In the 19th century, the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, emerged as a major producer of ikat — a shimmering, multicolored silk fabric used for wall hangings and men and women’s clothing. The industry quickly spread east to the Fergana Valley, where it still exists today.
Ikat is the only fabric where the design is applied before weaving. First, a designer stretches silk threads (often 200 yards long) in sections on a short wooden frame and draws a design on them in charcoal. Another specialist, the “binder,” wraps elements of the design with cotton string to resist dye. A dyer dips the wrapped threads into a bath of the lightest dye, then wrings them out, unties them and takes them back to the binder to be retied for the next color.
The most expensive ikats have many colors, requiring numerous trips to designers, binders and dyers that can take weeks. Finally, the fabric is woven on a treadle loom about 17 inches wide. In Uzbekistan and the Fergana Valley, the ikat technique is known as “abrband” (binding the clouds) after the fabric’s distinctive blurred designs.
This robe from The Textile Museum Collection features a stunning array of colors — including a bright green unique to the Fergana Valley — and a stylized floral design. It is lined with hand-rolled Russian cotton and trimmed with twined loops of dark red thread.
