Garut home industries boast fine silk products
By Dewi Anggraeni
GARUT, West Java (JP): What is beauty? In everyday speak, beauty is something which brings pleasure. It is such an ephemeral, even abstract concept, yet for centuries artists and artisans have been able to transfer beauty from the realm of idea into reality.
Many go further. They make it real and personal. And it sells. Make beauty attachable to our persons, as attire, as adornments, then you are in business.
In Indonesia we are increasingly bombarded by beautiful clothing items that are produced globally. They may be manufactured in this country, in China, Thailand, Vietnam or anywhere in the region. One thing is for sure, the clothes we are wearing have very little local identity. Imagine, at this moment, we in Indonesia may be wearing the identical items of clothing as millions of men and women in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, even far-flung places on different continents; such is the global nature of the fashion industry.
When wearing global-quality items has lost its novelty, try shrinking your world back to where the boundaries are still discernible. Explore local home industries, where beauty has not evaporated into the atmosphere, but is still thick and, in many cases, tangible.
Such a world can be found in Garut, around 63 kilometers southeast of West Java's provincial capital of Bandung. While a fair distance, physically and temporally, from the mythical goddess of silk, Lady Hsi-Ling Shih, wife of the legendary Yellow Emperor, who ruled China in 3000 B.C., Garut nonetheless boasts its own fine silk, sold to far-flung places in Indonesia
A regional city, Garut has a healthy home industry of silk- making and its own unique batik designs and motifs, known as Garutan.
Looking at the manufacturing sites one wonders how they manage to keep up with production demand. The two factories in town are owned by the Aman Sahuri family. Each consists of a shop front and a largish workshop at the back. While the shop is airy and tastefully decorated, the workshop is basically functional, and each square meter is efficiently used.
At first glance, it is hard to imagine how such a labor- intensive manufacturing business as silk-making can be accommodated in such a relatively small space. However, after a chat with Herri, the manager of one of the factories, it became clear that the term "home industry" in this case is not a name only, because a fair slice of the work is indeed done in ordinary homes.
Thus the silk industry of this town has long practiced, and benefited from, what is now de rigueur among companies in big cities: outsourcing. It provides hundreds of families part-time and full-time work cultivating silkworms. Since demand for the product fluctuates, from a business viewpoint, outsourcing seems a sensible option.
Herri painted a picture of the labor-intensiveness of silk- making when he explained that to produce one 38-denier silk thread, 14 cocoons were needed. Considering that tens of thousands of threads are required to make a cloth, it is no wonder that the whole population of Garut feels proprietorial toward the product.
The full cocoons are delivered to the factories, where the silk is extracted, cleaned, prepared, spun and woven, all where the quality can be controlled. The spinners are mainly women, maybe because they are more naturally suited to the work -- the spinning wheels, made of wood planks and sticks nailed together, on one side, and the old bicycle wheels on the other can only work properly when the hands that feed them are nimble.
Women are still required to do the length-wise weave, while the width-wise fill can be done by men. Both use nonmechanical weaving equipment.
Back in the shop, silk materials of various colors are available for sale between Rp 60,000 and Rp 70,000 a meter.
The town's silk industry also supplies the local batik industry with its fine products.
Understandably, silk batik is more expensive than the traditional cotton batik. The silk batik has a unique soft and flowing quality which falls elegantly and sensuously around the wearer's body.
The designs and motifs of the batik produced in Garut, be it silk or cotton, are distinctly traditional. The Garutan motifs stand out among those from other areas because they are mostly sparse, never crowded.
The three colors used are those of dyes extracted from natural materials: brick red, indigo and cream. These colors might be used individually or in combination. The base motifs are usually repeated geometrics, in diagonal lines. Then on top of these, butterflies, fans or flowers may be added. The overall impression is of softness and understatedness.
According to Muharam, better known as Bu Ubah, the owner of one of these home factories, a hand-painted piece of cloth may take up to two months to finish, depending on the intricacies of the motifs and the number of colors. The printed ones are understandably faster to produce. The prices reflect the amount of labor involved. Hand-painted batik usually costs around Rp 400,000, while a printed one about Rp 40,000.
The batik industry in this town mostly takes place in home- sized factories. A typical home factory has the front taken up by the shop or showroom, with the backyard functioning as a workshop.
In Bu Ubah's workshop, there are generally three or four women working with cantings, a type of implement used on hand-painted batik. Two or three men work on the dyes, and everything is done manually.
In the shop, the finished products are displayed tastefully. It is not quite a riot of colors, yet it grabs your attention and makes you reluctant to leave. You are surrounded by things of beauty, and what is more, beauty you can buy and wear, transferring that beauty onto your person.
Garut can be reached easily from Bandung, either by public bus or hired car. From Jakarta you have even more options. If you do not like flying, traveling by train or car is pleasantly scenic, if you can avoid the traffic.