Transcend Elegance

Knotty Scarves

Knotty Scarves
Dance of the Loincloth.

Throughout its never-ending journey across the ages, the Earth has borne witness to the ever-repeating history of Man, the beautiful encounters that make it whole and the exchanges that are born from it.

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The scarves featured on this website are made by the Manjak of Senegal.
Historically, Senegal is a caste society. Such societies are made of endogamous "guilds" in which every individual is tasked with perpetuating the hereditary profession, hallmark of his character and social standing.
In Senegal and Guinea, the Manjak are weavers. In those countries, these men are initiates, whose wonderful fabrics are showcased here.
Theses fabrics are better known as woven loincloth.
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Born from an unrelenting effort, this women’s cloth is fashioned by men through the endless contortions of the body, the deliberate and rhythmic movements of shoulders and flanks, which are not unlike the intransigence of a ritual dance of seduction…
It is the Dance of the Loincloth !

Tressie & Serigne

The art of Textile

Making this fabric is an Art form, and Art, was always meant to outlast the fickle fantasies of consumers.
While in Dakar(Sénégal), my husband Serigne and I, met with various weavers in order to purchase fabrics and scarves for our personal use, and wherever we went, we heard the same story:
“Traditional weaving is dying! The Manjak weavers can’t possibly compete with Chinese fabrics, batik from Java or the Dutch Wax. Their bodies are not machines!”
Making a single scarf requires two men, and some can take up to an entire day of labor per piece.
The results are astonishing and the visuals that are brought forth, spectacular. One has to touch them to believe it.
Historically, these fabrics were almost never exchanged outside of events like weddings and naming ceremonies among the “social elite”.
Nowadays, those people travel. They have new worlds to discover and new passions to tame. Local luxuries no longer delight them. They want furniture from Italy, rugs from the Orient or easy-to-get trinkets from China. They want to be like everyone else!
In order to survive to these changes and conquer new markets, the weavers started manufacturing bedding and scarves. But despite their efforts, more than 75% of them have long since disappeared.

Knotty Scarves
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Second Life

United States

Accessories

Africa

Furniture

Textiles

Bedding

We wanted this textile to survive and to lend new life to those old things we tend to get bored with too easily. In order to achieve this goal, we added real wood furniture (always) to our product range. They are entirely restored with magnificent fabrics, thanks to the exceptional work of our upholsterers.
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Knotty Scarves

Scarfication
saved by the scarves.

Our goal is to build a site that will allow others to discover these magnificent fabrics.
The website opens up on a dragonfly beating its wings, and then on a young maiden, back to the camera, showing her scarifications, her identity! It’s a picture taken by a German photographer in the French colony of Dahomey (currently Benin), in 1908. It’s the picture of a woman frozen in an authenticity that is long gone; a time before the great turmoil of war, and long before the empty promises of the Independences.
The woven cloth journeyed through the ages, outlasted industrialization, endures despite globalization, and even global warming by finding new purpose as scarves, furnishing and clothing fabrics.
The thread, just as the scarifications, symbolizes the identity of the Manjak. The scarf, universal garment if ever there was one, has become the banner of a struggle for the survival of this art form! We wanted to portray this struggle through one single and iconic word:
Scarfication (saved by the scarves).
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In order to survive, the textile must change. We needed a symbol to represent both immutability and transcendence. We chose the dragonfly, the changeless prehistoric creature that embodies evolution, since it is born from water and evolves to thrive in the air.

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