Nendo: sashiko-textile

Nendo collaborated with Hosoo in Kyoto to design the new textile pattern “by | n” based on the cloth's sashiko-ori technique, in which the weave imitates needlework.

For more than 1200 years, Kyoto’s Nishijin woven silk has been beloved of Kyoto’s emperors, nobility, landed gentry and prosperous townspeople.

Hosoo, a weaving house founded in 1688, counts the city’s great temples and shrines amongst its patrons. The firm specializes in increasingly rare traditional techniques, including the incorporation of materials like gold leaf and lacquer into textiles, creating dramatically three-dimensional effects and using weaves that change visually changes as the textiles are viewed from different positions.

Nendo decided to work with an entirely different – and usually overlooked – aspect of the firm’s production: the cloths that Hosoo uses to wrap its precious silks. By developing a new textile pattern based on the cloth’s sashiko-ori technique, in which the weave imitates needlework, they thought they could
introduce a new audience to Nishijin’s traditionally exclusive world.

Nendo’s new designs come in five patterns: stairs, like an Escher-like endless staircase; math, which incorporates +, -, ÷ and = symbols; map, with mapping symbols; post, using the Japanese post office symbol; forest, which creates the Japanese character for “forest”, 森, out of the symbol “tree”, 木.