The Kinshū — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Cloud Forms in Oxblood on Gold

Two colours. The loom was given nothing else, and it needed nothing else.

Large forms drift the length of this cloth, cloud or flame depending on where you stand, cut in matte oxblood silk against a ground of flat, unornamented gold. A thin band of gold gauze runs through them like light through a shutter. There is no third colour and no ground fill; the scale is large and the surface almost bare. The effect is nearer to ink laid on gold leaf than to brocade: calligraphy from the doorway, weave from the pillow.

Renaras designs and reimagines existing Japanese ceremonial silk into contemporary pieces for daily life — this is the Renaras mottainai: the bringing of new imagination into a living tradition. Woven once for ceremony, the obi was cut at the Renaras atelier in Amsterdam into a runner for the foot of the bed, 240 cm of it, falling over both sides of a 180 or 200 cm mattress, with three cushions for the head: one in oxblood and gold, two in plain gold silk, so the whole bed keeps to the same two colours.

Each cushion closes with an envelope pocket, the runner is backed in plain silk, and no metal touches the silk anywhere.

The set arrives with the Renaras Passport, a small handmade record of the silk's first life and its transformation, signed and dated in Amsterdam.

One silk. One story. One piece. Never repeated.