The Inaugural Tenun Fashion Week Highlights Southeast Asian Weaving Communities

 

For the first time ever, Maybank Foundation has teamed up with ASEAN Handicraft Promotion and Development Association (AHPADA) and Tanoti, a Malaysian social enterprise dedicated to heritage craft preservation, women empowerment and rural community-building brings you TENUN Fashion Week. 

The TENUN Fashion Week will take on a digital format where it will screened online from 15 to 17 October 2021, featuring its one in a kind handweaves pieces, reimagined in modern fashion. Unlike the typical fashion events, the TENUN Fashion Week focusses its spotlight on participating communities that produce the creation of handwoven textiles in Southeast Asia and their unique stories behind it. 

Such as Kampung Pulau Keladi located along the Pahang River, Hajjah Nortipah and her daughter are a part of a small community of weavers, who strive to preserve the heritage of handwoven songket passed down from their ancestors. Similarly in the central highlands of Vietnam, six ethnic minority groups form a network to preserve the traditional weaving heritage of local communities. Also situated in West Sumatra and the volcanic Indonesian island of Lombok are the weavers of ASPPUK, women who are victims of violence and disaster, female heads of families and migrant workers. 

Like them, hundreds of weaving communities exist throughout Southeast Asia, where textile weaving is traditionally taken up by women, forming a virtually untold but vital part of the region’s traditional fashion, culture and shared heritage. With humble hands, these women meticulously produce intricate fabrics – from exquisite material produced for royal courts to vivid cloths encompassing a tremendous range of imagery, demonstrating considerable technical prowess. 

TENUN will also will have an online shop available on the event's website @TenunFashionWeek