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april 17, 2018 - MoonShine Materials

Moonshine at the Milano Design Week


Ancient know-how and new technologies meet in the MoonShine Materials collections that embody the renewal of Japanese textile tradition.


Among its many crafts, the millennial Japanese artisanal tradition, whose artefacts are universally appreciated for their intrinsic perfection and beauty, includes the art of weaving.

For centuries, skilful weaves of warp and weft have given life to the fluid and gentle seductive power of silk, which finds its most emblematic and ritual expression in the kimono. Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan, and thus a crossroad of ancestral savoir-faire and sophisticated aesthetic sensitivities, is also the country's main manufacturing district of this material.


And this is where Isao Kitabayashi, the descendant of one of the most ancient Japanese families, founded #moonshinematerials in 2013, with the purpose of granting a future to this unique union between technical mastery and creative intelligence.

MoonShine Materials is a sort of hotbed of innovation in which the best in Japanese textile craftsmanship is accurately selected and distilled to enhance its virtues and experiment new processes, in a yet unseen weave between tradition and technology.

Thus, the Kinran collection, which takes its name from a typical ancient and precious weaving technique from Nishijin, an area north-west of Kyoto, famous for the use of golden threads, presents innovative combinations of elegant sobriety, in which silk is combined with cotton, polyester, and hemp.

Another traditional technique called Kasuri has been employed for the production of the most elegant silk kimonos since ancient times, the sophisticated Kasuri-omeshi. This technique has been revisited by #moonshinematerials to give life to the collection Stream Kasuri (Ikat), in collaboration with the master textile craftsmen of the area of Nishijin. The collection highlights the contemporary and practical nature of cotton.