing army of amateurs. If the unfocused enthusiasm of the maker and the market led indifference of the consumer can be guided towards each other, then a brisk trade in products made for longevity rather than fleeting fashion could be fostered. Instead of buying cheap machine produced lace to throw away, we can buy a piece of hand produced lace that can be passed down to another generation.
This has turned into more of a personal article than perhaps intended, and by its nature will be bound to be disagreed with, which is as it should be. I like to think however, that perhaps some may see as I do, that the Etsy video does not necessarily spell the end of hand production, but rather shows an opportunity to at least fundamentally rethink some of the aspects of our market economy, the fashion dominated world and the consumer market that cynically uses it. That hand craft can be seen as part of the solution to some of the more pressing environmental problems of a throwaway culture, lends support to the fact that traditional crafts, of whatever form, still have a purpose and a vital function to play in the twenty first century and beyond.
I would like to thank Etsy for approaching me with this video and giving me the opportunity, or excuse, to write this article.
