Word: batik
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...Better Grades At least, at his Alma Mater in Jakarta, the Menteng school, the American President can be assured of an unreserved welcome. Two weeks before Obama was due to arrive in the Indonesian capital, batik-clad students practiced a traditional Indonesian gamelan-orchestra performance they hope to play for him. School principal Hasimah is proud of the school's connection to Obama, showing off a class photo of a young Barry standing among a crowd of Indonesian students. "His story provides a huge motivation to our students," she says. "It means that no matter what your background...
...blunders to demonstrate unity. Representatives of this diverse group of 21 Asia-Pacific nations, who together represent roughly 40% of the world's population and 54% of the world's GDP, have bravely donned the traditional dress of the host country, from cowboy hats to ponchos to garishly colored batik shirts, to show that despite their differences, everybody could be made to look a bit ridiculous for a group photo...
...batik designs come straight from the heart of Javanese tradition, but in other respects Indonesia's most feted fashion maestro, 75-year-old Iwan Tirta, is a modernist - responsible for getting batik into the pages of Vogue and onto international catwalks. A Yale graduate destined for legal practice, Tirta switched career paths in the 1960s after his interest in batik was awakened during a research project. Since that time, he has built up an exclusive fashion and homeware label, and contributed to the preservation and advancement of batik-production techniques. Here are some of his inspirations...
...Javanese royalty Pakubuwono X, who died in 1938, was the susuhunan, or sultan, of Surakarta (the central Javanese city more commonly known as Solo). He was well read in everything and very forward-looking. His court even combined batik and Art Deco designs...
...that's from another time and place altogether. It looks at first like "traditional" African patterned cloth--and it is--but the tradition turns out to be complicated. As Shonibare discovered years ago, those "African" wax-print textiles are actually produced by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the batik cloth of their Indonesian colony, then started selling them in Africa, where they were adopted as, ahem, native dress. "Even things that were supposed to represent authentic Africa," he says, "didn't turn out to fulfill the expectation of authenticity...