The history of these fascinating textiles has its roots in a distant past. Manufactured textile products accompany man from the dawning of civilization to our days; man has always tried to imprint certain sensations using color - first directly on his body and then on other means.
Prehistoric man's first technical conquest (including weaving followed by dyeing) is from the Neolithic period when mankind sharpens his techniques, due also to an already developed sensitivity to appearance.
The first decorations are stylized, geometric shapes and the colors (vegetable or mineral) have numerous shades.
On the Fiji Islands, the primitive man already used the printing technique. The island dwellers engraved banana-tree leaves to which they applied vegetable colors; they then pressed these onto fabrics. With this technique, they obtained an excellent printing quality for their sacred images.
Since the Middle Ages in Japan, silk screens were engraved on a particular water-resistant paper: "Katagami" was used for printing on garments and furnishings such as the samurai's suit of armor and the partition walls in the dwellings.
In the same period, the Chinese used this technique to create their imaginative and refined traditional costumes: The antique, so-called "stencil" method for decorating fabrics (commonly used in China and Japan beginning in the V century) finds a special and evolved application in Japan at the end of the XVII century that is still used today. The design, also quite complex, is divided into smaller pieces that are then held in position using thin stitches of silk or human hair.
In the XVII century, the hand silk-screen printing technique is used to create wallpaper in France and England.
American colonists also used hand silk-screen printing to decorate walls and furnishings.
A century ago, it is only proper to cite William Morris and Mariano Fortuny for their contributions in achieving the sublime results they obtained using this technique, even though they used different modalities. Manifesting the sublime has always been a distinctive concept belonging to the history of weaving and printing, which can be poetically imagined as a never-ending thread that links the centuries between them, and envelopes them in the entire world
