Antik Batik Women's Fashion Brand

After travelling the world for inspiration and settling in fashion capital Paris, Italian-born designer Gabriella Cortese started Antik Batik in 1992. The label's own summary is bohemian elegance and authenticity, with its influences named: an eclectic mix of European and Indonesian influences, in fabulously romantic designs that combine colourful prints with eye-catching embellishments.

For women, that means ready-to-wear and accessories with a traveller's eye: dresses, blouses and jackets whose surfaces carry the work - print, embroidery, beading - and whose silhouettes stay easy enough for the craft to lead. It is the opposite construction philosophy to a minimalist label: the garment is the frame, and the handwork is the picture.

Craft Against Fast Fashion

Antik Batik has produced elaborate ready-to-wear pieces requiring hours upon hours of expertise and artistry. The drive behind them: the designer's fascination for the finesse and dexterity of the artisans she meets through her constant travels leads her to create garments made to be crafted - in diametric opposition to industrialised, mass-produced fast fashion - distilling millennia of traditional dyeing and printing processes, such as bandhani and batik, embroidery techniques and weaving know-how.

The profile closed that account with the relationships underneath the clothes: with patience, tender care and devotion, the women and men with whom the designer has built relationships of trust and respect give life to the pieces that form the collections. For a buyer, this is not background colour - it is the product. The price of an Antik Batik piece is substantially the price of skilled hours, and judging it means judging the handwork itself.

Judging and Caring for Handwork

Inspect embellished pieces the way you would inspect any craft object. Embroidery should lie flat without puckering the ground fabric; beadwork should be knotted securely, with no loose threads at the ends of a motif; printed patterns should align where the design intends and sit evenly in colour. Small irregularities are the nature of hand processes and part of the authenticity the brand promises - damage, loose work and repairs are a different matter, and the distinction is visible at close range.

Care must protect the surface: embellished and embroidered garments are gentle-wash or specialist-clean pieces, stored folded rather than hung where weight would pull at decorated fabric, and kept away from jewellery and bag hardware that can snag a thread. Worn with plain companions - the craft supplies all the detail an outfit needs - an Antik Batik piece is the rare fashion purchase that argues, stitch by stitch, for how it was made.

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