Connecting the Lines

Melinda Looi is looking at her most ambitious project yet, encouraging the next generation of weavers and the fashion industry’s future torchbearers

- Koyyi Chin

Melinda Looi’s four-day trip to Sarawak was hectic, ambitious, and in her words, “exhilarating”. But evidently, it wasn’t enough for the fashion designer—in fact, it only seemed to fuel her desire to go back for more.

“There was just so much to do and film that we didn’t have the time to spare for anything else,” laments Looi. “I would have loved to stay there longer to learn more from the local community, especially the weavers.”

With her children, her team and the production crew of Think Tank in tow, the group had hit the ground running as soon as they arrived in Kuching. From there, Looi filmed a key component of her latest couture collection’s journey from start to finish; it comprised waking up before the sunrise for six-hour drives between one village and another over bumpy roads, boat rides over choppy waters, the painstaking process of Sarawakian songket and Penan craft, as well as the weavers who create them.

“Unless people experience what these villagers go through daily and live like them, they’ll never realise how difficult—and expensive—it can be just to survive,” she says. “Because unlike their nomadic past, these villagers can’t move as easily as they did before, and it doesn’t help that their natural resources are being impacted by environmental change as well, which consequently affects the materials they need for their artisanal crafts.”