Stories on Silk

Look at your tie. Or at curtains, a tablecloth, wallpaper, a summer blouse…
Watch the fabric, and the drawing decorating it. It's not embroidered: it's printed.
Up to now, it's all trivial. What isn't trivial is the story behind the procedure that allows to actually make that printing, and make it so that, when your tie is stained, the color of the stain is taken off by a wash, but the decorations stay vivid and clear. A story that we chose an exceptional narrator for, someone who's been building machines for textile printing for more than sixty years: MS Italy.

The history of textile printing begins, as far as we know, almost two thousand years ago, in China, with silk cloths painted in flowers in three colors, around 200 A.D., and it reaches the Mediterranean area, in Egypt, only two hundred years later. But Asia will anyway remain the undisputed master of textile printing for several centuries, with Indian and Chinese silks deemed as objects of enormous value on European markets. Such printed fabrics are obtained with carved woodblocks, used as stamps and thus pressed, once dipped in color, on the cloth. An efficacious technology never stays still in one place, and it is in the Middle Ages that we find the first examples of similar textile printing being made in Europe, although on fabrics, and especially with dyes, of markedly inferior quality, which are on obstacle to a large market diffusion as washing the printed fabric is impossible, lest the colors run. This limits its application to tapestries and similar decorative objects, which require no washing.

This situation will last for several centuries: it will be the French who finally bring back to their homelands, from their Indian colonies, the techniques for printing fabrics that are wash-resistant, but not before the end of the seventeenth century. Just a few decades later, there will be no European country left where textiles are not printed.
But there still is a long road ahead: extremely beautiful as these printed fabrics are, they require too long a time to be made, and incredible mastery in aligning the woodblocks print after print, so that no interruptions or imperfections appear in the pattern. This is what makes Thomas Bell's invention, in 1785, a true revolution: it is a printing machine based on cylinders (a familiar sight to us, but a totally new and exceptional conception for the times) through which the fabric is pushed, being printed with the pattern engraved on the cylinders themselves. Besides allowing for extremely precise and detailed graphics, in up to six colors (an extraordinary result in itself), Bell's machine conquers the field for its astounding speed: in a ten-hour work day, it can print in one color about ten thousand yards of cloth. It is the clear passage from a craftsman's perspective to an industry's, both from a functional and economic standpoint. And an industry which becomes more and more demanding, until at the beginning of the twentieth century a new technology, one still widely used, is developed: that of screen printing, where color is pressed on the fabric through pre-treated silk screens, thus composing the final image on the cloth.

But our guide in this ride through the centuries also indicates us the most recent of technologies, the one MS Italy is specialized in as a machine builder: that of digital textile printing. Exactly as in the shift from offset printing to digital printing for paper, the digital textile printing technology has allowed for actual revolutions both cost-wise ( not needing specialized screens for every single job makes it economical to print even in low runs) and from an ecological point of view (no special reagents and solvents, which are essential in screen printing and quite polluting, are needed)

And we can continue to enjoy our beautiful, colorful tie!