ABOUT US
Joy Setton is the designer and founder of Setton, J. Textiles. She was born in 1980 in New York; and was raised in Paris, Geneva, and on a boat circumnavigating the globe. Joy has worked on documentary films, made music, and published two books of essays with the distinguished Swiss publishing house La Baconnière. After a trip to Japan in 2019, she started drawing patterns for fabric design and when it came time to decide how to produce those fabrics, the obvious answer was: natural dyes, meaning plants (indigo, madder, rhubarb, cutch, etc...) and insects (cochineal) that are boiled to make the color, which is then applied to the fabric.
The mission of Setton, J. Textiles is to create whimsical, meaningful, original designs, and to print them in a clean, careful way, in the same place in which they are designed. A simple goal, that just about every economic policy in the contemporary world is designed to derail!
Joy died of a brain aneurysm in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut on January 10th 2022. She was 41 years old. She lives on in her sons: Alpha, Primo and Tempo Schenk.
Eco-Friendly Dyeing
Now that we know how noxious chemical dyes are to rivers and waterways, it is absolute madness to keep using them! And yet, almost every company that produces fabric, does still use them, and what they consider eco-friendly is simply to use-meaning to contaminate-smaller amounts of water in each dye batch. What we consider eco-friendly is not to contaminate any water at all.
Imports
Most of our offerings are made in America, but we also import some fabrics. There is nothing wrong with importing–a very basic form of human exchange!-or with commissioning certain designs to be produced abroad, especially in places that have-old expertise in techniques like weaving, printing or natural-dyeing, but there is something wrong with taking too much advantage of the stark difference in wages between East and West, there is something wrong with the total divorce of design from manufacturing, and with living in a place that no longer produces anything beautiful. We make beautiful things where we live, and we import beautiful things from India, Indonesia and Kano, in Northern Nigeria.
CUSTOM PROJECTS
We are small and nimble and able to print limited quantities of yardage to suit your needs. We can design an original pattern based on a theme or event, or create new colorways from our existing pattern catalogue using specific plants and dyes.
