Laos silk gets Paris airing

A little known Sydney textile company has beaten off stiff competition to score a showing at Paris Fashion Week.
Face of Asia - the only Australian company to specialise in hand-woven silk textiles from Laos - appeared on the Paris Fashion Week catwalks earlier this month in the guise of garments by high-end Swiss fashion label AKRIS, confirmed Face of Asia co-founder David Hulme.
"We've been providing samples for AKRIS since January this year and they were talking about using our fabric next year. We'd provided them with a 30 metre sample of one of our fabrics and were amazed to discover it was appearing in Paris," he said.
The coup clinched the company's long-term strategy of launching its exclusive textiles on the back of a major fashion house, he said.
"AKRIS is not very well known in Australia, but it's huge in Europe and the US."
The fashion house had dressed well-known public figures including US politician Condoleezza Rice and film stars Brooke Shields and Susan Sarandon, he said.
"We've been working towards this for three years and it's bloody hard as there is no real market for our fabric in Australia."
While Face of Asia had been approached by Australian labels Camilla & Marc and Gabrielle Scarvelli, the high cost and exclusive quality of Laos silk was an unknown quantity to most Australians.
"By contrast, when we first showed the fabric to [AKRIS creative head] Albert Kriemler, he knew exactly what he was looking at."
Face of Asia had agreed to provide a maximum of 2000 metres to AKRIS by the end of the year, he said.
Kriemler had been "desperate for a premium silk" but unable to source it in textiles rich countries such as Italy or at leading textile fair Premiere Vision.
"Laos silk is the best silk in the world, but very few people know about it because Laos is a very poor, landlocked country. They have a tradition of silk weaving that goes back longer than even the people of Laos remember."