Designing Contemporary Karawo Motifs for Teenagers

Abstract

The development of the ornamental textiles of Karawo Gorontalo has not been able to attract teenagers by which it leads to a situation where the teenagers seem to not appreciate their traditional clothing. It is assumed that the ornamental design of Karawo does not look appealing to the teenagers. This experimental research is intended to produce contemporary ornamental textiles of Karawo that will be used in teenagers’ fashion. It consisted of three stages, i.e., 1) exploring the ideas and determining the design concept; 2) experiment on designing of ornamental textiles variants, and; 3) experiment on the application of the design in fashion. Furthermore, the design produced were evaluated to determine its quality for the production. The data were generated from observation and experiment, and were further analyzed interactively through processes, such as data reduction, data display, and summing up. The result of the idea exploration shows that the combination of traditional and urban culture through adaptation concept is able to produce an attractive design of ornamental textiles. In addition, the implementation of the aforementioned concept produces the designs of ornamental textiles of contemporary Karawo. Traditional wedding dress of Gorontalo (Bili’u) and modern social media icon are used as the basis of the design concept. The design is used to produce a contemporary Karawo clothings, e.g., Moslem attire and party dress for girl. These designs not only show physical beauty (visual), but also represent individual and social values from a combination of traditional and modern elements. The evaluation result shows that the designs meet the preference of teenagers as it represents the characteristics of teen, i.e., dynamic, energetic, unique, and fashionable. The result further shows that the development of Karawo possess a chance to maintain the sustainability of other traditional textiles.