Why Dye Fabric
When I first started dyeing it was in response to someone breaking into my showroom at the apparel mart and stealing my samples that I had put into the fashion show the evening before. The response was amazing and the next morning my garments were gone. I sold the market that season with photographs because my customers were returning customers and anyone who came for the first time had seen my garments in the fashion show the evening before could see the quality of my work in other items I was showing and understood what had happened.
Because the fabrics were available the people who stole my work could have a pattern maker pull copy of my design and grade it up and down to get the sizes so essentially they did what is called a knock off of my line.
I decided that I would learn every surface design technique that I could do and began to look for the classes and tools to allow me to do that. Now they might get my garment and get the pattern but there is no way they can copy the colors or design on the fabrics. That has allowed me to side step the designer want to bees and copiers that this industry is plagued with and move forward without being stalked at every market by the knock off artists who before were taking my work every market and claiming it as their own.
The satisfaction I got before was that they were now one season behind and I was on to the next set and season of designs so was ahead of them but after I started dyeing fabric the satisfaction I got was seeing that they could no longer rip me off. They could not duplicate my formulas and those that approached me were told that the formulas were not for sale.
While the fashion industry kind of brushes over the fact that this happens all too frequently, the general public needs to know that the designs that are being copied from the red carpet events are those that the designer and the company who is doing the lower price version are working together to do. For beginning designers, that is not the case and the person taking the work of someone else is actually stealing their work when they do not ask permission or compensate the original designer.
It is refreshing to me that I have moved out of range of these people who think that it is alright to take the work of someone else and claim it as their own. I wish I had known about fabric dyeing much earlier in my fashion career.