Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 17
Paris was ablaze with autumn light as the "Threads Without Borders" global exhibition opened at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The grand hall, usually filled with 18th-century tapestries and couture gowns, now housed a different kind of masterpiece: a 50-foot tapestry woven from threads collected from every collaborative project—Maasai beadwork tangled with Greenland seal fur, Australian *kapi* dye bleeding into Shanghai seaweed fibers, Italian silk merging with Bangladeshi jute. Su Yao stood in front of it, her hand brushing the section Nala had worked on, where tiny lion motifs seemed to roar from the fabric.
Elena appeared at her side, adjusting the lapel of her jacket—a tailored piece made from the Inuit-seaweed blend, its lining stitched with Inuktitut symbols. "Pierre's here," she murmured, nodding toward the entrance. "He brought a critic from *Le Monde* who called our work 'cultural appropriation with a sustainability label.'"
Su Yao smiled. "Let him. We've got something better than reviews."
She led them to a corner where Jedda sat cross-legged on a rug, teaching a group of schoolchildren to paint dot patterns with *kapi* sap. Nearby, Maliina demonstrated how seal fur repels water, dabbing a cloth on a sample of their Greenland coat, while Giovanni and Aputsiaq argued playfully over loom tension. "See?" Su Yao said, as Pierre and the critic watched a little girl from Paris gasp when her dot painting "came alive" under blacklight—Jedda's trick, using natural phosphorescent pigments. "This isn't appropriation. It's invitation."
The critic's skepticism melted when Nala draped a Maasai cloak over her shoulders. "Feel the weight," Nala said. "That's my son's spear strap pattern, woven into the lining. It means 'protection.' Now it protects you too." By the end of the afternoon, he was scribbling notes furiously, his earlier sneer replaced by wonder.
That evening, the exhibition hosted a gala under the tapestry. Maria's granddaughter, Lin, now 25 and running the Shanghai factory, toasted with a glass of rice wine. "We've trained 2,000 artisans this year," she said. "Half are women who'd never held a loom before." Her words were translated into 12 languages, but the pride in her voice needed no translation.
Pierre approached Su Yao as the band played a fusion of Italian tarantella and Chinese *guzheng* music. "You've turned fashion into something… *useful*," he said, his tone grudging but not unkind. "My daughter wants to intern with you. Said she's tired of making dresses for people who already have too many."
Su Yao laughed. "Tell her we'll save a loom for her."
As midnight approached, the guests gathered to "weave the last thread" into the tapestry—a gold filament spun from recycled Olympic medals, donated by a Greek artisan they'd partnered with. One by one, they stepped forward: a Syrian refugee girl from the Kilis camp, threading her olive branch patch; a Greenlandic hunter, tying a piece of seal sinew; a Parisian fashion student, adding a stitch from her first design. When it was Su Yao's turn, she wove in a strand of her mother's old sewing thread, the one she'd kept in her sketchbook all those years.
The system's absence no longer registered. She didn't need a holographic interface to know what came next. Outside, the Eiffel Tower sparkled, its light reflecting in the Seine like a river of stars. Su Yao thought of the little girl in Shanghai, now 12 and designing school uniforms for her village; of the Inuit boy who'd written to say he wanted to be an engineer, to "make fabric that saves the ice"; of all the hands that had touched the threads, leaving their stories behind.
Elena slipped a new swatch into her hand—a prototype from their next project: a collaboration with Tibetan weavers, using yak wool and seaweed fibers. "Ready to climb a mountain?" she asked.
Su Yao squeezed the swatch, its texture rough and warm, alive with possibility. "Always."
The tapestry glowed behind them, a living map of connection. It wasn't perfect. It was messy, colorful, full of contradictions—just like the world. But as Su Yao walked into the Paris night, her coat swirling around her, she knew that was the point.
Fashion, at its best, wasn't about perfection. It was about people—stitching their lives together, one thread at a time. And the story, she realized, was just getting started.