For years in Chiang Mai, we kept noticing the same textiles in passing – bright, striped cloth folded into stacks at market stalls, or stitched into small accessories hanging in rows. They were often labelled simply as “hill tribe” fabric, sold cheaply, and treated as generic decoration rather than the work of a specific people.

Only later did we learn what we were actually looking at: Lisu textiles – constructed through a particular logic of cutting and sewing, with an unmistakable sense of proportion, colour rhythm, and patterned punctuation. The more we paid attention, the more the cloth began to speak with specificity.

Our interest in working with Lisu craftspeople comes from a desire to meet tradition without consuming it – to collaborate without turning culture into surface.

Slowstitch Studio has its own deep relationship with cloth: dye, repetition, constraint, the quiet record of time held in fibre. But when we enter a living tradition that is not ours, the responsibility changes. The aim is not to reproduce Lisu textiles as a “look,” and it is not to borrow aesthetic cues for novelty. It is to create a shared outcome where both practices remain visible – where origins are named, and value is returned to the hands that carry the knowledge.

A respectful collaboration is not simply an exchange of materials. It is a slower process of listening: learning what already exists, understanding what must remain intact, and moving carefully enough that evolution happens with consent rather than extraction.

For this collaboration, we began with cloth – cotton fabrics dyed in simple tie-dye and shibori-adjacent methods, creating soft, cloudy surfaces that feel native to Slowstitch Studio’s way of working. The dyeing process is quiet and indirect: folds and bindings impose temporary structure, and when they are released, the cloth holds a memory of restraint.

These fabrics were then sent to DeeDee, who transformed them through Lisu technique – bias-cutting the cloth into strips and sewing them together with meticulous precision. Where our dyeing tends toward diffusion, her sewing insists on clarity. Where colour in our work often behaves like weather, her stripes behave like architecture.

“The way stripes are built, how they hold rhythm, has its own logic,” she told us simply, as if it were obvious. And it is: a knowledge carried in the hands, sharpened through repetition.

What emerged was not a hybrid that erases its sources, but a dialogue between them. The cloudy dye patterns sit beneath the crisp structure of stitched stripes, acting as a soft meeting point – allowing our fluid sensibility to live alongside DeeDee’s rhythmic composition without competing for attention.

The collection comprises handbags, a pillow and pouch bag – everyday forms chosen deliberately, so the cloth remains the centre. These are objects made to be used: carried, held, leaned on, lived with. The work does not demand to be preserved; it asks to be completed through time and touch.

Each piece holds two kinds of attention. One is the slow preparation of dyeing – folds, bindings, patience, the gradual unfolding of pattern. The other is the precision of stripe construction – strip by strip, seam by seam, geometry arriving through handwork.

One colourway runs through the collection, built as an alternation between indigo and earth. A deep blue stripe repeats beside a warmer band of gold-brown, a tone we kept returning to because it resembles the region’s clay soil – sun-warmed, iron-rich, and present in everyday traces. The contrast is simple, but it holds a steady rhythm.

While the collection introduces tie-dye and shibori elements, the Lisu identity remains intact. We experimented primarily through proportion and arrangement – small shifts that create variation while staying grounded in the logic of Lisu textile construction. The aim was never to make Lisu cloth “more contemporary,” but to create space where two practices could coexist without one flattening the other.

The result is a new visual language – one that sits between texture and rhythm, between place-based knowledge and our own sense of pattern.

DeeDee is a Lisu craftswoman living in Mae Taeng district in northern Thailand, where Lisu communities continue to sustain textile traditions alongside contemporary livelihoods. She works primarily on commission, producing striped textile panels that become small bags, hats, and accessories.

Her skill lies not only in sewing, but in her intuitive understanding of balance – how colour holds tension, how proportion shapes mood, how a stripe can carry steadiness without becoming rigid. This knowledge is not easily explained; it is learned through years of making, and carried forward through generations.

Working with a craftsperson who already has an established practice means moving with patience and respect. Introducing new materials and new surface behaviour requires trust on both sides. DeeDee approached the process with quiet curiosity, and was herself pleasantly surprised by the outcomes we arrived at together.

This collection is shaped by her hands as much as by ours.

Some collaborations are defined less by what is added, and more by what is carefully held in balance. This collection is not about invention, but about attention: to materials already present, to skills often taken for granted, and to the people behind the work. Through these objects, we hope to slow down the way Lisu textiles are seen, used, and valued – allowing their stories to surface through everyday life, one stripe at a time.