If a photo shoot happens in the forest, but nobody hears of it, did it really happen?
A photo shoot in the Japanese woods with your dearest friends, documenting the work you did, doesn’t get any better. Then you find a magical waterfall and a 600 year old temple at the end of a two hour hike through the snowy forest mountains of Gunma.
This was shot over a year ago and it never really made it beyond WhatsApp groups and the website… Might have something to do with overthinking things.
I used to think there was something more honest or humble about keeping the work quiet. Just doing it and letting it sit. But the work is made to be seen, to be worn, to be shared and passed on to others…
So I want to make more of an effort to share it with others. So it can reach more people. So my friends know how much I love and appreciate them and value their skill and work. So more people learn about Gathering and can decide whether it’s for them or not, or share it with others who care about special materials made by hand.
Comfort isn’t really about softness or warmth. It’s something harder to explain.
The smell of a beautiful coat that’s been passed down to you from one family member to another. Your mum’s cooking before you even walk through the door. A jacket you’ve had so long it’s started to feel like a second skin. That feeling of being somewhere familiar, even when you’re not.
That’s what we think about when we make things. Clothes woven and dyed using techniques passed down for centuries, ancient processes, tribal traditions, the kind of knowledge that lives in hands not books.
Everyday clothing, made with materials and techniques that have been here long before any of us.
A few of these pieces remain on our website, link in bio.
Comment KALA to see all the beautiful things we’ve made from the world’s oldest cotton.
I learnt about kala cotton almost 10 years ago, before we made our first garment. It was the fabric that made Gathering make sense - the texture, the weight, the fact that it’s been made the same way for thousands of years without anyone needing to improve it.
It’s rare, dying out and something that we want to continue to use, develop and share with fabric lovers around the world.
It always starts with fabric.. details below:
Slide 1 & 2
Mud-dyed ramie from China — one of the oldest plant fibres on earth, cool, strong, and impossibly soft dyed with mud and dried on glass sheets. Made to be Beekeeper Pant. Super wide, but sits perfectly on all bodies, flowing with the wind.
Slide 3 & 4
A medium-weight linen, naturally dyed green by layering indigo and marigold together in the dye bath. Almost sage. Cut long with a curved hem borrowing from South Asian and East Asian tailoring. Our take on the Kurta.
Slide 5 & 6
Handwoven, hand-felted yak and sheep wool from the Tibetan Plateau. Dark, dense, centuries unchanged. Made to be The Pear Drop Bag — one of our original designs, inspired by Furoshiki bags from Japan and the hobo-core Aesthetic.
Slide 7 & 8
A rain dye print on clay brown linen cotton. The Farmer Shirt. Our relaxed comfy shirt, with shell buttons, each picked to perfectly match the naturally dyed print.
And if you’ve made it to the end of this caption, each of these pieces is on the website now. Only a few pieces remain, some with a discount applied at checkout. (available until 30th March). Link in bio.
Doh-roh-zoh-meh. All the shades of…
Mud!
In Amami Ōshima, Japan, mud holds more than minerals. It holds memory. And, some believe, healing.
The iron-rich soil used in Dorozome isn’t just for dyeing — it’s long been associated with purification, grounding, and renewal.
Tannins from local plants, including the local wood, iron from volcanic earth — together, they create colours that feel alive, elemental, and ancestral.
I’m drawn to traditions like this not just for the beauty in the many shades of brown that come from mud dye, but for their wisdom.
Because sometimes, the most powerful colours come from the most unexpected places — like deep in the ground.
For more stories like this, sign up to our journal via the link in bio.
Your clothes are trying to tell you something — and Sheila Hicks spent her life decoding it.
Trained as a painter, raised with Bauhaus ideas, Sheila Hicks broke away from the canvas — and into the world of thread, fibre, and form.
To her, weaving wasn’t craft. It was a grid, a language, an architecture. A living algorithm that carried stories, cultures, and human histories across time.
Like most textile people, Hicks travelled the world to experience the various languages surrounding fibres. From Mexico to Morocco, Hicks learned not just to weave — but to… listen.
This philosophy has deeply shaped the work I do for Gathering — spending over a decade travelling across Africa and Asia, listening to material traditions, studying the cultures that built them, and letting those stories inform each and every thing I make.
Today, Hicks’ monumental works sit in the world’s leading museums — not just as textiles, but as art, architecture, and most of all a communication of her memory.
In worlds like fashion and art, that often dismissed fibre and weaving as “less than,” Sheila Hicks rewrote the rules.
Because when you give material the space to speak — you realise it’s been speaking all along.
If you love learning about textiles, sign up via the link in our bio.
Made without weaving or threads….
Bark cloth.
Bark cloth is made by hand — not on a loom, not with thread — but by carefully stripping the inner bark of the mutuba tree and softening it over hours of rhythmic beating.
The result is a pliable, richly textured fabric used for centuries in Uganda. Once worn by royalty and used in ritual ceremonies, it continues to be made today using the same ancestral methods — entirely biodegradable, completing a full cycle returning to the land it comes from.
Even better, no trees are cut down in the process. The bark regenerates. The tree survives.
If thoughtful stories exploring natural materials and processes from old ways is your thing, you can find more by signing up to our weekly newsletter, link in bio.
The most accessible natural dye?..
Is the very grass we walk on and look past in our every day lives.
This one is for all the green nature lovers.
Natural green dye is an often overlooked as we turn attentions to indigo and yellows to create green. But often green can be made through grass, pivot berries, artichokes, black eyed susan plants, a popular tea chamomile leaves, foxgloves, mint, nettle, plantain roots, red onion skins, pine needles spinach, privet berries and of course grass.
In the quiet of dawn, village boys tread softly among whispering grasses. With precision and respect, they gather and transform these humble greens into extraordinary dyes. Through age-old techniques, they boil the blades to unleash deep, rich greens—colours that have whispered secrets of survival and beauty through generations.
From the lush fields of the Sahel to the verdant valleys of Southeast Asia, grass is not just underfoot—it’s a vital thread in the fabric of life. It dyes clothes, feeds livestock, and even heals. Tribes like the Fulani in Africa and communities in Asia have long revered grasses like bamboo for their ability to yield vibrant dyes and construct life’s essentials. Lemon grass itself is a common medicine used throughout even the west.
While fashion and commercial industries race towards synthetic solutions for speed and cost savings, we embrace these natural green-dyes, we wear the legacy of warriors, healers, and earth guardians.
Some cultures still swear by the magic of nature’s palette. But is natural always better?
Pablo Picasso’s hidden secret…
He was inspired by the mud cloth designs of Mali!
Bogolanfini - meaning Earth (‘bogo’) with (‘lan’) cloth (‘fini’) - is a deep expression of Mali’s rich cultural heritage. This art has been established many years ago and begins with Malian cotton, woven into fabric and then bathed in a mixture of leaves and branches. The prepared cloth is artistically painted with mud harvested from the Niger River, which has been fermented for over a year, allowing deep, earthy patterns to emerge.
As the mud dries, it reacts with the tannins in the fabric, transitioning from a soft gray to a vivid black or dark brown, embodying stories and traditions of the Malian people. This technique, rooted in the land and perfected over centuries, captures narratives of community, life, and environment in each piece.
Picasso, during his visit to Mali, found this technique so inspiring that it subtly influenced some of his later works, a testament to the universal language of art and its power to transcend borders.
The earth is so versatile in this part of the world it is often used to build incredible structures, some that are temporary and rebuilt every year, like the Great Mosque of Djenne
I am genuinely in love with bogolanfini more and more each day. Which fabrics do you hold close to your heart?
Massive shoutout and thanks to the incredible Franck Edja @prince_edja & Nybé Ponzio @visualsbyponzio , both sources of inspiration and beauty. Please visit and share their content.
