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This two-part article focuses on near-extinct Lao textile tradition. We look at how a determined woman leased it a new life and brought it to the attention of top designers in the world. The second article discusses the design motifs and their symbolism.

Here is a story where the artistic tradition is making a significant contribution to the socio-economic status of a sleepy Asian country. An inspired textile business in Laos is stemming the tide of opium growth, encouraging foreign investment and building a skilled labor force. It is bringing one of the world's most sophisticated weaving cultures out of obscurity for the rest of the world and away from its own near-death knoll at home. Fabrics by Lao Textiles have been compared to Herme's silks, have had fashion's Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren champing at the bit and the world's most serious textile collectors knocking on the studio door in Vientiane.

Left: Carol Cassidy.

"We are producing woven art, giving proper value to labor and craft and taking Laos beyond the cheap image of the Third World," says strident but amiable textile expert Carol Cassidy who set up this first wholly owned foreign company in 1990. Thanks to her, Laotian woven silk, in designs that tell the story of a people, have been rescued from virtual extinction. When she arrived in Laos from Africa in 1989 as the first United Nations field expert to go into the villages, silk farmers had switched to opium, and nylon was the mainstay of a textile industry that had largely lost its ancient techniques due to the Japanese occupation of their homelands in war and the time-is-money ethos of economic development.

From the few old pieces she bought from dealers, Cassidy has built up a source bank of traditional designs (from up to 100 years ago) which she marries with her own to produce Laotian textile art that goes beyond mere tradition, taking on a modern aesthetic of its own. Talking of the intricate patterns of old wedding outfits, burial shrouds and headscarves, Cassidy says: We have the song but we do not know the meaning or the words." Even so the colors and abstract motifs still tell a subtle and sophisticated story of an Indochinese heritage. Magenta thread refers to betel, gold to the sands of the great Mekong river, peacocks, butterflies, serpents and the Naga bird of good fortune, where the change in color on the weave was made so as to confuse the evil spirits.