Sashiko Stripe

Sashiko began as a necessity. In rural Japan, fabric was scarce and winters were long — so garments were reinforced with repetitive running stitches, layering cloth over cloth until the textile was thick enough to hold warmth. The stitching was functional. The patterns it produced were not.
Over time, the geometry of the running stitch — its regularity, its rhythm, its quiet insistence — became recognised as a form of craft in its own right. Today, Sashiko is practised as an art, its patterns studied and collected.
The Sashiko Stripe shirt takes the most elemental unit of that tradition — the single running stitch — and arranges it in vertical columns across a rose pink ground. From a distance, it reads as a stripe. Up close, it reads as something made by hand. Both readings are correct.