Posted January 4, 2017

One of the pleasures I’ve had covering the global textile and apparel industry is the inspiring speakers I’ve had the opportunity to hear over the years. Astronaut and moon walker Charles Duke, Vietnam POW Col. (Ret.) Lee Ellis, college and NBA great David Thompson – to name a few. All inspire in different ways, but the common thread is how memorable their presentations were.

Most recently, I was in the audience when an actual member of our industry at large gave an inspiring, memorable presentation. Award-winning fashion designer Alexander Julian certainly left many awe-inspired after he shared his story and designs with attendees of the AATCC/SGIA “Digital Textile Printing: The Future Is Now” conference in Durham, N.C. Getting a peek inside the mind of an internationally renowned creative virtuoso was a delight.

I’ve known of Julian, a fellow North Carolina native, most of my adult life, having received one of his multi-hued Colours by Alexander Julian shirts as a gift while in college. A few years later, my level of consciousness of his work was raised when it was announced that he would be designing the first uniforms for the then-newly formed franchise, the Charlotte Hornets. And I later would shop at his brother Bruce’s clothing store in Charlotte.

But I hadn’t heard much about him in recent years, until I saw his name on the speaker’s list for this conference. And, as it turns out, he was the perfect choice for an event covering this rapidly growing segment of the textile and apparel industry.

 “I’ve been working on digital printing since 1990,” Julian said in his introductory remarks.

Who knew?

He then told the story of how his infatuation with digital printing started by accident, when he met an associate of famous pop artist Peter Max at a dinner party in New York. Julian learned that the man was responsible for turning Max’s iconic, brightly colored paintings into posters, which he informed Julian was a very lucrative pursuit.

After that dinner, Julian was intrigued. He started looking at some of his designs with “a magnifying glass” and he hired a photographer to take macro photos of his fabrics. He then collaborated with another man who did photographic transfer prints, and soon these images were being printed on men’s apparel.

But his fascination for design started much earlier, he said, when he was building forts out of cashmere at his father’s clothing store in Chapel Hill, N.C.

“I grew up in a store where fabric was the most important thing in our lives,” Julian recalled. “I guess I was 12 or so when I figured out that in every men’s store, women’s store, children’s store or dogs and cats store, the most important denominator was the cloth itself. I was always mesmerized by cloth.”

Though captivated by patterns and designs, that didn’t mean he would start a career in that field in the traditional way. He entered UNC-Chapel Hill to pursue a degree in English, he said, but he also began to play around with fabric design.

“I didn’t know that was atypical,” he said. “To me, that was the most important thing and that’s what you should concentrate on. So I basically taught myself to design textiles before I learned how to weave. I later taught myself how to weave on some trial looms, but by that time, I could visualize things so much faster than I could weave them.”

He mentioned a poster hanging in his store, Julian’s in Chapel Hill, with one of his quotes: “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was I never went to design school.”

Today, incidentally, he does serve on the Industry Advisory Board of the College of Textiles at N.C. State University.

Julian went on to show examples of his work and the design inspiration behind them. After years of studying patterns, designs and art, he later experienced a eureka moment that helped define his career, he said.

“The first time I copied a piece of art in textiles was in 1978. This is one of Monet’s haystack paintings,” he said, showing the masterpiece. “I went on to study them and I could count 30 colors, which means there were probably 50. I thought that was fantastic to put that many colors into a solid. Then when I received an award in Toronto 15 or 16 years ago, they had a color scientist who could map all the colors in a photograph. In a picture of an oak tree in full foliage on a bright day, for example, guess how many colors are visible? Somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000. When I heard that, that was like light bulb time for me because that’s what Monet understood a long, long time before I did. I realized what I was trying to do all my life was to emulate nature, trying to make manmade textiles that made you feel natural.”

The inspiration for the shirt Julian was wearing during his presentation, in fact, was from an 1880s book of textile shirting paintings, he said. He had scanned the picture, played around with the colors and added a background to it, he said. He also showed a shirt that was double digitally printed, with two rows of buttons on either side that made it totally reversible.

“I’ll be going to LA tomorrow and wearing this shirt, so I’ll keep my luggage light,” he quipped.

In the Q&A segment, Julian was asked how much of his apparel is manufactured in America. “I make as much as I can onshore  – maybe 25 percent, which is higher than it was 10 years ago, and I’m encouraged by that,” he said. “And we make all of our ties in North Carolina.”

Later, a self-described “fabric nerd” asked him how he educates customers about that they’re actually buying.

“That man standing back there is my son,” he said, pointing to his son Huston, who works with him. “He writes very clever hangtags.”

When asked about the biggest benefits and frustrations with digital printing, Julian answered: “The biggest benefit of digital is to dream. You can do anything. All you have to do is think about it. When I first started out in the 1990s talking to that artist, I was going to do Harris tweed aloha shirts for summer, just to sort of say ‘I’m a man of steel,’ and I was going to do sheets that looked like broken glass or a bed of nails – all these weird things. You can really do anything you can dream of.

“I would say my biggest frustration is not being in the women’s business right now because the thing that appealed to me so intensely about digital, having been born and raised between the warp and the weft, is that menswear offers a very narrow channel of things that you can do that are still conservative enough for men to wear. But women’s wear is wide open. We could print a shirt with zebra hooves clinging to the back of it if we wanted.”