According to a study by Cornell University, it only came about in the mid-1800s with the industrial revolution. Before that, clothes were made by hand with woven cloth.
There’s plenty of machine-made clothing in Indonesia. In fact, Nike and Columbia Sportswear and many other American clothing brands have their clothes made in factories outside Jakarta before shipping them to stores in the United States.
Nonetheless, Indonesians take great pride in traditional cloth forms, too. Instead of the casual Fridays that we have in the U.S., they have Batik Fridays, when everyone is encouraged to wear clothes native to their tribes. What would you wear if you had Batik Friday at your school?
Each six-foot-length of cloth in the store I visited was made by hand with shuttles and a weaving loom. On average, Ibu Arnas the shopkeeper explained, each cloth took a month to make!
Ibu Arnas had six different Southeast Sulawesi tribes’ cloth designs on display at her store. She said that each motif or design on the cloth had a meaning, too. For example, Ibu Arnas explained how one common Muna tribe design was actually an omelet! Not just any omelet but a kenta nedole, or omelet packed with shredded fish and coconut. This is a food that Muna people eat daily.
Ibu Arnas also showed me a cloth that is made with threads dyed with natural local materials. Blue comes from making a tea with the leaves of the Indigo tree. Brown came from boiling mangrove wood in water. Red is from boiling the wood of a rainforest vine locally called kayu bajakah. The vine’s Latin name is Spatholobus littoralis.
