Lai Lei's Weaver Girl: I owe 3 million yuan for weaving, and only seven people can craft. This kind of fabric is on display at Paris Fashion Week.

Different from the decline and poverty of artisans in modern China, European and American luxury brands such as Dior, Gucci, Chanel and Hermes are often praised for their high prices, especially personal tailor, which makes people enjoy the "best in the world" luxury.

Of course, whether these products are of high quality or made in personal tailor, let's not talk about quality. They are expensive only because they are artificial and sought after. People will buy it just because of the vanity of "only buying expensive ones, not buying good ones".

Similarly, "scarcity is the most valuable thing", but countless handmade fabrics with high quality and low price in China have been ignored, and some have even been lost. Dong Bu, from the Dong nationality, once faced such a dilemma. The so-called Dong cloth is the cloth that Dong people often wear clothes, which is very different from ordinary cotton cloth.

In the early years, all the women in Dong's family could spin. They spun cotton yarn into roving or spun yarn, and the most primitive clothing fabric was already available. Roving is generally used as the lining of cotton-padded clothes, while spinning is also woven into "double-hall cloth" with checkered pattern and "cotton material" with checkered pattern.

At this time, white cloth will not be used to cut cloth immediately, and Dong Nv still needs to inject soul-impregnation. The materials used for dyeing cloth are not chemical pigments, but natural dyes, such as indigo grass leaves, lime, liquor, cowhide juice, egg white and so on.

These raw materials, which seem to have nothing to do with dyes, often have miraculous effects after mixing, and dye beautiful colors on fabrics without fading. However, after impregnation, Dong people still need to steam and hammer these fabrics, and the fabrics seem to react violently with dyes, becoming more and more bright and shiny.

Steel needs a lot of tempering to remove impurities and become good steel, and so does Dong Bu. Every time the hammer of Dong women is aimed, the fabric and the "soul" will be more closely combined, and the fabric will shine in the sun. A piece of Dong cloth is brighter and brighter, and more expensive.

These fabrics will be made into all kinds of beautiful clothes after being handed over to the old Dong people, but it takes three months to make Dong skirts for Dong girls, and hundreds of fine wrinkles on them are made by hand for a long time.

But now there are not many young girls who are willing to wear beautiful Dong skirts and are unwilling to learn this craft. After all, the casual clothes bought in the city are cheap, easy to wear and simple in workmanship. What's more, they want to go out of the mountains and enter the big cities to follow the so-called trend, so such a unique national costume has received a cold reception, even in Sanbao Dong Village in Rongjiang County, eastern Guizhou Province, known as "the first Dong Village in the world"

Li Lei, a Dong girl, grew up in the beautiful village of Lu in Rongjiang County. When she was a child, she never felt anything special about Dong Bu, but as time went on, the scene before her changed. When she came back from studying oil painting in Yunnan Art College, she found that her hometown had already become another brand-new look, and Lai Lei, who was unwilling, began her journey to find traditional culture.

When she entered Dong Village, she was stunned by what she saw. The Dong cloth produced by the "No.1 Dong Village in the World" is not a traditional Dong cloth, but dyed with chemical reagents. Lai Lei believes that cloth without soul cannot be called Dongbu. She stubbornly believes that Dong's cloth should keep its true colors.

Just do it, Lai Lei used the money she earned from working in a credit union as the starting capital, but she only found seven Dong women who can still do traditional Dong cloth. Lai Lei said it again, and then she pulled the seven girls to her, and a group of only eight people was born.

Lai Lei's idea is simple. She never wanted to go international, nor did she want to make big money by using traditional fabrics as a gimmick. All she wants is to stick to Dong Bu's traditional practice and stick to her original heart in a capital-dominated world. But just "persistence" has made her spend all her savings. Later, she continued to borrow money to open a knitting site. Gradually, Lai Lei has been in debt of 3 million.

"Nothing is difficult in the world, if you put your mind to it." Because of Lai Lei's insistence, she never moved to Paris Fashion Week, and everyone was fascinated by such beautiful fabrics. The world's top luxury brands have also thrown an olive branch to Lai Lei. But after talking to the designers of these luxury brands, Lai Lei despised them.

These top designers promised to make Dong Bu into the fabric of top luxury brands, but the requirement turned out to be to change the production process of Dong Bu. Lai Lei looked back: "You should design the bag according to the characteristics of Dong Bu, not change it into your fabric!"

In the end, Lai Lei didn't get the chance to cooperate with the world's top luxury brands, and the wooden building she built became the last pure land of Dongbu. It is precisely because she is unwilling to "go with the flow" that the fame of immobile gradually started, and Lai Lei finally gradually paid off the debt. But we should also be more vigilant. Can you be sure that going to Paris Fashion Week proves the value of your culture? Do you have to wait for others to approve before you can believe in your own excellent culture?