Chula plays a part in developing the local economy by endorsing a systematic and comprehensive cultural capital development model from the creation of fiber and textile innovations to the design of lifestyle fashion items to promote the creative economy, provide added value to the fashion industry, and the production process by considering the creation of brands and competitors’ markets along with the creative tourism business to help generate income leading to sustainable community development.
Highlights
- Researching the problems and extending the spirit of Thai textiles into contemporary lifestyles
- A comprehensive model for developing cultural capital
- Eight new brands for Nan Textiles
- Two Cultural Capital Tourism Destinations
- A sustainable move for Thai textiles
Textiles are a part of the cultural artifacts that reflect the identity, way of life, and wisdom of members of various ethnic groups and countries whether in the weaving methods, materials, dyeing, textile design, or forms of wearing, etc. They are part of the heritage that people in each society have passed down from one generation to another for the past hundreds of years and, unfortunately, such a valuable cultural feature has now become nothing but souvenir items or garments worn on special occasions.
To restore its value to ensure its survival in today’s world we need to make sure that artistic creations can blend the traditional value with modern lifestyles of today. With this intention along with her expertise in fashion, Professor Dr. Patcha U-Tiswannakul, Head of the Fashion and Creative Arts Research Unit (FAC-RU), Department of Creative Arts, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Chulalongkorn University an outstanding national researcher in Philosophy for 2023, from the National Research Council, has initiated “the lifestyle product industrial innovation from Nan Province to the World to Promote Creative Tourism (2020-2022)”.
Professor Dr. Patcha U-Tiswannakul
According to Prof. Dr. Patcha “Thailand is rich in its diverse forms of cultural capital scattered around the country each with their own unique identity some of which are connected to the ethnic groups of each neighboring country. Unfortunately, they might eventually disappear as a result of the lack of comprehensive development and marketing strategies which means these textiles do not answer the needs of consumer markets of today – a classic case often found among the weaving communities here in Thailand.”
With support from Chula’s Second Century Fund: C2F, a team of researchers, lecturers, and CU alumni headed by Prof. Dr. Patcha have helped pioneer a cluster of textile weaving in Nan Province. Together they have studied the problems in the local context to create a model to develop the cultural capital to build a specific identity of a lifestyle fashion product into an original cluster. The task involves the innovative development of fibers and weaving techniques such as adopting natural plant extracts as color dyes or the unique designs of ethnic groups in Nan along with local techniques for extracting color in fashion creations.
“We have designed our textiles and turned them into lifestyle fashion products to promote the style of tourism that is currently popular thereby upgrading the status of these products, promoting marketing possibilities, and developing creative tourism. We hope that this model can help drive the community industrial economy to sustainable markets at both the national and international levels. Our aspirations even include having this model applied to other cultural capital products in all other regions around Thailand.”
Continue reading at https://www.chula.ac.th/en/highlight/135183/
