MAKING &

SELLING
ADIRE T-SHIRT
"What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when
human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language."

—Miuccia Prada
CONTENTS

CHATER ONE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER TWO

MAKING ADIRE TSHIRT

CHAPTER THREE

SELLING ADIRE T-SHIRT

INTRODUCTION

Adire is a resist-dyed cloth produced and worn by the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria in
West Africa. The Yoruba label adire, which means "tied and dyed," was first applied to indigo-
dyed cloth decorated with resist patterns around the turn of the twentieth century. With the
introduction of a broader color palette of imported synthetic dyes in the second half of the
twentieth century, the label "adire" was expanded to include a variety of hand-dyed textiles
using wax resist batik methods to produce patterned cloth in a dazzling array of dye tints and
hues.

The Art of Making Adire

The traditional production of indigo-dyed adire involves the input of two female specialists-
dyers (alaro), who control production and marketing of adire, and decorators (aladire), who
create the resist patterns. In the oldest forms of adire, two basic resist techniques are used to
create soft blue or white designs to contrast with a deeply saturated indigo blue background.
Adire oniko is tied or wrapped with raffia to resist the dye. Adire eleko has starchy maize or
cassava paste hand-painted onto the surface of the cloth as a resist agent. Further
experimentation led to two additional techniques. Adire alabere involves stitching the cloth
with thread prior to dyeing to produce fine-lined motifs. Adire batani is produced with the aid
of zinc stencils to control the application of the resist starch.

History of Adire

As a distinctive textile type, adire first emerged in the city of Abeokuta, a center for cotton
production, weaving, and indigo-dyeing in the nineteenth century. The prototype was tie-dyed
kijipa, a handwoven cloth dyed with indigo for use as wrappers and covering cloths. Female
specialists dyed yarns and cloth and also refurbished faded clothing by re-dyeing the cloth with
tie-dyed patterns. When British trading firms introduced cheap imported cloth and flooded the
market with colorful inexpensive printed textiles, the adire industry emerged to meet the
challenge. The women discovered that the imported white cotton shirting was cheaper than
handwoven cloth and could be decorated and dyed to meet local tastes. The soft, smooth
texture of the import cloth, in contrast to the rough surface of kijipa cloth, provided a new
impetus for decoration. The soft shirting encouraged the decorators to create smaller more
precise patterns with tie-dye methods and to use raffia thread to produce finely patterned
stitch-resist adire alabere. The smooth surface of shirting led to the development of hand-
painted starch-resist adire eleko. Abeokuta remained the major producer and trade center for
adire, but Ibadan, a larger city to the north, developed a nucleus of women artists who
specialized in hand-painted adire eleko. The wrapper design Ibadandun ("Ibadandun" meaning
"the city of Ibadan is sweet") is popular to this day.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vast trade network for adire spread across
West Africa. Adire wrappers were sold as far away as Ghana, Senegal, and the Congo (Byfield
2002; Eades 1993). At the height of adire production in the 1920s, Senegalese merchants came
to Abeokuta to buy as many as 2,000 wrappers in one day from the female traders (Byfield
2002, p. 114). In the 1930s, two technological innovations to decorate adire were developed
that provided an avenue for men to gain entrance into the female-controlled industry. Women
retained the dyeing specialty and continued to do tying, hand-painting, and hand-sewing to
prepare the cloth for dyeing, but decorating techniques involving sewing machine stitching and
applying starch through zinc stencils were taken up by men, because West Africans believe that
men have an affinity for machines and metal that women do not. A regional and international
economic decline at the end of the 1930s led to a decline in the craft, so that in the 1940s no
major innovations in production occurred (Byfield 2002; Keyes-Adenaike 1993). The European
restriction placed against exporting cloth to West Africa during World War II (1939-1945) also
had negative effects. Following the war, the adire industry was dealt a further blow when the
markets were flooded with low-priced printed cloth from European, Asian, and African textile
mills. By the 1950s adire production had significantly slowed, and few young people were being
trained in the craft.

In the 1960s, while rural women were still wearing the indigo-dyed wrappers, urban dwellers
considered it "a poor people's cloth" (Byfield 2002, pp. 212-218). However, the 1960s marked a
new period of innovation in handcrafted cloth production in Yorubaland. With the growing
availability of chemical dyes from Europe, there was a revolution in color and techniques
(Keyes-Adenaike 1993, p. 38). Adire patterns caught the eye of Nigerian fashion designers who
adapted the designs to print high-quality cloth using imported color-fast dyes in colors other
than indigo. Sold by the yard the "new adire" was used for clothing, tablecloths, bedspreads,
and draperies (Eicher 1976, pp. 76-77). One expatriate woman, Betty Okuboyejo who lived in
Abeokuta, is credited with introducing high-quality adire-inspired cloth using a full range of
commercial color-fast dyes to expatriates and Nigerian elites (Eicher 1976, p. 76). New
multicolored adire utilized a simple technology and became a backyard industry so that the
markets filled with the new adire. This modern form of cheaply produced adire, dubbed
"kampala" (because it became popular at the time of the Kampala Peace Conference to settle
the Biafra War in Nigeria) was manufactured by individuals with no prior knowledge of dyeing-
farmers, clerks, petty traders, and the jobless (Picton 1995, p. 17). Hot wax or paraffin was
substituted for the indigenous cassava paste as a resist agent, and designs were created by
simple techniques including tie-dye, folding, crumpling, and randomly sprinkling or splashing
the hot wax onto a cloth prior to dyeing. As demand grew and the new adire makers began to
professionalize, a block printing technique to apply the hot wax developed and largely
supplanted stenciling (Picton 1995, p. 17).

New Adire Dyeing

In the twenty-first century, the new colorful adire continues to meet fashion challenges and to
be an alternative to machine prints. In continually changing patterns, new adire appeals to the
fashion-conscious Yoruba in the urban and rural areas. In Nigeria one can still buy indigo-dyed
adire oniko and eleko made by older women in Abeokuta and Ibadan and by artisans at the
Nike Center for the Arts and Culture in Oshogbo where the artist Nike Davies-Okundaye trains
students in traditional adire techniques. But, increasingly, the lover of indigo-dyed adire must
turn to collecting pieces from the cloth markets such as Oje Market in Ibadan or from traders
who specialize in the old cloth. Soon those also will be gone from the Yoruba scene.
 CHAPTER TWO

MAKING ADIRE TSHIRT

SELLING ADIRE TSHIRT