The landscape of the Seto Inland Sea, woven into a single shirt.

Boats drifting across the calm waters of the Seto Inland Sea. Small islands scattered along the shore. Following last season, we return with a shirt that translates the scenery of Kojima into jacquard fabric.

Indigo warp threads meet black weft threads twisted with strongly-spun raw silk. Their crossing creates deep shadows and a three-dimensional texture that seems to ripple like waves. A face that changes with every angle of light — that is the defining character of this jacquard shirt.

FABRIC

An original jacquard fabric, born in Nishiwaki.

Nishiwaki, Hyogo Prefecture, was once home to over 2,000 textile mills — one of Japan's foremost shirting fabric districts. The collaborative, division-of-labor structure that shaped its growth mirrors that of Kojima, the birthplace of Japanese jeans. Today, roughly 80 mills remain. Yet the craft and pride of the district live on in the hands of its artisans.

The fabric is woven on a Tsudakoma rapier loom dating to around 1975. Unlike modern machinery, it carries a quality close to that of a power loom, while proving exceptionally well-suited to jacquard weaving. The subtle fluctuations in tension that this machine produces give the cloth its singular, irreproducible character.

DETAILS

Every time you look, a new face reveals itself.

Boats on a calm sea. Islands scattered across the water. This fabric draws its motif from the scenery of the Seto Inland Sea — yet it never reveals everything at once. The landscape is held within the jacquard weave in abstraction, shifting with the angle of light, unfolding quietly in the eye of each beholder.

At the heart of that texture is the strongly-spun raw silk woven into the weft. The unique contraction and tension that tightly twisted raw silk generates within the cloth creates a delicate, wave-like three-dimensionality. Nishiwaki artisans carefully control the loom's tension so that durability and rich expression are achieved in the same stroke.

A seascape hidden within the weave — boats, water, islands. Craft passed down through generations in Japan, and a fading that grows richer with time. We invite you to hold it in your hands and discover its face for yourself.