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VCU professor plans a trip to the Silkworm Sanctuary to learn ancient ways of making fabric

Visitors to the Silkworm Sanctuary learn to spin, color, weave and create silk clothes and accessories.
Jeannine Diego
Visitors to the Silkworm Sanctuary learn to spin, color, weave and create silk clothes and accessories.

Jeannine Diego is a professor of fashion design at VCU, and she knows her students worry about what’s known as fast or disposable fashion.

"It’s a mode of production that fosters, of course, over-consumption and has a tremendous environmental impact that the fashion industry can no longer sustain or excuse," she explains.

So, Diego is taking students and other interested adults to a place that celebrates artisan production of silk clothing and accessories in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. This summer, ten participants will spend five weeks working with 30 different craftsmen.

"They do everything from raising the silkworms to spinning to weaving, to dyeing with natural dyes, so students get a chance to do all of that," she says, "and we collaborate with the artisans."

The program is called Slower and Fairer – Fashioning the World We Want.  It begins in the capital – Oaxaca – then moves into a valley in the Sierra Norte mountains.

"We live with the artisans in their homes. We weave with them. It’s very immersive. It’s very farm to table what we eat, without any pretension of course, just because that’s how we live."

Accommodations are basic— adobe huts lacking in hot running water and air conditioning— but Diego says the climate is mild and the scenery spectacular.

"There are places where you can actually cross bridges that are above the clouds, and it’s really something!"

Diego reports the experience changed her students’ lives, and her partner in Mexico said the program made a big difference for their hosts as well.

"She told me she had never seen the artisans as happy as with this collaboration. There were tears when we left. The connection was much deeper than I ever expected."

The artisans were experts on silkworm cultivation, fabric and design, they were less sure about how to market their products. That’s where the students came in – creating a social media campaign to help sell Mexican silk clothes and accessories.

Diego is bi-lingual, so participants need not speak Spanish or know anything about fashion, and VCU has financial aid available for college students who might like to take part.

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Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief