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Summer jacket of salmon skin sewn by a Nanai woman in the Amur valley

SALMON-SKIN CLOTHING WOULD BE FIT EVEN FOR A KING.

This summer jacket, which looks like a tsar's baby-shirt, is made of salmon skin. It was sewn by a Nanai woman from the Amur valley, though the piece looks like a statement coat from a Dries Van Noten collection inspired by the East.
The technique is extraordinarily complex: the skin was dressed in a special manner which the Nanai are thought to have worked out by the 11th century. It was scraped of scales, soaked, dried, kneaded and treated with special compounds, after which it could be used for sewing.
A pity that we saw nothing of the kind at last year's Met Gala, where Rihanna appeared in an enormous yellow cape by the Chinese designer Guo Pei. She, too, might have done well to take lessons from the ancient Nanai. Nobody has made such fine things for a long time.

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Summer jacket of salmon skin sewn by a Nanai woman in the Amur valley

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