Word: raffia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rock, chalk, oatmeal, twig, sand, deep sand, flax, parchment, stone, putty, buff, dove, raffia...
...gowns show the most exquisite materials and embroidery but are presented, as it were, in translation -- to a modern idiom. The last-minute bolts of georgette appear in a series of elegant sheaths, delicately layered, that have the cool beauty of a waterfall. One knockout skirt is of raffia -- the straw-hat material -- that looks amazingly like embroidery...
...Ferragamo, necessity was the spur to invention. In the 1930s and '40s, metal and leather, the staples of shoemaking, were scarce in wartime Italy, so he experimented with what came to hand -- straw, raffia, bark, even fishskin. Another local material, cork, launched one of his greatest inventions, the wedge. The precursor of the familiar wedged heel was a shoe with four corks from local wine bottles sewn together to make a heel. Later in the 1940s, he made uppers of cellophane, after noticing how strong and durable the material was when he twisted a bunch of candy wrappers...