WAX Fabric, no45

African wax prints, also known as Dutch wax prints are industrially produced and are mainly used for clothing in Africa and especially West Africa.

The process to make wax prints is originally influenced by batik, an Indonesian (Javanese) method of dyeing cloth by using wax-resist techniques.

The fabrics were introduced by the Dutch during their colonization of Indonesia in the 19th century, with the goal of flooding the market with cheap machine-made imitations of Batik. However, this did not succeed any further. By contrast, the fabrics became very popular in West Africa when Dutch trading vessels began introducing the fabrics in those ports.