2025 Collaborative Capsule I ᐧ Serpentine Scarves

Serpentine Scarves is a capsule collection celebrating Lunar New Year 2025, the year of the wood snake. Created in thoughtful collaboration between slow fashion designers Joy Mao and Ryan Taylor, the limited collection features eight one-of-a-kind merino wool scarves, treated with a color-shifted natural dye. 

Each scarf began with Joy, as an oversized white ribbon of 100% merino wool, manually knit on a hand-powered Silver Reed SK280 knitting machine. The knits themselves were intentionally patterned in an elegant full-needle rib construction that would give them their surprising weight and durability.

Once with Ryan, they were then treated to a bath of lac (kerria lacca): a deep burgundy-hued natural pigment that has been extracted for dye from the resinous shellac of scale insects since antiquity. Both makers then worked together to fold, twist, bunch, and bind each scarf with a different shibori-dye technique — in preparation for the final step of their journey: color-shifting. During this step, each piece was plunged into a bath of iron — the resulting alchemy transmuting the bright reds into deep purples, along and beyond the crinkles and twists of their binding. 

In a world that feels increasingly unknowable, returning to the primordial weight of the serpent feels timely: the wood snake invites us to lay on our bellies in the dust and desert, and to feel every vibration of the earth in concert with both our stillness or our motion. The capsule explores this urge, and reflects the act of integrating intentionality with the embrace of that which is uncontrollable — and ultimately yielding transformation.