•Shukun Duan, the owner of Puzhen Zha-ran Textile company in China
“During the Covid, we cannot open the shop or museum to allow people come to visit or buy our tie-dye products. But because of the online platforms, we attracted more young people and we did a successful live broadcast to sell our zha-ran products. And some of our followers left message to ask where they can learn zha-ran which made me so excited.”
•Zhoucheng Local Government
We strongly support all the creative efforts to promote our zha-ran technique and online platform is an important way to arouse more attention of our traditional zha-ran technique preservation.
From the secondary research, I learnt that social media can play a very important platform for me to carry out my intervention to promote Chinese tie-dye. Therefore, I choose two most popular social media platforms, Tiktok and Instagram, to register Chinese tie-dye account, as an ‘online museum’ to show and share what zha-ran is and what innovative design we could have to arouse the attention for Chinese tie-dye.
Due to the Covid situation, I had to count on my stakeholders to supply me firs-hand pictures and videos, so I can build up the basic structure of this ‘online museum’ to support my first-step intervention. Thanks to the support of Dali Zha-ran museum, the only national museum about Chinese tie-dye in China, I received a lot of original documents about Chinese tie-dye art pieces which I could use to edit and post on Tiktok and Instagram.
During the past few months, I received more and more likes and comments. “Before I only seen Zha-ran as a local souvenir in Yunnan to represent their Bai ethnic group culture. But the story behind made me want to know more about zha-ran. If I will have chances in the future, I would love to go to Dali and make one zha-ran scarf for myself.” Ziyi Wang, a Chinese college student commented on my Tiktok post. Also, I received very positive feedback from my stakeholders. “Young generations spend a lot of time on social media and by using social media promotion, more and more people came to buy our products online.” Hanmin Zhang, the owner of Lanxu Zha-ran Textile company in China told me.
During all these days, I did a lot of research about fashion design. And I found out a lot of luxury brands are combined their products with some traditional techniques, such as tie-dye.
Dior design has tie-dye styleLV handbag with the printing looks like tie-dyeChanel chain bag with tie-dye printing
So this bring me an idea, can we innovate our traditional design and make it more diverse or fashionable?
So I interviewed Fanglu Lin, the designer of Beijing Zha-ran Culture&Arts, ltd. Apparently she did a lot of innovation about Chinese traditional tie-dye and some of her artworks won the recognition internationally.
I like to innovate our traditional tie-dye patterns and design something more modern. From the exhibition I had I can see young generation like our traditional techniques, we just need to find more ways to attract them and tell them all of these treasures are not old.
