Letter from Egypt
Times have changed but tassles remain on the fringe
What do royal courts, burlesque costumes and Swahili chastity belts have in common? They all use tassels and fringe, the dangling bits that tell the world that what they have is special.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, French designers commissioned extravagant silk, linen and wool tassels to decorate furnishings and to trim the costumes of royalty. Artisans created exquisite loops and intricate braids of a sophistication we can only dream of.
Today, craftsmen skilled in traditional passementerie, the art of making tassels and trims, are hard to come by. Machines can produce more or less the same results – but not to the discriminating eye.
In the fall of 1993, a British jewelry designer with an eye for beauty in-the-rough discovered a faded and damaged tassel in Cairo’s hectic, crowded Khan El Khalili market. The dusty object that Sevinch Deman brought home failed to impress her husband that day, but it eventually inspired the venture they now run together.
Sevinch's husband, Michael, a busy oil company executive, looked askance at the exotic odds and ends his wife extracted from the bazaar. But Sevinch was in love with the curiously crafted objects, which she soon learned how to commission from the backstreets of Cairo. She began talking to traders and other people in the industry and gradually a whole world of ancient tradition opened up to her and a new perspective on innovative craftsmanship was soon to be revealed.
A visit to Komagna
Komagma, a timelessly rural Egyptian village has for two hundred years nurtured the elaborate craft of tassels and trimmings. The village is less than an hour away from cosmopolitan Cairo, but with its rustic surroundings and wandering water buffalos, it has more in common with a medieval village.
No one knows about Komagma. Even Egytians have never heard of it. And it was only by chance that Sevinch discovered that hidden treasure of artisanship. To this day, even teenage boys in Komagma know how to turn a delicate wooden mould and knit a fine silk cover around it. Middle-aged women can deftly fashion a coiled core and coat it perfectly with hand-spun thread. And if you need a hank of yarn died to a custom color and woven into an intricate decorative ribbon, Komagma is the place to be.
Handmade passmenterie is a dying art. Since the 1950’s over 200 passementerie workshops have gone out of business in France alone. The few that survived are now working for upscale clients and they mostly use industrial machines to produce trimmings of regular quality. Some are outsourcing to China. Few want to do custom work any more. And that’s the niche in which Sevinch and her team flourish.
Over the last 16 years, Sevinch and Michael have mobilized and refined the skills of the craftsmen of Komagma to create one of the rare passementerie workshops in the world. They handle the authentic trimmings required for museum quality restoration, couture designer fashions and detail obsessed Hollywood movie sets. It is hard work.
This morning, Ali and Fatiha are finishing the bedspread fringe for a historical textile restoration project for the Museum of Modern Art half a world away in New York. At eight that morning, they hopped on a bus in the middle of Komagma along with fifty of their co-workers. Now they are in Abu Rawash, a desert village to the east of Cairo where “Sevinch Passementerie” has set up shop.
The place is abuzz with the sound of spinning wheels and looms, squeaking and rumbling to fill a recent order from Europe. The hand-made looms are rough and pre-industrial, and often need to be stabilized with a brick or calibrated with a piece of scrap metal.
The courtyard outside is whitewashed and two aluminum vats of boiling water are waiting to the side. Next to the vats, a man wearing a flowing robe, or galabeyya, is studying a swatch of fabric. A moment later, he plunges a stick into one of a dozen jars of color then dips it into the boiling water. He’s matching the color of the water to the color of the cloth in his hands. In a little while he will fish out the freshly died thread and hang it to dry in the shady part of the courtyard near the spare tires.
I am told that a huge scaffolding was standing in this same courtyard a month ago. The craftsmen built it to handle two massive pink tassels, three meters long each, that they created for a Hollywood set designer. These were commissioned for the upcoming movie Nine, a sequel to Fellini’s 8 ½. Extraordinary, but not unusual for the men and women of Komagma.
Sevinche and her talented crew are currently occupied making stylized flowers for Christian Louboutin, the haute couture shoemaker. The French jewelry designer, Loulou de la Falaise, is next in line for their help.
This seems only fitting, helping the French that is. It was during Napoleonic times that the French brought this particular skill to Egyptian villagers, who are now returning the favor.
