Fashion

Joume Atelier's silk scarves are dyed by hand in a Paris atelier, one at a time, over three days, using cyanotype - a nineteenth-century photographic process discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1842. Silk is painted with a light-sensitive solution, composed against old zoological engravings - panthers, herons, a tiger - and carried into the sun, which does the rest. Every scarf lands at its own particular shade of blue; one made at midday is not the scarf made at dusk.

Musubi, in Japan, prints furoshiki - the traditional wrapping cloth - with historic ukiyo-e woodblock compositions, then fits some with a patchin, a wooden clasp turned from black walnut, that lets two knotted corners become a bag with no stitching and no hardware to fail. The cloth does the folding; the wood just holds the knot.

A hand-dyed scarf from a Parisian atelier and a printed cloth from Japan turned into a bag by a single piece of wood - different countries, different centuries of technique, the same instinct: let the material do more work than it has to.