HSIEN-WEI LIU & CHIA-YING LAI

THE MINE-WOMEN

Description

This collection is a tribute to the silent labour of the women miners who worked along Taiwan’s northern coast in the 1950s. Rather than directly replicating their appearance, the design distils the essence of their resilience: in the hot, damp, dark, and airless depths of the mines, their labour was denied legitimacy in the name of “protection,” yet they still used their bodies as pillars, striving to build spaces of survival beneath the shadow of the productivity of fathers, brothers, and husbands.

We used layered interfacing, folded and heat-pressed, to express the irregular natural traces of the mine tunnels, like marks left by time and labour. The fabric was then dyed in a boiled gallnut bath, producing a deep, mixed grey-black tone with a rusty quality, reminiscent of the mineral depths of the earth. The most important texture was created through the fusion of acrylic and quartz sand, which we applied to both the fabric and the structural lines cut from foam board. This gave the garment surface a rough, gravelly, and coldly reflective “petrified” texture, like rock walls after being cut by human hands.

In terms of silhouette, the collection boldly challenges the boundary between the body and space. Prototype shell structures were built from foam board and sponge, then covered with dyed and painted interfacing applied like scales, creating a heavy, defensive rocky exoskeleton. This also symbolises the hard protective shell women build for themselves. Inside the garments, the skirts and core structures combine black leather with layered bundles of black tulle. Through the suppleness of leather and the translucency of the tulle, the design suggests the fragile, hidden yet unyielding soul concealed beneath the hard strata—like the sheen of leather faintly emerging from the darkness.

Women of the Mine is a tribute offered from the shadows—
a tribute to those women who bore great weight in silence. Though they may have been buried by their time, they resisted oppression with their bodies, and in places without light, fought to claim a space in which to survive.