WEAVING LAYERS – The making of LIGHT WEIGHT

Layered yet light.
Simple patterns, vivid threads, science mixed with silk.
And the pure, slow flow of groundwater from deep beneath Mount Fuji, Japan’s most sacred peak.

LIGHT WEIGHT is a textile brought to life by HaaT, through a reimagined harmony of technology and craftsmanship, progressive complexity and elemental simplicity. Light to the touch with a soft textural nuance, the fabric is crafted from double layers of a plain weave known as futsu-ori – its essence shaped by a warp of fine black silk intertwined with a weft of rainbow-bright synthetic stretch yarns.

The result? A dimensional textile, timeless yet contemporary, that contains in its DNA a finely-honed balance of humans and nature – embodied by a unique structural integrity, layered depth and textural softness.

The seed of LIGHT WEIGHT lies in the place it is made. Crafted in the shadow of iconic Mount Fuji in Yamanashi Prefecture, it comes to life at a century-old facility that taps deeply into the region’s millennia-long heritage as one of Japan’s major textile production regions. The nature-soaked beauty of the setting plays a key role in the region’s textile innovations – with Mount Fuji’s pure spring water, flowing on a decades-long journey from snowy peak to groundwater, long used in the weaving process.

The starting point for LIGHT WEIGHT is the double-layered weave. Unusually, the number of warp threads of black silk is halved and the density of the synthetic weft threads is increased, using a specialized device – resulting in a unique textural effect hovering between lightness and strength.

First, the warp threads are prepared. A critical step before weaving can begin, this is undertaken at the same factory – one of the few in-house warping facilities that still exists in Yamanashi. The machine holds up to 600 creels at a time, each spinning threads at a meticulously even tempo, to ensure a perfect tension.

To create the base weave, artisans unusually use a jacquard loom, which enables them to use up to 12 different colours of threads, alongside stretch yarns. Specialist skills are essential as the challenges are plentiful – from the high risk of defects weaving such a simple pattern on a jacquard loom to the innate fragility of black silk during such a process. The presence of synthetic threads in the weave is also a departure from the use of natural materials typically embraced by both HaaT and the factory – yet this innovation, which delicately fuses silk with the manmade, adds a unique textural dimension, in its essence, beauty and strength.

Another ingredient written into the DNA of LIGHT WEIGHT? The purest possible water from nearby Mount Fuji. Drawn from about 50 metres underground, the water – once snow or rain, which has journeyed over decades through the heart of the sacred mountain’s natural filtration system – is used for carefully-controlled mist-based humidifaction and heating.

LIGHT WEIGHT is a textile that embraces the beauty of duality written into its weave – strength and softness, simplicity and complexity, mountains and machines, humans and nature.