Hand-weaving from Laos
“When I looked at my first piece of hand-woven silk, I fell in love and I knew that the making of hand-woven fabric was something I wanted to be part of,” said Daniel Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Soie de Lune, speaking as part of London Design Week 2021’s ‘Spotlight’ video series. “What makes the fabric luxurious is easy to define: the painstaking work of setting up a loom with thousands of threads of silk, coupled with the skill required to produce the unique designs, and, of course, the silk yarn itself,” he added.
Soie de Lune’s fabrics are all hand-woven at its workshop in Laos in south-east Asia, where the tradition still thrives despite it being a dying craft in many countries thanks to competition from cheaper machine production. “On our first visit to Laos, my co-founder and I were mesmerised…nowhere had we seen such intricate patterns and skilled weaving before,” recalls Marcus.
His challenge has been to harness and preserve this ancient craft by producing the finest hand-woven fabrics that not only represent the spirituality of Buddhist Laos, but that can be adapted to fit the modern world. Since the company’s founding in 2004, Soie de Lune’s silk has became popular with the world’s top interior designers including Michael S Smith, Peter Marino, Jonathan Reed, Caroline Sarkozy and many others. At Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, it is available from Alexander Lamont + Miles.
Tout de Suite, the latest collection, is vibrant and colourful, a true reflection of Lao culture. Woven with linen, cotton and silk, it includes ‘Saiseng’ (pictured top), ‘Sailom’ (pictured above left) and ‘Monsoon River’ (pictured above right).
Explore these products in the showroom during Artefact, or watch the Spotlight video here.
