TWISTED THREADS – The making of KARAMI

A weaving heritage rooted in fishing nets.
A landscape shaped by sea breezes, flowing rivers, deep wells.
And thousands of threads – tightly twisted and intricately intertwined – creating space, light and air.
This is the beauty of karami, a Japanese weaving technique that involves interlacing twisted warp threads with weft threads, forming an airy and breathable yet crisp textile with a soft stretch to the touch.
HaaT explores contemporary expressions of karami at a third generation mill in Enshu, a nature-soaked region in Shizuoka Prefecture famed for its mild climate, scenic landscape and centuries of textile innovations.
Here, the beauty of karami – whose name evokes a sense of being ‘intertwined’ in Japanese – came to light naturally, through an accidental discovery.
Descended from fishermen, the mill’s founders initially made fishing nets, before slowly expanding to a cornucopia of goods for daily life: dish cloths, curtains, mosquito nets. Its distinct karami technique was born by chance. Weavers working with a new textile washed it in hot water – and it unexpectedly shrank, due to its highly twisted warp and weft yarns.
This serendipitous moment sparked a new chapter of innovations in its explorations of karami, with the textile endlessly refined through a balance of meticulous craftsmanship with contemporary vision.

Artisans are key. The karami-ori weaving process involves aligning over 3,000 warp threads, with zero margin for error: each one must be perfectly positioned. Acutely sensitive to the subtle sounds and vibrations of the machinery, weavers intuitively detect even the slightest irregularity.
Harmonizing with the abundance of the surrounding landscape, the making process uses pure well water – cool in summer, warm in winter – to help maintain humidity levels and prevent thread breakages.

The 100 per cent cotton yarn-dyed fabric is finished with a silket process, ensuring the net-like textile is not only light, breathable and slightly stretchy due to the open spaces between the threads, it also has a crispness – or in Japanese, it’s harikoshi.
The seed for HaaT’s collaboration is a creative dialogue between Issey Miyake and karami which began decades earlier. It was in the 1980s that Makiko Minagawa, now HaaT’s creative director, named this textile Boil Mesh, when it was first used by the Issey Miyake brand PERMANENTE.
For this HaaT collection, specialist karami weaving techniques push the boundaries of its creative expression, with the textile made in gingham check and striped patterns for the first time. Four unique karami pieces – two tops, a dress and a pair of trousers – have been woven in shades of white, green and blue.
And in a timeless modern expression of Japan’s karami weaving heritage, each piece is light and crisp, soft and elastic, structural and flowing – woven with a crafted sense of space at its heart.

KUMOSHIBORI

Arimatsu-shibori is the general term for the cotton shibori (tie-dyeing) conducted in the Arimatsu-cho and Narumi-cho areas of Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture. It began and flourished in the early Edo period (1603-1867), when shibori hand towels and other such items were sold as souvenirs to travelers on the Tokaido Highway. Since then, Arimatsu-shibori has been mass-produced in more than 100 different types of shibori patterns using various methods such as tying, sewing, and binding the cloth. Kumo-shibori, one of these patterns, is known as the most common tie-dye design.

For Kumo-shibori, part of the cloth is tied by hand and dyed. After dyeing, the tied part is untied and a spiderweb pattern is revealed (kumo means spider in Japanese ). However, HaaT focuses on the shibori in its tied state, and aims to make the beautiful, organic form of the shibori be remembered in the garments. Created based on this aim, the KUMOSHIBORI series applies the shape-memory property of polyester and incorporates the bumps of the shibori into the design.

KUMOSHIBORI has now become a staple HaaT series. We have continued to use the small Kumo-shibori bumps to add charming decoration to the neck areas and hems of clothing.