Circles on a Tunisian headscarf are known as mirrors, and their job is to bounce the evil eye away from whoever wears it. On a veil from Yemen, diamond shapes read as eyes that keep watch over the woman beneath them. Each of these protective patterns began the same way, with somebody binding the cloth tight before it ever met the dye. A new exhibition at the Museum der Kulturen Basel invites you to follow that process from the first fold.
Top Left: Work sample from Japan from before 1956; cotton, wood, cord, metal, indigo, folding clamp reserve, sekka-itajime. Bottom Left: Tie-Dye sculpture as seen in the installation "Shaped - Relief in Fabric". Right: A Boubou from Mali as featured on the "catwalk" installation.
Tie-dye: Folded, Stitched, Coloured runs until 23 January 2028, drawing on the museum's own textile collection for around 250 exhibits. Seven stations take the techniques apart one stage at a time, with the tools and materials laid out beside the finished cloth. Japanese shibori is the best known of them, and it sits alongside plangi, bāndhanī, tritik and adire, practised across Asia, South America, Europe and Africa.
Three-dimensionality is the outstanding characteristic of tie-dye techniques.
Curator Stephanie Lovász points to the three-dimensional life of the cloth as the heart of the matter. Before it is dyed, fabric is moulded into form, sometimes only for a moment and sometimes for good, so that a flat length of cloth becomes a puckered, clamped sculpture in the dye bath. A dedicated station explains how, and the results are astonishing: raindrops, weeping willows, spider's webs, waves and even an entire sunrise, all coaxed out of thread and tension, each one shaped by decisions made long before any colour touched the cloth. Lovász is clear that nothing here is hurried. The work asks for time, experience, imagination and a little maths.
Above: Work sample from Japan from before 1956; cotton, wood, cord, metal, indigo, folding clamp reserve, sekka-itajime. Below: The Déjà Vü clique dyed costumes based on Japanese designs for the Basel Carnival 2025.
Where a fashion show would parade luxury labels, the catwalk here carries kimonos, children's clothes, cloths and shoes, and the cast changes roughly every six months, which makes a second visit worthwhile. The stories attached to them are good ones. A five-point pattern on the hem of a skirt from India promises good fortune to its wearer, while blue and white stripes on a Japanese kimono are believed to cool whoever puts it on. A Spanish plangi T-shirt first sold at Globus in the 1960s resurfaced at 1990s raves, and in 2025 the carnival clique Déja Vü dyed their costumes and head masks with the classic itajime fold-and-clamp method before wearing them in Basel's famous carnival parade.
Work sample from Japan, from before 1963; crepe silk, setting reserves yokobiki, hitome.
Textile artist Marie Schumann's installation Sequences, Screens fills the stairwell, a length of fabric that unfolds from floor to floor and shifts from flat to sculptural as you climb past it. Visitors can try techniques for themselves at a hands-on station, and the 12th International Shibori Symposium, themed around textile and architecture, brought experts to Basel from 25 to 27 September. With the exhibition running well into 2028, there is time to watch the catwalk change its mind.
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Further Information:
Tie Dye is open now at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, until 23 January 2028.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Carnival costumes of the Déjà Vü clique, dyed according to a Japanese model.
All images courtesy of the Museum der Kulturen Basel.