This isn’t about fashion. Not really. It’s about magic — specifically, the kind of magic that happens when a bride changes clothes in the middle of her own wedding and, in doing so, changes everything about who she is perceived to be. The two-kimono tradition in rural Japan — iro-naoshi, or color-changing, layered over a…
Sixty dollars was the price tag attached to a handcrafted, besom-style broom at a wedding fair in Brooklyn last spring. The woman selling them, a craftswoman specializing in heirloom pieces, explained that the handle was made from reclaimed cherry wood and the brush from dried sorghum. It was a beautiful object, destined to hang on…
The glass beads catch the overhead light of the studio, and Priya, a jewelry designer who has been working with Indigenous-inspired motifs for seven years, flicks a finger across a string of Czech-cut seed beads in the color known as “old red.” It is not a bright red. It is the color of dried clay…