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www.thisweekinpalestine.com: Some day, somewhere, somebody will build a museum where ethnographers, artists, fashion designers and all of us who are fascinated by the splendour of the Palestinian cultural heritage will be able to admire at peace the beauty of Palestinian costume collections that most of us only hear about. Meanwhile, we can at least admire them in books.
It is a wonderful coincidence that just as fashion designers are becoming interested in the haute couture potential of traditional Palestinian embroidery and textiles, the British Museum Press should have decided to publish a new book on the subject, Embroidery from Palestine, in their Fabric Folio series which is explicitly aimed at artists and designers. Shelagh Weir, the author, has a long involvement with the subject through her work at the British Museum, where she was Curator for Middle Eastern Ethnography.
The British Museum acquired its first collections of Palestinian costumes from missionary societies in the 1960s, and this stimulated Weir to make her first visits to Palestine in 1967 and 1968 to collect more examples and to conduct anthropological research. For several months she investigated the provenances of garments, their meanings in people’s lives, and the symbolism of their beautiful embroidery. During many subsequent visits to Palestine and Jordan she pursued her investigations further, especially among the older Palestinian refugees, and enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with another enthusiast, Widad Kawar, who was building a wonderful collection which has since been exhibited around the world.
Weir organised two major exhibitions of Palestinian costumes and textiles at the Museum of Mankind: one in 1970-72, and the second in 1989-91. She is the most prominent specialist in Palestinian costumes and embroidery with several publications on the subject to her name, all published by the British Museum: Palestinian Embroidery (1970), Spinning and Weaving in Palestine (1970), Palestinian Embroidery: Cross Stitch Patterns from the Traditional Costumes of the Village Women of Palestine (with Serene Husseini Shahid, 1988), and the seminal work Palestinian Costume (1989), which is still the best resource on the subject in English. These are all now out of print and are becoming collector’s items. The popularity of the subject can be gauged by the fact that the first print run of the book co-authored with Serene Shahid, founding mother of In’aash in Lebanon, managed to sell out before the exhibition it was to accompany even opened, and had to be rapidly reprinted.
Therefore, a new book by Weir is an event. And when Annabel Kealy, wife of former British Consul in Jerusalem Robin Kealy, took the initiative in London for the Arab British Centre to organise a joint lecture billing Bella Freud and Shelagh Weir on the fashion potential of Palestinian embroidery, it was fully booked.
Embroidery from Palestine, this gem of a small book, is published at an accessible price and is a perfect gift for anyone wanting to enjoy the beauty of the Palestinian textile heritage, something we could take the habit to bestow upon friends and business relations, visiting foreign dignitaries and diplomats, journalists and tourists.
The book contains a text introduction and an array of dazzling pictures illustrating over 20 outfits in close-up that reveal stitch by stitch the intricate complexity of colours and patterns, but also represent a village, regional and national identity passed down for generations from mother to daughter in the refugee camps and parlours of the Palestinian Diaspora. Weir writes with expertise and affection about the exquisite and innate artistic talent of the Palestinian women to embroider their life and history into their dresses and movingly dedicates the book to “the Arab village women of Palestine for their creativity and courage.â€Â
Weir’s latest contribution to the preservation and regeneration of the cultural heritage in Palestine will hopefully not be her last one.
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