About

Collector

les enphants’ senior consultant, Ms. Christi Lan, has spent the last twenty years traveling to rural parts of China and Southeast Asia, searching for and collection traditional, handmade textile relating to children (bibs, hats, shoes, marital blankets, and baby carriers). The purpose of her collection is twofold. First, she is trying to preserve this vanishing art by publishing books about her collection. And second, Ms. Lan hopes that these thoughtfully designed and exquisitely crafted textiles will inspire les enphants designers to create each article of clothing with the same meticulousness that a mother would make for her own child. Perhaps most importantly, Ms. Lan’s collection of children’s textile is a salute to mothers everywhere, as well as a hope that all children grow up healthily in an environment filled with love and respect.

Archivist

brenda Lin grew up among the myriad of antique children’s textile that her mother collected. She received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her first book, Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound, was a collection of interconnected personal essays on family and cultural identity. Lately, she has been writing about the intersection between text and textile. Her recent work has appeared in TextilesAsia, Sotheby’s, and TextileXchange. In 2021, she published a touch-and-feel picture book, Hope, that you can wear, inspired by her mother’s textile collection. She is the archivist for her mother’s collection. She works as the brand manager for les enphants and teaches creative writing to upper school students.

The Ties That Bind

Growing up, we traveled a lot as a family.  Always, my mother found a pocket of time in our itinerary to disappear into the local market, befriending people who had the time and patience to show her interesting local handicrafts and antiques.  On the occasions I trailed along with her, I saw my mother – who usually played the role of quiet introvert next to my garrulous father – most in her element, her eyes glistening with excitement as she wound her way through dusty alleyways and gesticulating animatedly with shop owners and artisans, her hands eagerly brushing against the grooves in ancient and handmade wares, wanting to learn about each piece.  As she collected these varied artifacts from our travels – everything from lacquered boxes to leather shadow puppets to tiffin boxes to old land deeds – she was, like an anthropologist, collecting stories about a particular culture and its people.  Her openness and willingness to absorb these stories was moving and her excitement was infectious.  It was not uncommon for shop owners and artisans to excuse themselves into backrooms and reemerge with that rare piece they weren’t willing to part with, until now, having met my mother, this passionate collector finally worthy of owning the pièce de résistance. 

One day, many years ago in an antique shop in Hong Kong, my mother chanced upon an intricately hand-embroidered rectangular piece of cloth, which dramatically changed the course of her collecting.  This piece of cloth, she explained to me, was the main body of a baby carrier that was handmade by a mother from the Miao minority tribe of China, about eighty years ago.  The deep, velveteen dark blue of the cloth was dyed using plant extracts indigenous to the rolling hills of the southwestern region of China where most Miao people live.  Threads of vibrant yellows and magentas were woven into the cloth in impossibly minute cross-stitches, into shapes resembling butterflies, bats, flowers, and geometric shapes that twisted and turned into optical illusions.  All of these are symbolic and auspicious motifs (for example, the Miao believe they are direct descendants of the “Butterfly Mama,” which is why butterflies are an oft-repeated motif), that a young, pregnant mother painstakingly embroidered into the body of this baby carrier, imbuing this piece of cloth with all the love she already felt for the child she was about to deliver into the world. 

My mother was deeply moved by the depth of this young mother’s love for her unborn child.  Even as she was relaying this story to me, her eyes became glassy.  I puzzled over how the baby carrier worked, without straps or ties. She went on to explain that when this mother parted with her baby carrier – by then, all her children were grown and she was likely selling her baby carrier to an antiques buyer for some extra cash – she cut off and held onto the ties, which, on the one hand, were already worn threadbare, but more importantly, was the proverbial umbilical cord between mother and child, the tie that although had already been physically cut, exemplified the bond between mother and child that could never be severed.  

My mother was familiar with this emblem of love, expressed through the careful design of textiles.  For the majority of her adult life, she devoted her career to the children’s apparel company my father founded 44 years ago in Taiwan – les enphants.  In its early days, my mother traveled to Europe and Japan to attend fashion shows and browse local boutiques to gather trend ideas for les enphants’ following season of children’s wear.  She scoured fabric shops for inspiration and often came home with yards of fabric and buttons and zippers she collected for herself, which she fashioned into her own unique wardrobe pieces.  Even if her introduction to textile was unintentional (she was a zoology major), she grew into the role of designer seamlessly.  The Miao baby carrier tied together her work in children’s apparel with her deepening understanding of textiles and gave a focus to her fervent passion for collecting.

Since then, my mother has gone on numerous trips to rural parts of China (on one of these trips, she described staying with a Miao family and finding a black boar slumbering in the corner of their outhouse!) to understand the handicraft of Chinese minorities.  She now collects baby carriers, marital blankets, children’s outfits, hats, shoes, and bibs from different tribes, each with distinct features and motifs, but all of them telling the universal story of a mother’s hopes and dreams and unconditional love for her child. 

It is a gross understatement to say that you won’t understand your parents until you become one yourself.  When my mother began her baby carrier collection, I was in college, already dating my husband, but still very much in the mindset that parenthood was something in the amorphous and distant future for us.  Until experiencing those life-changing milestone moments of parenthood – holding and nursing my babies during those dreamlike midnight hours, hearing them utter their first words in a language only I could understand, looking into their eyes and seeing endless possibility and endless goodness in the world – there was so much about my mother I could never profess to understand.  A woman’s place in the world changes utterly the moment her body houses another life, another soul.  To deliver that once physical part of you unto the world is a lifelong lesson in humility and in letting go.  “Memory,” is the technical term used by textile conservators to describe the wrinkles imprinted in garments from repeated wear.  I can only imagine the kinds of memories that these baby carriers contain.

I have a deep respect for my mother’s passion for collecting, because I can now clearly make out its narrative arc. Because of that first Miao baby carrier her collection of handmade textiles for children has grown in depth and breadth.  Through the act of collecting, my mother is helping to preserve this quickly vanishing art form.  She has homed in on a deeply personal, yet totally universal emotion and found the things that help tell that same story of love and hope, unaltered through time, crossing boundaries of culture and language.