Profile: Bess Nielsen
Khadi & Co. founder and textile designer Bess Nielsen first traveled to India in the 1970s, on a trip that would forever change the course of her work and her life.
“It was chaos—not, of course, for the people there, but for me—the airport was old, people were sleeping on the floor, chatting to each other, there was the noise, the smells—you had to jump over people to get out,” Nielsen says, nearly four decades later, at her showroom in Paris’s upper Marais. “But I said to myself, ‘Yeah, yeah—this is OK.” Asked to explain the substance of that “OK”, she hesitates before answering. “When I said, ‘This is OK,’ I meant, ‘This is just the way it is. It’s an acceptance—you accept that that is the way it is.”
“When I said, ‘This is OK,’ I meant,
‘This is just the way it is. It’s an acceptance—
you accept that that is the way it is.”
________
You might think that Nielsen’s upbringing, in a tidy Danish home, might not have prepared her for this but instead for the life she says she might have led, before leaving Copenhagen, first to studying Stockholm and then to work, as both a model and as a designer in fashion houses across Europe: “I had the feeling, ‘If I stay, I know exactly what my life is going to be,’” she says. “I would have ended up married to a doctor living north of Copenhagen, and I did not want that.” She had the benefit of parents who urged her to defy those conventions. “I was very lucky to have a father who always said, ‘Don’t think that Copenhagen is the center of the world, because it’s not. I was always looking out. And now I can look back and say that I’m profoundly happy that I was born in Denmark to Danish parents, because that really gave me a backbone. But my really big lessons came from India.”
India is ever present in Nielsen’s work and conversation. It is where she collaborates with a team of artisans to produce her meticulously constructed textiles, which relies on a number of different but interwoven skills. She must seek out not only exemplary printers, for her block-printed pieces, but master block carvers as well. Her weavers often work in tangent, so that a female weaver will work until her duties call her elsewhere, at which point her father will take over, resulting in a work that melds two styles into a single work. “The weaving becomes the story of a village,” Nielsen says.
“I’m profoundly happy that I was born
in Denmark, because that really gave me a backbone.
But my really big lessons came from India.”
________
Nielsen says she views her life as a series of successive cycles; each one has a lesson to impart, and once she understands it, she progresses to the next. This is Khadi and Co.’s 10th anniversary, and while big things are on the horizon—including the opening of a new boutique nearby, in the 11th arrondissement—she says her focus now is on”refining” the brand she created. “You come to a point in your life where you say that you’re starting again—but I don’t really want to start again,” she says. “What’s important to me now is that I give what I have learned to the younger generation.” She is intent on opening a “laboratoire” in Paris. (“I want to gather very talented young people in a big space for an experience,” Nielsen says, mindfully vague.) She also hopes to continue her ongoing collaboration with master weavers. “I’ll do workshops in India, and the artisans do what they’ve always done,” she says. “You can say, ‘This is great, what you’re doing, but maybe you can do it like this—and make some money,’” she says. “You want to get out of stagnation without killing the base—so when I sit with a weaver, he weaves, and I say, ‘Now, we put that in.’ I’m not spoiling or disturbing his knowledge. It becomes teamwork.”
“It was then that I realized
that for me, India is a country of miracles”
________
“Teamwork” is one way of expressing it. It seems that Scandinavia taught Nielsen practicalities, while India showed her magic. She tells the story of an early trip to India, when her staff dallied over production, as the hours dwindled until Nielsen’s scheduled departure. “I was telling the whole staff, ‘Come on, come on, come on—I’m leaving the next day,’” she says. “And half the staff didn’t come in. But then they’d all come in and get it all done, and I saw that they can achieve as much as we can achieve, without our way of doing it, the ‘go go go go go,’” Nielsen says. “It was then that I realized that for me, India is a country of miracles.”
Photographs above (5) by Alba Morassutti
