Before this year, students had learned about luxury Italian fabrics, working with mills to spin silk and cotton fibers. “As much as I love Italian fabrics, I just feel like it had been done,” says Wong, adjunct assistant professor. Students told her they wanted to learn about sustainable textiles—and she realized they needed to start by understand farming. She wrote a brand new course that focused on craftsmanship, working with artisans, and forging a sustainable livelihood.
Wong herself owns a farm in the Philippines that produces abacá, the raw material for a sturdy high-end plant fiber. In 2023, she traveled to South Africa’s Karoo, a semi-arid region that produces 60% of the world’s mohair, a luxury fiber harvested from Angora goats. She felt a deep connection to the process and product, and she wanted to bring that knowledge to her students.
To contrast the production of animal and plant fibers, she included abacá as the second focus of the course. A third fiber in the capstone curriculum, piña, is extracted from the Red Spanish pineapple, also grown in the Philippines. She included a fourth, Jacob wool, grown in New York State, to give students a glimpse into local production.
Frances Van Hasselt, whose family owns the Angora goat farm that Wong visited, and whose sustainable brand, Frances VH, produces luxury mohair rugs, apparel, and other textiles, came to New York for two weeks in February to help teach the mohair section of the course.
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Categories: New York, Education, Livestock, Goats & Sheep