The Pillow That Remembers
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The pieces that arrive at Renaras come from Japanese estates. Silk of this age and provenance has qualities nothing new can imitate: a depth of colour synthetic dyes cannot reach, a surface that has settled into itself over decades of careful storage, a material presence that announces itself in a room before you know what you are looking at.
A lumbar pillow cut from Nishijin obi silk holds a specific position in an interior. It is not decorative the way most cushions are decorative: pattern applied to surface, colour added to composition. It works more like a single considered object. It carries its own visual weight and asks nothing further of the room around it.
The weaving lineage behind these obi reaches back some fifteen hundred years, to the silk workshops of fifth-century Kyoto. The district took its present name, Nishijin, after the Ōnin War in the fifteenth century, and it has woven Japan's most formal ceremonial silk ever since. The techniques are old and exacting: tsuzure tapestry weave, nishiki polychrome brocade, metallic threadwork in which real gold and silver are wound around silk cores.
The pillows in our Nishijin obi silk lumbar pillow collection are cut from this tradition: each from a single vintage obi, each pattern unrepeatable.