Fabric of Life

You’re in Jakarta, with only a limited amount of time to buy presents for family and friends back home. Where do you head to? To the acme of batik shops, naturally. And that would be the one on Jalan Purworejo, run by Josephine Komara — better known by her Indonesian name, Obin, www.binhouse.com.

To many, the word batik conjures up visions of Asian-themed restaurants or ASEAN summits. To Obin, the fabric means glamour. It means stunning models sashaying down the catwalk to the music of James Brown. It suggests beautiful people and exclusive parties. How else could it be for this 52-year-old fashion designer, who is single-handedly responsible for dragging the ancient Indonesian craft into the arena of contemporary fashion?

First created during the Mataram kingdom in the 17th century, batik has been historically appreciated throughout the Indonesian archipelago, but especially by the people of central and eastern Java, where the technique of wax-resist dyeing originated. In recent decades, though, batik has gone into crisis: handworked cloth simply cannot compete in price with mass-produced printed textiles. Changes in the manufacture of batik — with several assembly-line workers now robotically completing individual stages that were once handled by a single highly skilled artisan — have also diminished the cloth’s allure. Government support has become essential to the industry’s survival. So has Obin: by working almost exclusively in batik, she has created a business that supports about 2,500 employees. Among them are dozens of artisans practicing their craft at home or in small studios across Java. “I am grateful that this type of business can provide a livelihood for so many people,” she says. “Batik is our heritage and we must preserve it.”

Obin’s conservation strategy involves aiming high. She courts an A-list clientele, which includes the Indonesian capital’s top socialites, tycoons and politicians, as well as visiting celebs like Mick Jagger and Julia Roberts. She also sells her work through a smattering of high-end boutiques in Europe, the U.S., the Middle East and Japan. Samples of her fabrics hang in museums in Amsterdam, Sydney and Japan.

Credit Obin’s multicultural childhood for her ability to design across borders. Of Chinese-Indonesian ethnicity, she grew up in Hong Kong and first became aware of clothing and style through watching laborers on the Wanchai docks in their baggy cotton pants, or the British businessmen in summer suits. “Hong Kong is a visual feast and I think I took a lot of that back to Indonesia,” she explains.

Upon moving to Jakarta at 14, she began collecting traditional fabrics, as well as picking up know-how from the artisans she bought them off. Not long after, Obin started designing patterns herself, and experimenting with techniques of producing batik, including the use of hand-woven silk instead of the usual cottons. When, at the age of 31, she finally opened a small outlet for her designs in central Jakarta, she became an immediate hit among the élite neighborhood’s well-off shoppers. “Obin led a revolution in modernizing batik by translating traditional motifs into contemporary design,” explains leading local fashion designer Ghea Panggabean.

It can take over three months to finish one of Obin’s pieces, whether it’s a shawl or shirt. Be aware of that as you browse the shelves of Bin House, her flagship store, and raise your eyebrows at price tags in the hundreds of dollars (a top-of-the-line item, like a custom-made wedding kebaya, or blouse, can cost up to $10,000). “I am simply trying to breathe new life into the craft,” Obin says. “What I would really like to do is wrap the whole world in cloth.” So long as it’s her cloth, the world isn’t likely to mind.