The Slowest Thing We Make Has No Straight Lines In It

A letter from the workshop, on the last thing we will make this year.

There is a sound a room makes when everyone in it is concentrating. Not silence exactly. The chairs still creak and the fans still turn and somebody's phone still buzzes face down on a table. But the talking stops, and what is left is scissors, and the small catch of a machine starting and stopping, starting and stopping, because the seam is a curve and a curve cannot be sewn in one long confident run.

That is the sound the workshop has been making for weeks.

"The slowest thing we make is the one with no straight lines in it."

The thing about a curve

Most of what we sew is straight. A side seam, a hem, a placket. You line up the edges, you keep your eye ahead of the needle, and the machine does what machines are good at.

A curve is a different animal. To put a red shape inside a white field, you do not print it on top. You cut the red, you cut the white, and you join them edge to edge so the two become one piece of cloth. Every few centimetres the fabric wants to pucker, so you stop, you ease it, you start again. Linen in particular has opinions about this. It is a stiff, honest fibre that does not stretch to forgive you.

The Two Moons pieces are a yin yang, which means they are nothing but curve. There is not a single straight line in the design. We have made this playsuit in many colourways over many years, and this is the most demanding version of it we have ever attempted.

Who is actually doing it

The families sewing these are the same ones who have sewn the Kundalini Playsuit since the very beginning. Not a factory floor. Homes, and workshops the artisans own, across Bali, about thirty families in all, paid a real living wage.

I think that matters more here than it usually does, and not for the reason you would expect. It is not only about fairness, though it is about that. It is that a person who is rushed cannot sew a curve. The work simply does not come out. Slowness is not something we chose as a value and then hung on the wall. It is the only speed at which this particular thing can be made at all.

What Myrah said about it

"The brightness of these colours brings me so much joy. This was one of my favourite pieces to make this year. The sewing is so intricate, and truly, it is an evolution of the Kundalini Playsuit."

Harvest Moon red and Moon Milk off white. One is the colour of a moon sitting low and heavy over a field in autumn. The other is the colour of the same moon at the top of the sky, when it has gone pale and small and certain.

Why it is the last one

We are making ten in each size of the Kundalini, thirty in all, and five in each size of its more refined sister, the Vata, which is ten. Then we stop, and the year is closed.

There is no scarcity theatre in that number. It is simply what thirty families can piece by hand between now and the end of the year while also finishing everything else already promised. We would rather tell you the true number than invent a bigger one.

One honest note, because it surprised me too: because the yin yang is sewn into the body of the garment, this edition is not reversible the way our original Kundalini is. And because every panel is placed by hand, the pattern lands a little differently on each one. The playsuit that arrives will be its own, not a copy of the photograph.

The part I keep thinking about

A yin yang is a picture of two things that are not fighting. The dark holds a point of light. The light holds a point of dark. Neither one wins, and that is not a failure of the design, it is the whole design.

Most years end with a tally. What worked, what did not, who you were and who you meant to be. I have never found that useful. The last thing we made this year is a garment that says you are allowed to be both at once, the bright and the quiet, the year that went well and the year that was hard, and to wear them in the same cloth without apologising for either.

That seemed like the right thing to end on.

With love from Bali,
Myrah.

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A Piece for This Threshold

The Two Moons Kundalini Playsuit

Harvest Moon red and Moon Milk off white linen, every curve of the yin yang cut and sewn in by hand. The same wide leg and easy fall you reach for first, carrying a pattern that moves with you. Thirty in all, and then we stop. $358, and because it is over $350 it travels to you free.

Made to order: 3 to 6 weeks from order to shipment, then 5 to 15 business days with DHL.

Shop the Two Moons Kundalini →

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