CANGIARI means to change in the Calabrian idiom.
Calabria is a wonderful region of southern Italy, with a strong and friendly people, but it is also a land suffering with serious social and economic problems. Many years ago, a group of social cooperatives, gave birth to GOEL, a “redemption community” which began an adventure full of hope to change Calabria, in different ways and in different fields.
At some point of this history, some young Calabrian women turned to GOEL: they wanted to save the ancient and prestigious tradition of hand weaving that was sinking into oblivion. In Calabria, hand waving dates back to Magna Graecia, and up to fifty years ago many Calabrian families owned a handloom in the house and made most of their tissues. Young women who spoke to GOEL decided to go to the few old majistre still living in the territory. The majistre are not simple weavers, they were the handloom teachers who "programmed" and set up all the handlooms of the territory. A complex and sophisticated art: in the loom there are up to 1,800 yarns of the warp that must pass in the "healds" in a precise mathematical order to produce a given type of fabric design. Grown in other times, often majistre couldn’t learn to read and write, then to remember this complex mathematical programming -multiplied by each of the textures they kept in their professional "archives" – they had devised some mnemonic tricks to remember them: lullabies and chants, the verses of which contained, cleverly hidden, the mathematical order of 1,800 yarns passing through the heddles of the loom. These lullabies remained hidden for centuries, the majistre have handed down from mother to daughter, guarding them jealously. Seeing that their daughters were no more interested, they revealed these lullabies to the young women who today produce CANGIARI handwoven, who wrote down its on paper, thus preserving a great legacy of Hellenistic and Byzantine fabrics. These young women have also restored or rebuilt antique handlooms, on the local design, starting weaving and becoming themselves the new young majistre.
Weaving one meter of handwoven (no wider than 70/80 cm) takes from 3 to 6 hours of passionate work! A precious and valuable fabric, then, that could be properly paid only in a high fashion market. For this reason GOEL decides to create CANGIARI, the first eco-ethical brand in the Italian high fashion market. But the handloom was not enough; CANGIARI wants to be a 360 ° ethical project, while remaining fashionable and of high quality. The ethics everywhere then. Ethical materials: becoming the first Italian high fashion brand using only strictly organic materials, G.O.T.S certified. Ethical production chain: cooperative production chain, participated by the workers themselves, opportunity of employment also for disadvantaged people. Ethical brand message: a refined lifestyle founded on the values of GOEL and on environmental and social sustainability.
