The Yūsoku — Japanese Ceremonial Silk Bed Runner Set, Court Diamonds with Paired Birds in Vermilion and Gold

Four geometries inside one diamond, and a pair of birds who ignore all of them.

A Japanese ceremonial silk bed runner set, runner and cushions cut from one obi at the Renaras atelier in Amsterdam.

Yūsoku is the name kept for the formal patterns of the court, ordered and repeating. Here large diamonds outlined in vermilion enclose roundels of paired birds, wings fanned, facing one another above a small crest; the diamonds are filled with flat gold, and within a single unit the ground changes four times, chevron, lozenge, hexagon and dot. The ornament is denser than the figure. The birds, in matte orange and white, are the only things on the cloth that are not a grid.

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, 198 cm of it, falling over both sides of a 140 or 160 cm mattress, with four cushions for the head: two carrying the diamonds, two in plain champagne-gold silk.

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.