The development of Indonesian textile design is mostly based on culture and tradition. The Indonesian government has cultural preservation program (Indonesian constitution, no 5, 1992), to promote Indonesian local culture in sustaining tradition by exploring the possibility of shifting the function of traditional textiles from ceremonial purposes to becoming commodity products. The shifted function into product commodity creates new market and situation among Indonesian craft-makers. This situation also happened for stitch resist dyeing technique, which is an Indonesian traditional textile technique used to manufacture traditional fabrics in three regions, namely tritik cloth in Yogyakarta, pelangi cloth in Palembang, and sasirangan cloth in Banjarmasin. Stitch resist dyeing, as a particular form of resist dyeing technique, is a textile technique that creates patterns in various shapes with small holes along the line of stitching, as a mark of any stitched resist pattern. Most of this technique are done manually, which are generally recognized as being time-consuming. This study will focus on preserving the stitch resist dyeing technique by producing elaborate description about the technique, focusing on the organisational structure and supply chain. The study will use a combination of ethnographic and soft system methodology. The methods use in this study are questionnaires, interviews, and observation. By producing rich pictures from each survey area, describing the character of the organisational workflow of stitch resist dyeing enterprises in Indonesia. Finally, this study discusses the critical points of the supply chain in the stitch resist dyeing enterprises that are related to the production capacity and quality. The unprecedented long chain of the process and the sense of ownership from the craft makers consider the main aspects in supporting the practices.
Luxury goods are characterised by a series of traits such as exclusivity, rarity, premium price, high quality and aesthetic value, but also to specific methods of production that focus on notions of excellent workmanship carried out by expert craftspeople. This paper focuses on the problematic relationship between craftsmanship and the luxury fashion industry by examining how representations of craftsmanship are employed by luxury fashion labels in their communication strategies. In particular, the strategies employed by Dolce&Gabbana will be examined. It will be argued that the label has emphasised in its online communication the craftsmanship involved in the creation of its products, but it will be observed how that element is presented only in association to limited categories of goods, and not to the totality of products that are associated to the name of the fashion brand. The case study of Dolce&Gabbana will be explored with regards to the role that the label's online communication strategies attributes to notions of Italian handmade craftsmanship, and in this sense those practices will be examined in terms of national identity. This phenomenon will also be contextualised in terms of the contemporary marketing strategies employed by luxury fashion labels and the relationship they hold with regards to traditional conceptualisations of luxury.