Hello Precious People,

How are you doing?

I’ve been in a bit of a strange in-between. In between cities and countries, waiting for my visa to arrive. In between stories, as the world itself seems suspended between old ones that are coming apart and new ones that haven’t quite emerged. And The Lissome, too, has entered its own peculiar limbo.

The editorial deadline passed at the beginning of June, but not every story has arrived yet. Some contributions needed a little more time, and with others, life got in the way, with unexpected things coming up. For me, this stage of making a magazine is always a bit unsettling. I begin to see glimpses of the issue, but I still don’t know what it will ultimately become, or what direction I’ll be able to give it. After all, it is a collaborative effort, with many moving parts and people.

Print has its own distinct discipline and constraints. In the case of The Lissome, there are 144 pages. No more, no less. There is a production timeline: editing and proofreading, finalising the layout, picture editing and pre-press, printing and publishing. Funding has to be secured, distribution organised, and an event to launch and celebrate the issue is in the making. All of this is needed so that the magazine can materialise and see the light of day.

The Lissome in print
Our current issue, Rise Up Rooted Like Trees, brings together conversations, essays, photography and art exploring how we might live and create differently.
Discover The Lissome No. 5 →

This in-between stage also seems to be the point each year when I feel that it’s too much for me to hold. To make a new print edition possible, I step away from client work for several months, giving myself the uninterrupted time to commission, edit, art direct, write, design and somehow keep all the moving parts together. For a long time, I accepted this as part of maintaining an independent publishing project, something I deeply care about. But lately, I’ve been wondering whether this is a sign that The Lissome itself needs to evolve. I’ve started to think that if I want this platform to exist for the long term, I probably can’t continue making it in the same way. Right now, I feel ready for a shift, if that means I can continue creating with joy rather than trying to be an entire editorial team of one.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I want to leave print behind. I believe strongly, and now more than ever, that we need tangible, embodied experiences in an increasingly digital world. But I do think the magazine may need to find a new form. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. If The Lissome were to evolve, what would you hope it never loses? What feels essential to you? I don’t expect anyone to solve this question for me, but I’d love to know what you hold most dear about the publication and The Lissome as a cultural initiative.

While all these thoughts were circling in my head, I remembered a conversation from our current issue with the mythologist Michael Mead. He spoke about the strange historical moment we’re living through as a liminal time, and suggested that times of transition ask us to cultivate a practice that keeps us anchored.

A few months earlier, two friends had independently introduced me to The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (a peculiar serendipity?). The book revolves around two wonderfully simple practices: writing morning pages and taking yourself on artist dates: small excursions with no purpose other than nourishing our imagination.

It made me realise something that felt a bit uncomfortable. For the past few months I’ve been immersed in an issue about deep beauty, and I’ve spent countless hours reading, writing and talking with others about it. But it’s so easy to stop actively making space for beauty, even when our work revolves around it. Without noticing it, I had begun organising my days around deadlines, emails and to-do lists. Beauty had disappeared into the background as my attention was constantly being claimed by other things. I was reminded that attending to beauty can nourish not only my imagination, but also my spirit and soul. It isn’t really a habit our culture encourages, and maybe for that reason we have to intentionally make space for it in our days.

Earlier this month, I met Julie of the knitwear brand L’Envers, who was visiting Berlin with her family. Before we said goodbye, she asked if I knew the Bloomsbury Group and told me about Charleston, their beyond-beautiful country home in Sussex. She smiled and said that the way I think about life had reminded her of them, and I was intrigued.

So last Saturday, I took myself on an artist date to Charleston in Firle. Walking through the house and garden, surrounded by an overflow of beauty and creativity, I kept thinking about the idea of treating life itself as a work of art.

Below I’ll share a series of photographs from my visit, showing the stunning interiors and garden. And I’d love to hear from you. If The Lissome were to grow into a new shape, what would you hope always remains at its heart?

Sending much love,

Dörte xx

Impressions from Charleston:

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Hello Precious People,

As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, this month I’m sharing a travel reportage and reflection following a recent peer-learning exchange in Porto with Miguel and Alice from Barbot Bernardo and Saber Fazer, which I was invited to take part in through the European Creative Hubs Network. Thanks to their support, who made this exchange possible, this month’s newsletter is freely available to everyone.

The experiences of the week kept circling back to one question: what allows meaningful, small-scale cultural work to endure?

From neighbourhood initiatives and educational programmes to makers, publishers and collaborative forms of organising, I encountered many people patiently building the kinds of structures that allow slower, values-led work to survive and support one another. At the same time, many spoke openly about the growing pressures their ecosystem faces.

I have returned to Porto various times throughout the last two decades, and for me, this harbour city in Portugal’s north has always held a special kind of magic. My first visit was in 1999, staying with a friend whom I had met whilst living and working in London as an au pair the year before. Back then, the city had a gloomier charm, and tourists were still few and far between. In the years that followed, I witnessed Porto become increasingly international, slowly turning into the vibrant cultural hub it is today.

What I always loved was the openness of its people: welcoming, real and very down to earth. Over the years, I had the great fortune to meet some wonderful creatives and become acquainted with their work.

I have returned to Porto various times throughout the last two decades, and for me, this harbour city in Portugal’s north has always held a special kind of magic. My first visit was in 1999, staying with a friend whom I had met whilst living and working in London as an au-pair the year before. Back then, the city had a gloomier charm, and tourists were still few and far between. In the years that followed, I witnessed Porto become increasingly international, slowly turning into the vibrant cultural hub it is today.

What I always loved was the openness of its people, welcoming, real and very down to earth. Over the years, I had the great fortune to meet some wonderful creatives and become acquainted with their work.

In 2024, after not having been in Porto for several years, I decided to return and reconnect. I had a special story in mind for our current print issue, The Lissome No. 5, Rise Up Rooted Like Trees. Ten years earlier, I had met Alice Bernardo and her project, Saber Fazer, and she had been one of the first initiatives I connected with after founding The Lissome. I had followed Alice’s work over the years and felt inspired by how it had evolved from a personal research project into a certified vocational education and training provider focused on natural textile and fibre production and processing – as well as into a financially sustainable business doing important work for the common good.

Continue the journey:
The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted Like Trees

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My plan was not only to interview Alice, but also to create a fashion editorial informed by her work and worldview. When the idea received EU funding through the Culture Moves Europe programme, photographer Florence de l’Olivier and I were able to spend two weeks in Porto on a research and production exchange with Alice.

Alice’s passion lies in rigorous craft education and in bridging traditional skills with contemporary knowledge. Through vocational training, research and hands-on workshops, she empowers people to reconnect with textiles from the ground up – from raw fibre to finished fabric. For her, knowledge is power: “Knowledge is power. After all, we can’t protect what we don’t know or understand, so educational resources are key to raising awareness.” She is equally passionate about relocalising craft, arguing that we need to bring textile and food production back to Europe, foster small- and medium-scale local value chains, and transition towards agroecological practices.

This commitment is something Alice shares with Miguel Barbot, her life partner and partner in business, with whom she founded Barbot Bernardo, the “mothership” of Saber Fazer and their design studio, Ofício. Together, they follow a vision for a world shaped by local production chains, ethical and sustainable organisations, and communities committed to climate transition.

During my stay in Porto in 2024, Alice and Miguel introduced me to the European Creative Hubs Network (ECHN), of which they are both active members, and warmly encouraged The Lissome to join. The peer-led network brings together all kinds of different creative hubs across Europe and neighbouring countries with the mission of strengthening their creative, economic and social impact. I followed their recommendation, and this is the reason why I found myself back in Porto a year later. The ECHN offers peer learning exchanges for its members, in which one hub visits another to exchange best practices, share knowledge and learn from one another – and also share their findings with the public.

Miguel and I decided to embark on a week of joint learning centred around two intertwined areas of exchange. On one hand, we explored future editorial collaborations between our two hubs, developing initial concepts for a joint event and editorial project and discussing how publishing can serve as a bridge between material production, cultural knowledge and public engagement.

On the other hand, Miguel, who also works as a consultant supporting small creative businesses and organisations, mentored me around questions of organisational sustainability and values-based business development. Together, we reflected on the challenges facing independent cultural iniatives and explored possible pathways for strengthening the long-term resilience of The Lissome.

During our conversations, Miguel reflected on how much of Porto’s creative ecology has been shaped through scarcity, resilience and the necessity of working together. Porto, he explained, is a city used to “punching above its own weight” – historically industrial, both bourgeois and working class, with a long tradition of small-scale production and interconnected local economies. Although it feels intimate, it actually sits at the centre of a dense network of neighbouring towns and communities.

During the 1970s and 1980s, much of the historic centre emptied as corporations relocated to Lisbon and families moved to the suburbs. What remained was space: affordable rents and abandoned buildings that, together with a thriving university culture following the 1974 revolution, enabled a strong underground culture, from music to visual arts. From the early 2000s onwards, Porto gradually became more international. Tourism, cheap flights, cultural investment and a growing visibility attracted a new generation of creatives. Studios, bars, workshops and cultural spaces opened, while the city developed a tightly woven creative ecosystem.

Miguel spoke passionately about how much this ecosystem depends on proximity and everyday encounters, and I got to experience it during my time there. “Face-to-face is fundamental for most of our work,” he told me. Casual conversations in the studio, bumping into friends, or meeting someone over a beer can unexpectedly become the beginning of a collaboration or a new idea. Porto, he said, has become a “glocal” city: locally rooted, yet connected to wider international networks and welcoming to newcomers.

But, like many cities across Europe today, Porto is also facing many pressures. After years of crisis, from austerity measures following the financial crisis of 2008 to Covid to the repurcussions from the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the city is now grappling with a speculative housing crisis, much like so many other urban centres worldwide. Affordable rents that were one of the conditions that allowed experimentation and grassroots culture to flourish, and, in turn, to revitalise the city, have largely disappeared. Rising property prices and investment-driven development are making it increasingly difficult for artists, makers and small organisations to remain in the city centre.

I arrived in Porto on a Sunday afternoon after taking the scenic bus route from Lisbon, where I had spent a few days with a dear friend and visited the gorgeous gardens and ceramics collection of the Albuquerque Foundation in nearby Sintra.

Our exchange began on Monday morning, and my flat for the week was conveniently located just a comfortable 20-minute walk from Miguel and Alice’s studio, and each day began with a joyful sunny morning stroll.

Our week unfolded through work sessions between Miguel and me, interwoven with visits from and of other creatives and local initiatives whose work connected to the themes we were exploring. On Thursday, we opened up the conversation to the public through a roundtable, which invited us to think about how craft, science, publishing and storytelling can work together to support more resilient ways of making, sharing knowledge and building culture.

For the conversation, we invited Vai Vem, a Porto-based independent publisher, and Paula Nabais, a professor and researcher in conservation and restoration whose work bridges historical textile knowledge and contemporary sustainability. Paula currently leads the ERC-funded SCARLET project, which studies historical natural textile dyeing techniques from the 15th to the 18th centuries and reconstructs traditional recipes to develop sustainable solutions for today’s textile industry.

Together, we reflected on questions of responsibility and integrity in storytelling, on how we tell stories about craft and heritage without romanticising or trivialising them by reducing complex realities to nostalgic narratives? And how do we remain truthful to the communities and craft practices we intend to represent?

The themes we touched upon during the roundtable continued into a longer written conversation afterwards, in which Miguel expanded on some of the questions we had begun exploring together. He spoke about what he calls the “metropolitan gaze,” a tendency to romanticise rural labour and traditional practices while overlooking the precarious practices that can shape them. The people and communities we seek to represent, he argued, are often far more similar to us than the idyllic nostalgic ideas we project onto them.

For Miguel and Alice, the question is not how to preserve the past unchanged, but how knowledge can be updated and made meaningful in the present. Through Saber Fazer, they focus on rigorous research, technical education and creating new pathways for local craft economies to thrive – what Miguel describes as building “future ecologies”.

At the same time, Miguel emphasised that storytelling itself carries responsibility. “Respect their labour and do your homework,” he said. Understanding the realities, skills and systems behind craft practices matters for truthful representation and for contributing to their long-term economic viability.

We also reflected on the current revival of craft and folk culture, something Miguel sees as a very positive thing, especially in communities that for decades undervalued their own traditions and are now rediscovering their identity and creating new interest from the outside. Yet he also pointed to an ongoing challenge: while there may be growing appreciation for craft, consumers often struggle to understand the true cost of skilled labour, time and quality.

Particularly in Portugal, where, as Miguel remarked, there was no equivalent of an “Arts and Crafts” movement, many craftspeople and makers still lack the recognition and leverage to properly value their work. This is where small independent publishing can play an important role: creating visibility, fostering deeper understanding and helping build new cultural circles around craft and small-scale making. As he put it, “There is plenty of beauty and craft in the real, contemporary world; we don’t need to delve into a good-old-times rural utopia.”

But these questions of value and long-term viability do not only concern craftspeople. They echoed through many of our conversations throughout the week, returning us to a shared challenge faced by many small-scale, values-led practitioners and initiatives: how do we remain committed to quality, ethics and slower ways of working while still making a living in systems that reward quantity over quality and profit over care?

The exchange with Miguel was very insightful for me in this regard. He and Alice had just done this – they had found a way to support their work reliably long-term through a mix of different income streams that meaningfully support one another, ranging from for-profit work with aligned clients through their design studio, to a shop selling specialised equipment such as hand looms, spinning wheels, yarns, fibres, needles, spindles, wools, silks and dyeing plants, to longer-term institutional funding for their educational and community projects.

This led us into conversations about The Lissome and what a financially sustainable future for the publication might look like without compromising its editorial independence, quality or values.

The Lissome also began as a personal inquiry ten years ago, initially as a simple blog, spurred by my curiosity to explore the deeper systems shaping fashion, culture and ecology. The move into print in 2019 was made possible through a crowdfunding campaign that funded the printing costs for the first edition. Since then, The Lissome has remained a grassroots project, without outside investment or institutional backing, with each issue largely depending on finding enough funding to make the next one possible. Like many independent cultural initiatives, it has survived through an unshaken belief that this kind of discerning, systems-oriented storytelling matters, and through a deep love for the beauty, meaning and possibility it brings into the world.

Inspired in part by the wider ecosystem Miguel and Alice have built around Barbot Bernardo, our conversations began to open up new possibilities: whether a similar kind of “mothership” could gradually emerge around The Lissome – where the annual print publication is supported by a broader ecosystem of interconnected work, such as expanded publishing formats, institutional funding for cultural work, and a studio practice focused on editorial direction, publishing, magazine design, art direction and visual storytelling.

Miguel introduced me to several examples in Porto of how small independent actors have built infrastructures that make meaningful cultural possible long-term. One example was the Bombarda arts community that began in the 1990s, when a group of young gallerists decided to open galleries in the same neighbourhood, and then started working together. This created visibility and power in numbers. To this day, the district hosts collective openings every nine weeks, the Bombarda Collective openings, which attract people from all over the region and strengthen a sense of cultural community.

More recently, this spirit of collaboration evolved into the Bombarda Creative District Association and a shared effort to strengthen the neighbourhood’s wider creative ecosystem. The association emerged through the Digital Neighbourhoods programme, funded by Portugal’s post-Covid recovery fund (PRR), at a moment when many small businesses were still reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

Rather than supporting isolated actors individually, the initiative created a shared structure through which almost 200 local entrepreneurs, cultural spaces and creative businesses could organise collectively and gain greater visibility. Among its outcomes was a digital map of the district, making Bombarda’s many galleries, studios, workshops and independent initiatives easier to discover, while also helping strengthen connections between local actors themselves.

But beyond visibility, what struck me was the wider ambition behind the project. As Miguel explained, the association gradually became a way of building something many small independent actors struggle to create on their own: shared strategy, professional support and a stronger collective voice with political influence when advocating for the needs of creative businesses and the neighbourhood more broadly. Yet, as he emphasised, “it is communal at its core.”

Bombarda is only one example of how creative life in Porto organises itself collectively. Today, the district is home to a dense network of galleries, makers, publishers, studios and small businesses, many of which can now be explored through a shared digital map developed through the neighbourhood fund initiative. But creative life and cultural experimentation are found throughout the city in many different forms. During my week in the city, I got the chance to visit a number of creatives working in different fields, from craft and material knowledge to circularity and publishing.

On Monday afternoon, Margarida Antunes and Pedro Mota from Vai Vem, a Porto-based publishing house focused on design and culture, came to see us in the Saber Fazer studio. We exchanged learnings on the realities of running an independent book publishing house versus an independent magazine initiative, and recognised many shared challenges around editorial independence and financial sustainability.

The following afternoon, I set off on a small excursion to visit a number of makers and designers. First, I stopped by the shop of GUR by designer Célia Esteves and the studio of artist Michelle Nunes, before ending the day over a galão and homemade pear cake with fashion designer Sara Miller.

At GUR, designer Célia Esteves welcomed me into her shop and studio, where a beautiful selection of handwoven rugs was on display alongside a special exhibition of pieces inspired by the eco-educational children’s music and book project Mão Verde(“green thumb” in English). Through GUR, Célia collaborates with artists and illustrators to reinterpret the traditional Portuguese handwoven rug, working with the same techniques but bringing in new forms, colours and visual languages. During my visit, she showed me different weaving techniques in an old book on Portuguese crafts and introduced me to her small ergonomic handloom that she purchased through Saber Fazer and on which she creates smaller woven tapestries in the shop.

Michelle Nunes is a multidisciplinary artist from Phoenix, Arizona, who moved to Porto during the pandemic. Working across textiles, objects and sculpture, Michelle combines intricate hand-beading and hand-embroidery with clothing and everyday materials, such as simple plastic bags, transforming them through slow, highly detailed craft. Seeing these works in person, I was moved by the contrast between the ephemerality of the original object and the care and time invested into it through her handwork. There was something deeply tender in the way these throwaway materials were elevated and lovingly attended to.

I had first come across Michelle’s work through her collaboration with Lisa and Esuga from Abaya, currently featured in the Book of Kin with their beautiful collection of footwear. Abaya had collaborated with Michelle on a special hand-embroidered collection of T-shirts, which you can find on their website and read about in our conversation on Substack.

Meeting Sara Miler closed a small circle. Sara had supported our Porto photoshoot through helping us with production and location scouting. After years of working as a fashion designer in Barcelona, she moved back to Porto and started Refresquito, creating beautiful everyday objects from discarded materials: balls made from leather offcuts, notebooks from old wallpaper and found paper stock, and playful arrangements that she continuously transformed into ever-changing window displays. More recently, Sara has begun working with the Porto municipality on circular design initiatives, helping develop new approaches to working creatively with discarded materials through collaborations with schools, artists and local institutions.

On my final day in Porto, before catching my flight home, I happily reunited over lunch with artist, maker and art educator Ana Rita de Arruda, whom I had first met during our stay in Porto in 2024. A long-term collaborator of Saber Fazer, where she regularly teaches specialised felting workshops and shares her extensive technical knowledge, Ana Rita had welcomed me and Florence into her studio, introduced us to her felting practice and exploration of wool as a sculpting material, and generously lent some of her pieces for the photo shoot.

Throughout the week, a book I had read several years ago, Local Is Our Future by Helena Norberg-Hodge, kept coming back into my mind. For Helena, localism is about rebuilding resilient and thriving local economies and communities that are rooted in relationships, reciprocity and a sense of place. This includes strengthening local production and culture as well as decision-making powers, collaboration and knowledge exchange within the local communities. As an alternative to the large-scale corporate structures and economic logics that dominate our time, she argues that diverse, human-scale and place-based economies are much better able to meet our human needs – for feeling that we belong, that we care and are cared for, for having a voice and a say, and can play an active and meaningful part in shaping our daily lives and immediate surroundings.

Much of what I encountered in Porto helped me understand in very concrete ways what Helena means. Throughout the week, I met people building small and diverse forms of infrastructure around meaningful work: collaborative neighbourhood initiatives, educational programmes and workshops, shared workspaces, independent publishing and local production. But at the same time, Porto also showed how the pressures of property speculation and rapidly rising rents were now threatening such models and initiatives, and how political intervention and legal frameworks that protect local communities were desperately needed. Because after all, if cities benefit economically from a rich cultural life that attracts tourism, then shouldn’t meaningful support also flow back to the people, initiatives and small businesses that make these places distinctive and worth inhabiting, in the first place and for the long term? Isn’t that just common sense?

But, as Miguel reflected, the “creative utopia” many of us might imagine does not simply exist on its own. Meaningful cultural work comes to life and survives because people come together, organise and patiently build structures that can sustain it over time. “Change takes time,” he said, “but you, as a collective, are nothing without the numbers to enforce it.” It’s a good learning to take home with me: yes, localism is about proximity and place, and this is what makes real relationships possible, but it is also about the continuous and loving work of building these relationships and shared infrastructures that make forms of mutual support strong enough to face uncertainty and change.

It was a beautiful and memorable week, guided by an incredible host and many joyful encounters. I’d like to say a huge thank-you to Miguel, Alice and the whole team of Barbot Bernardo, and all the beautiful souls that I met throughout the week – and a huge thank you to the European Creative Hubs Network for making this learning exchange possible. If you’re curious, I really recommend exploring their map of creative hubs. They are a great network and you might discover some inspiring places close to your home.

Now I’ll leave the last word to Miguel:

“Good things take time. Focus, be patient, do your work with purpose, and understand your role, your priorities and the impact of your decisions. We are not interested in quick wins, but in building a structure that can support sustainable, impact-positive and meaningful growth.

I think this logic is contrarian to the tech-capitalistic way. Remember Zuckerberg’s ‘move fast and break things’ motto? I guess craft, as a way of thinking, is the exact opposite: ‘move slow and build things’.”

I hope you enjoyed travelling through Porto with me.

Sending warm wishes,
Dörte xx

Further Explorations:

A huge thank you to the European Creative Hubs Network (ECHN) for making this learning exchange possible through their ECHN P2P initiative.

European Creative Hubs Network (ECHN), https://creativehubs.net
Explore the network and map of creative hubs across Europe.

Bombarda Creative District Digital Map, https://bombarda.pt/en-US/home
A way to discover the many galleries, studios, makers and initiatives that make up Porto’s Bombarda neighbourhood.

Barbot Bernardo, https://barbotbernardo.com
Miguel and Alice’s wider ecosystem spanning design, craft, education and consultancy.

Saber Fazer, https://www.saberfazer.org/home
Vocational education, research and workshops focused on natural textiles, fibre production and craft knowledge.

Vai Vem, https://vai-vem.pt/en-1
Independent publishing house dedicated to design and culture.

Abaya, https://abaya.life
Footwear and clothing brand rooted in regenerative natural materials and a philosophy of treading softly.

GUR, https://rugbygur.com
Contemporary Portuguese handwoven rugs by Célia Esteves.

Michelle Nunes, https://michellegomesnunes.com
Multidisciplinary textile and object-based practice.

Sara Miler / Refresquito, https://www.instagram.com/refresquito/
Playful everyday objects made from discarded materials.

Ana Rita de Arruda, https://anaritadearruda.com
Textile artist and educator specialising in felt and wool.

Helena Norberg-Hodge – Local is Our Future
On localisation, interdependence and rebuilding resilient local economies.
www.localfutures.org/publications/local-is-our-future-book-helena-norberg-hodge/

→ Continue the Journey:
Many of the questions that accompanied me through Porto also sit at the heart of The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees. The current issue is available here.

Order The Lissome No. 5

I’ve just returned from Porto, where I spent a week on a peer-to-peer learning exchange with Barbot Bernardo, a creative studio and vocational education provider working across urban transition, agroecology, sustainable production and small-scale manufacturing, supported by the European Creative Hubs Network, of which we are both part.

During the week, I met designers, researchers, publishers and organisers actively building local initiatives - from neighbourhood networks and shared learning spaces to small-scale production and craft practices. Many of our conversations revolved around what allows local cultures and communities to emerge and endure. I came back with many thoughts (and many notes), and I’m looking forward to sharing more in the June newsletter.

For this month, Liz has prepared an essay on the aliveness of objects, and what our relationship to clothing might teach us about consciousness, matter, and the curious ways we become attached to the things around us.

I hope you enjoy reading.

Sending lots of beautiful sunshine, this month from Berlin,

Dörte xx

Everything is Alive.
An animist perspective on clothing.

By Elizabeth McLellan

What defines the nebulous line between the living and the inanimate, between consciousness and oblivion? Perhaps there is no stable distinction at all. Over time, spirit migrates into matter, and matter rises and congeals within us, like capillary action, where the fat in a soup forms a hardened layer on top. Matter weighs us down, tethering us to this life and containing our beings; keeping the remaining water inside us from simply slipping out and become one with the primordial soup of the ocean.

This is, in fact, an article about our relationship to clothing. Yet it is also about the nature of the universe, the connection between matter and spirit, and the societal ills that plague us. I hope, with this article, to briefly illuminate just how interlinked they actually are.

We are entangled beings. Physicist Karen Barad coined the term Agential Realism: arguing that things emerge through their “intra-actions”, as opposed to an interaction where things simply exist first, then come into contact. Intra-action means the boundaries and identities of beings are constituted through the encounter itself. In this view, matter itself takes on agency, participating in the becoming of reality.

Her view was formed through a complex web of disciplines, mixing quantum physics, feminism, critical theory, natural sciences. One of the tools she used to demonstrate this phenomena was diffraction: whereby waves of particles overlap, bend, interfere and produce new patterns. As Karen writes, “Diffraction is a material practice for making a difference,”1 a way of understanding the world not as separate entities reflected back at one another, but as forms continually produced through patterns of interference, entanglement, and relation.

In this view, it’s impossible to cling to a neat definition between animate and inanimate, in any meaningful way. Part of what is so powerful about an animist relationship to objects is that it posits that everything is, in fact, full of life. What an exciting, vibrant way to go about the world!

On the flip side, it opens us up to an understanding of how intimately we are related to death. We are also matter, and at a certain point in our journeys we will lose this consciousness and become distributed as matter again. The lines between living and dead, consciousness and object are receptive, impressionable and osmotic. The world is constantly fluctuating between these boundaries.

Love, then, is what teaches us that consciousness and emotional significance are not exclusive to humans. Once we experience attachment to animals, plants, objects or spaces, the strict boundary between subject and object begins to dissolve.

I have felt this in the powerful ways I relate to my home space, as an extension of my self. Sometimes, when I lose a favourite sock it feels as if one of my limbs has been ripped from me. I’m well aware this sounds a tad extreme, as my husband can attest to, yet I can’t help but feel there is some spiritual truth to the feeling. Things are supposed to be our vestiges of permanence, and when they fail us at this task, by getting caught in the drier, it can feel like everything is slipping away into the void of time; of change; of impermanence.

💌 We are sharing this essay in full with our members. If you’d like to continue reading, you can join us here.

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Hello precious people,

This month’s essay has been a while in the making. It follows a thread around what I’ve come to call a “culture of care,” and this piece is a first attempt to bring these thoughts together.

It begins with a shift in perception and the realisation that what we are living through is not simply a time of crisis, but a moment of transition between two fundamentally different ways of seeing and relating to the world.

The piece that follows traces this shift across different layers of experience, from my time working in fashion to the systems that shape our economies and ecologies, and into the question of what it might mean to live differently. It is an attempt to name the worldview that has brought us here, and the one that is slowly beginning to take shape.

The following essay is the first piece we are sharing in full with our members. If something in this speaks to you, you’re very welcome to join us. At the end, I’ve also gathered a few books and a prompt that opened up this line of thinking.

We’ve kept this project alive over the past decade through a great deal of care, and largely voluntary effort. If you feel moved to support it, becoming a member is one way of helping it continue and of being part of what it makes possible.

A small note: we’ve begun getting back to contributors for the next print issue, but are a little behind due to a bout of illness – thank you so much for your patience if you’re still waiting to hear from us.

I hope you enjoy reading.

Sending much love,
Dörte xx

Towards a Culture of Care

By Dörte de Jesus

I have been trying to gather my thoughts around an idea for a while, what I’ve come to call a “culture of care,” without quite knowing how to approach it. When I listened to a recent podcast episode with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, suddenly something clicked into place.

Solnit was discussing her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, and joked that she often feels like a tortoise at a mayfly party. She was speaking about taking the long view, and how important it is for seeing patterns emerge and gaining perspective.

I remembered a moment when my perspective fundamentally shifted, when I recognised a pattern in a fragment that opened up a wider view. It was, in fact, quite a mundane realisation, but at the time it was something I hadn’t yet understood, and it went on to shape my path in a fundamental way.

About a decade ago, I was working as a freelance art director at ELLE magazine, and I was surrounded by clothes. Endless images of clothes, rails of samples, beauty products stacked in every editorial department. I was responsible, among other things, for the runway guides published twice a year. Season after micro-season, the volume was staggering, and I learned that what I was looking at was only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it ran the even faster, larger current of fast fashion, with its globe-spanning supply chains and mountains of waste.

Looking at all those clothes, I found myself wondering when they had become so replaceable. When we had grown comfortable with such a fleeting relationship to the things we wore, the people who made them, the world they came from and returned to. I remember feeling a profound sense of grief.

It struck me then, and has stayed with me since, that what I was witnessing was not simply a problem of the fashion industry or of consumption. It was something more fundamental: a worldview organised around division and isolation, expressed through disposability.

A veil had suddenly lifted.

In The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit suggests that this worldview, or what she calls the “old world”, is slowly breaking down, and that a “new world”, grounded in interconnection, equality and ecological awareness, is already emerging. But because we tend to think in short timeframes, we often fail to perceive the scale of this shift. Amid the turmoil of our times, I found that thought intriguing and somewhat reassuring.

To build up her theory, Solnit takes her readers on a historical and philosophical excursion into what she calls an “ideology of isolation,” a worldview in which lives, human and more-than-human, are seen as separate rather than interconnected. Drawing on historian of science Caroline Merchant’s The Death of Nature, she traces a decisive shift in early modern Europe (about 500 years ago): from seeing nature as a living, interconnected system to viewing it as a machine to be controlled and exploited. Once nature is framed as chaotic and disorderly, domination becomes justified – a logic that extended not only to land, but to women and colonised peoples, and found its starkest expression in the land enclosures, colonial seizures and witchcraft trials of the era.

She connects this to theologian Walter Brueggemann’s critique of modernity: how the doctrines of private reason, private property and private monetisation hardened into an ideology of scarcity and competition, in which people are no longer neighbours but rivals, and social life becomes shaped by fear, greed and the potential for violence.

In Solnit’s words, the term extractivism describes “the logic (…) that arises from having no relationship to a place, at least none that includes a commitment to its continued thriving. It’s most obvious in the case of literal extraction of mining and wholesale logging, but the logic applies to anything that can be exploited in unsustainable or destructive ways, including human beings.”

When I return to that moment at ELLE, I can see more clearly what I was sensing. The patterns I encountered in fashion are not separate from those in politics or ecology. The invisibility of the sweatshop workers, the pollution of rivers and soils, the shipment of vast amounts of clothing waste to other, poorer parts of the world – all depend on the same underlying story: that we are separate, that we are not implicated in one another’s lives, and that some lives are worth more than others. The exploitation and destruction are concealed under a shiny façade, and we simply experience the system as our “natural” way of life.

I find it fascinating to think that what we see as “normal” and “natural” in one period of time and place can be perceived entirely differently in another moment, and how we can be blind to things. So much depends on our cultural conditioning, and discrimination and cruelty can hide in plain sight – often justified through a claim of what is natural by the ones who hold power.

To exemplify this, Solnit writes about books and films that she loved when she was younger and now sees in a much more nuanced light: “Those old movies, what’s striking in so many of them is how normal it was to mock and make jokes at the expense of women, queer people, disabled and divergent bodies, non-white people, many others, to find amusement in their humiliation and thwartedness with the assumption that the audience, or the audience that mattered, was made up of those who were in none of those categories, or who would identify with the people at the top of the hierarchy, or would just accept the abuse.”

When I think back to my own teenhood in the 1990s, there were lots of things that I found troubling, but in those days, I often felt like a lonely voice, a strange outsider who perceived things differently and couldn’t quite fit in. At my school it was normal for teachers to humiliate students in front of the whole class, to mock and shame them when they didn’t know how to perform a maths equation on the blackboard, and it wasn’t uncommon for students to join in, and mirror and continue their teacher’s bullying. It was an awful experience, and even back then I wondered how this could be beneficial for a learning environment.

But now I see that perhaps that was never the point. Perhaps cruelty is nothing more, and nothing less, than an expression of a worldview – a sense of entitlement to harm, made possible by a lack of empathy. It performs separateness, signalling that another’s suffering does not matter, or can even become a source of power or pleasure.

The same logic plays out at every scale. I am thinking of the footage from Gaza, the ICE raids, the trail of the Epstein files, the war on Iran ... We live in a time of lifting veils; globally more connected than ever, information reaches us in an instant through the technology in our palms. What was once normalised, internalised, made invisible is now, by its sheer, escalating brutality, impossible to look away from.

But perhaps this is also why the present moment feels so charged. If, as Solnit suggests, long-term change is under way, then the tensions and backlashes we are witnessing may not only be signs of breakdown, but also of transition – of an old logic being unsettled and acting out ultra-violently, and a different one not yet fully formed.

💌 This is the first essay we are sharing in full with our members. If you’d like to continue reading, you can join us here.

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Hello precious people,

We have now closed submissions for Issue No. 6, Deep Beauty, and were quite speechless and overjoyed by how many of you answered the call (so many!), and by the beauty of ideas we received. Thank you so much to everyone who sent something in. We know that the selection process will be hard, and, as always, a little heartbreaking, but we aim to be in touch with all contributors by the end of the month or latest at the beginning of next.

A small update: from April, our membership will become more defined as a way of grounding our work more firmly in the community it grows from. The opening reflection of each newsletter will remain freely accessible, as will a portion of our essays and interviews, with full versions becoming part of the member layer, allowing us to go deeper in every issue. All the details are on our about page, if you’d like to take a look, and you can → subscribe here.

So, people make clothes. But they also make meaning, connections and ways of seeing the world differently. This month, Liz speaks with Sofi Thanhauser, author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, about taking clothing seriously as a lens onto the systems we inhabit: research, grief, synchronicity and the radicalism of those who believe things can be made otherwise.

Sending much love,
Dörte
xx

THE BOOK OF KIN presents:

Matthew Cox

Based in: UK

Every piece of furniture begins with a tree. That fact, so easily forgotten in the seamless surfaces of contemporary interiors, sits at the centre of Matthew Cox’s practice. Their new Milk Table collection is crafted from British chestnut, elm, and sycamore – timbers that are rarely seen in furniture today, despite growing on our doorstep.

The tables draw inspiration from early dairy stools: three-legged, stable and turned from native wood. Each is made individually before being offered for sale, so that the particular grain, variation and character of each piece can be appreciated before a choice is made. Nothing is uniform or repeated.

A certified B Corp, Matthew Cox designs with a hundred-year horizon, making things beautiful and enduring to honour the material they came from.

www.matthewcox.com / @matthewcoxetc

People Make Clothes

A Conversation with Sofi Thanhauser

By Liz McLellan

I first encountered Sofi Thanhauser as the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, which traces the fabrics of our world and the human lives thrown asunder by the conquests of colonialism and capitalism. She is also, however, a musician, visual artist and Adjunct Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. While clothing has clearly planted itself as a tendril of curiosity and enchantment in her life, she pairs that fascination with serious journalistic rigour and a commitment to structural change.

Perhaps what the book does most powerfully and adeptly is lay bare an interconnected web of materials and socio-economic machinations. We are left with the sense that our world has a single living heartbeat and that we cannot, in fact, distance ourselves from it, as the fast-fashion industry would lead us to believe. Like shining a flashlight on a spider’s web at night, we suddenly see each previously obfuscated thread of connection. The web reveals the accumulation of wealth to be at the heart of social, political, cultural, health and ecological unraveling – a system in which profit is spun from extraction and every thread pulls tight somewhere else.

From this illuminated perspective, a deeply emotional world of grief and anger pulses through stories of disenfranchisement. We cannot look away. Yet Sofi also introduces hope, guiding us towards vital stories of revival unfolding in unexpected places.

Materially, the book moves from linen to silk, synthetics, cotton and wool: each fibre offering a lens into global trade histories, agricultural systems, labour struggles and the waves of industrialisation that reshaped them. Sofi’s writing weaves together primary archival documents, environmental research, first-person reporting and economic analysis. The depth of her thinking on a subject that, in today’s media landscape, has often been flattened into greenwashing catchphrases entirely reframes how we think about clothing.

I had the opportunity to speak with Sofi about the book, her research practice and what clothes mean to her.

Liz: How do you navigate the tension between approaching clothing through a research and history lens while also engaging with the urgent, solution-driven conversations happening around it today?

Sofi: I think I’m really glad to be able to participate in a conversation that I felt for some time wasn’t happening – and still isn’t happening at the level that it should be. But I do feel there are little fires burning in a lot of places, with people actually starting to look more deeply at what’s happened with clothing.

So on the one hand, writing this book has put me in touch with people who are doing really interesting, thoughtful work, either making clothes or thinking seriously about them. That’s a pleasure, because it’s fun to talk about such a big problem with people who are thinking about it seriously.

Also, it’s been a chip on my shoulder for quite some time – since before writing the book, during writing the book and after writing the book – that inherently there’s this way in which discussion of clothing is dismissed as being unserious, or it gets feminised and thought of as fundamentally anti-intellectual. That’s been a hobby-horse of mine for a long time. So it’s a blessing to be put in touch with people who understand: people you don’t have to explain the connection between the garment trade and imperialism to, for instance.

I’ll give you an example. A colleague of mine wrote a really interesting book recently about the U.S. Special Forces and the heroin trade, which is a subject that I see as completely parallel with a lot of the connective threads of the garment trade. One of the stories I tell in my book is about the U.S. and Honduras: there are a lot of connections there. Yet two different editors I’ve pitched a review of that book to said: “Sounds like an interesting book, but you’re the clothing lady. You wrote the book about clothes. Why should you write about the U.S. military?” So on certain levels of the media, outside of this niche of more interesting work happening, there is still this persistent idea that writing about clothing means writing about an unimportant cultural artefact.

Liz: Yes, as though it exists in its own world, rather than being connected to the systems we inhabit. I think that’s something your book does so well: it connects clothes to the workings of the systems we live within. Nothing happens in isolation. Everything is linked, and there are deep, intricate reasons why things unfold as they do.

Sofi: Totally. I think that’s really well put. And I think there is a very active mechanism in the media that de-links those things daily: separating politics from the objects of everyday life, which is kind of crazy-making for everybody.

Liz: In many sustainability conversations it feels as though brands are offering a “greener” version of the status quo, encouraging people to keep consuming, just from the perceived right sources. From your research, what concrete changes would you urge brands or producers to make if they genuinely want to transform how clothing is made?

Sofi: Probably the most important thing would be unionised labour forces. It depends on the scale people are working at. If it’s three guys in their basement, then just keep doing what you’re doing. I hope you can find health insurance, and let me try to tell everybody about you.

But in terms of making claims – a big company that is producing overseas and making any kind of claims about workers’ rights: if they’re not working with a labour union, or if labour isn’t providing the data on the ground about how things are going, then I kind of lose interest.

Any legal instrument that can create actual accountability for the brand in its relationship with the subcontractor and the work is critical. Otherwise there’s actually no need for the brand to avoid killing people. So that kind of legal instrument, plus worker-provided data, would be the two basics in my mind.

And then the claims around environmental impact are much harder to unpack. In the U.S. there’s nothing really approaching governmental legislation, as far as I’ve seen. But there are things happening in France, which is cool to see. It is possible to legislate around environmental impact in meaningful ways. At least we know that it’s not impossible. It’s actually pretty simple.

Liz: Whether digging into the practices of specific brands, or researching for your book, how did your research approach take shape? How do you decide which threads to follow and where to look for information?

Sofi: By the time I started doing archival research or reporting for this book, I had already gathered a ton of data simply by spending time in thrift stores, as someone who enjoys them. I often think people are led by interest or desire into gathering troves of data that are more comprehensive than what most researchers ever collect.

I wrote an article years ago about squid. I was trying to gather information about squid in the Cape Cod area and was speaking with research scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Their data was much less robust than fishermen’s data, because they go out once a month and the fishermen are out there every day.

Our interests can drive us to accumulate information. Mine drove me to accumulate enough information to become curious about certain things: touch and fabric type, construction, cuts and styles. After that came looking at labels, countries and union labels, and starting to wonder why a particular moment of shoulder pads was always made in Korea, trying to draw a connection between American mass-produced garment styles and foreign policy.

Once I started to develop that interest, I was led to academic books and articles. Academic writing can almost be biased against narrative. It’s out of style to tell stories. So, it can be difficult to wade through some of that material. But historians, sociologists and anthropologists have done a lot of meaningful work that can be accessed. I’m fortunate enough to have access to JSTOR, which is a great trove.

And then, in terms of my more active journalistic process, that was really led by trial and error and synchronicity. A lot of the time I had incredible experiences with synchronicity. I was doing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Wyoming and went to apply for a travel grant through the school to go to China. I asked one of my professors – who was a GIS specialist and taught in environment and natural resources – whether he would write me a recommendation for the grant.

He said, “You could go to China, but I’m from southern India and all my childhood friends are textile industrialists now. So do you want to just go there with me instead?”

And I was like, yeah, I do.

So that was amazing. Without him, I could never have seen Tamil Nadu in the way that I saw it. Then years later, after I had a book deal and received an advance that allowed me to travel to China, I happened upon a family friend who had spent time there. She lives in New York. I think she used to be a buyer for Bill Blass. I met up with her to interview her, and she invited me to China. So that too was amazing synchronicity.

And then in Honduras, I was beating my head against the wall because I had no entry point, but that was interesting in its own way. I had a labour union guy who just never showed up a couple of times. I didn’t even know how to interpret that. Different people later gave me different interpretations of what it might have meant. Sometimes I just have to accept that I’m going to be in the dark about a situation.

Liz: I think that’s often the nature of how you actually make connections with people, which tends to be the best way to get things done and do them well. It was also one of the most striking parts of the book for me: when you write about your experience speaking with farmers in India. It’s profoundly emotional and devastating to read.

Sofi: I definitely felt, and still feel in my current project, that my emotional body travels with me when I’m recording. I don’t know how other people do it, but I get personally very affected.

Liz: How does that translate into your writing process? What is the flow between emotion and analysis in your process?

Sofi: My ideal for a text that’s going to be brought before others is that it not be haphazardly riddled with my own emotions.

An immense amount of anger went into writing the book. In some ways, I was relieved of some of it by writing it. I felt really angry and had something I needed to say. And then I said it, and I did feel less angry. But I didn’t necessarily want to say it in an angry way. I also felt a lot of grief around many parts of the book. But I didn’t want it to be a book saturated with grief.

Liz: How does that translate into your teaching practice when dealing with issues that are steeped in those emotions? With the state of the environment and the textile industry as they are right now, it can be easy to reach a point where you feel quite hopeless. When you’re teaching and trying to transmit knowledge, how do you engage people in a way that empowers them to act rather than leaving them paralysed by grief?

Sofi: I have a funny relationship with teaching. I do teach at Pratt, but I generally don’t teach subject matter that directly relates to the book. I teach a graphic novel class and a class about creative writing pedagogy for children. I also teach a class called Fabric Book, which is probably the most closely aligned with Worn: A People’s History of Clothing. I assign Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years to my students, which I think is a really wonderful book.

The whole class is organised around making things. The first assignment is to make a loom. I don’t say how to make a loom. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s good pedagogy or not. I just tell them to figure it out – make a loom. And they all do. Some are very standard, some are really weird. The next assignment is to weave a story. It’s a strange prompt, but they all find a way to do it.

I think most students take the class partly because they really miss touching things. Many of them are graphic design students, animation students or creative writing students. They don’t often get opportunities in their coursework to make things physically. When I ask why they’re taking the class, almost all of them say that’s what they want. So for me it’s a very gratifying position to be in: enabling people to make things.

I think of myself more as a facilitator than a pedagogue. Maybe that’s because I get that out of my system in my writing. In a room full of young people, I don’t want to talk at them. It’s ironic, because my favourite classes in college were lectures where someone just talked at me for a couple of hours. But the way I tend to run things is much more communal and participatory.

Liz: It takes people out of receiving mode and into creating mode, which I think is really nice. There’s a balance between those perspectives: taking in knowledge, developing a critical perspective, and then doing something with it. The ability to shift into the creator mode, which can be a challenge.

Sofi: Often the students who are most engaged in their own process and their own work – those who are taking their artistic practice most seriously – are also the most generous and thoughtful when they consider other people’s work, because they know what it takes to make anything. They’re primed to be more receptive and attentive.

The students who are kind of phoning it in on their own creative work, on the other hand, are often very critical of others and very willing to dismiss things wholesale without examining them very thoroughly.

Liz: That’s so interesting. There’s this idea that the things we reject in ourselves are the things we reject in other people. When someone stifles their own creativity, the fear beneath it often sharpens their criticism of other people’s attempts to be seen.

Sofi: Indeed. When I was working on Worn, one of the things that struck me most when interviewing business people, whether from small companies or large ones, was how much their own way of practising their craft or running their business shaped how they saw reality.

The people who were doing things that were a little more radical, and informed by a belief in a different kind of future, were very awake and alive to the possibilities happening everywhere around them. Whereas the people who felt very constrained by market forces and focused on their bottom line often couldn’t see those things at all: that whole realm was invisible to them.

So I had to think about that for myself too. What am I tuning into at any given moment?

Recently I’ve also been thinking a lot about the way information moves. One of the things that having regular interactions with 19-year-olds has done is make me more aware of information networks and how people speak to one another outside the systems we’re increasingly directed towards through highly monetised, heavily surveilled online interactions.

Liz: What are your thoughts on sharing information and information networks as activism on Instagram? It’s something I’ve seen happening a lot, in ways that are both interesting and also quite limiting.

Sofi: Yes. I was recently reading about a radical architectural collective called Ant Farm. They were doing a lot of architectural and theatrical interventions, and eventually committed to more media-based work: both commenting on the media and trying to create alternative media networks.

There was a quote from one of them that I found really interesting about how alternative information circulating through traditional channels is never going to work. We need alternative channels.

On TikTok, for instance, the incredible creative work of millions of young people is just being mined by a large company. That’s strange to me. It’s like social interactions themselves are being mined. That reality is haunting me.

Liz: Mining is a really rich framework for thinking about it. It is connected to the material realities of mining, as relates to our digital world.

Sofi: They’re so connected. The mineral resources that go into producing any film are unbelievable. And that’s before even getting into the energy involved in these online attractions that seem so weightless but actually have very serious material counterparts out there.

Liz: It’s interesting because I feel there was a moment around AI when people suddenly became aware that digital things have a physical impact. We hadn’t really thought about that before, which is kind of wild.

Sofi: It was an interesting moment where that surfaced in a real way for people: “oh, this is an immense drain on water and energy. What do we think about that?”

I’m old enough to remember what it was like before social media and cell phones. Just rediscovering the pleasures of company, of spending time with people, of having a party, of actually meeting people through other people, of getting information that way. If I’m in a new city, for instance, I might use the internet to figure out where to eat. But I’d much rather find out through someone. If I find a good restaurant, I’m going to ask the waitress where else is good.

I like those kinds of networks. I find them more reliable and absolutely more pleasurable too. So yes, to your point: we’re still here, people are still here, we can still talk to each other.

Liz: It totally changes the emotional relationship to the experience of where you are: the ability to just be present with what you’re doing, as opposed to feeling that there are a million options out there and you need to experience all of them. Do you have any particular projects or developments that are making you feel hopeful right now?

Sofi: In my writing I’m working on a quite different set of histories and materials. I’m writing about houses, actually, which are connected in many ways, but it’s a different field of inquiry. I have my eye on hemp and flax and, to a certain extent, I keep being drawn back into conversations happening in textiles.

Last October I went to Venice to speak at a sustainable textiles conference and met some really interesting people. There was a woman there from Italy’s last surviving factory producing a non-synthetic lining material. She shared a bit of her story with me.

I was also working a little with Oregon State and their Canvas Research Institute, because they’re interested in trying to build hemp supply chains. That was a little dispiriting at first, though it’s not over yet. It’s just not clear whether the market, as it’s currently configured, will reward domestic fibre production because of processing bottlenecks. At a conference Oregon State organised with a few brand representatives, they were very direct. They said: “Look, customers don’t care if the material is from the U.S. or not. You need to give us a better reason to buy domestic. Is it better performing? Is it cheaper? Then we’ll talk. Otherwise we can’t make money from that promise.”

But on the other hand there are promising uses for hemp in building, in hempcrete, for example. And yet, no miracle material is going to fix anything. It’s about how things are integrated into systems, and whether those systems work for the environment and for people.

But that being said, I think it’s a cool plant – and a cool project.

Liz: There are some interesting hemp and linen projects happening in Canada too. The CEO behind Eliza Faulkner has started a company called Canflax, working to rejuvenate the flax production industry there.

Sofi: That’s cool. That’s always an interesting thrift-store find – when you see a “Made in Canada” label. I’ve seen some interesting hemp and linen pieces made in Canada, and there’s always good wool. Although I spent ten years working on this book, there are still infinite other cool stories out there that I don’t know about. And I love that. I love that there are so many things I still don’t know.

A couple of years ago, I was in Hungary and spent a lot of time in Hungarian thrift stores. There’s this whole Soviet-bloc world that I had never gotten into before. It’s super fascinating. You see a lot of “Made in Poland” labels, for instance, and you start thinking about how a similar story of deindustrialisation happened there, but with its own particular flavour.

Liz: What’s your current approach to, and your personal relationship with, clothing? Are you still a thrifter? What kind of clothes do you like to buy and wear?

Sofi: Yes, I’m a thrifter for life. It’s something I really enjoy. I think it’s one of the main ways I relax.

This doesn’t happen anymore because I don’t live within walking distance of a thrift store, but when I was living in Laramie and working on my thesis there were times when I would arrive at a thrift store and think, “Wait, how did I get here?” It was almost like muscle memory: something that would override everything else. If I was hungry, or had to pee, or was irritated, all of that would disappear. I’d walk into a thrift store and all my needs would be suspended for at least 30 minutes. I’d just be pleasantly engaged.

Liz: I know that feeling very well.

Sofi: Yeah. There are a couple of things I’ve gotten into recently: wool, specifically merino wool undergarments. That’s a new one for me. I’m completely sold on them personally. Where has this been all my life?

Liz: Are there other books that have informed your thinking, or that you’d recommend?

Sofi: I mentioned Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. I think that’s a classic, it offers an interesting perspective and it’s very accessible.

I also recently discovered a book I think is really fascinating. I can’t believe it took me so long. It’s called The Grand Domestic Revolution by historian Dolores Hayden. It’s about 19th-century feminism and the focus on collectivising housework. Basically, these women were saying: unless we have collective kitchens for whole communities and collective childcare, nothing is going to work for women.

Her argument is that this was the central feminism of the second half of the 19th century, and it’s largely been forgotten. I had never heard about any of this, which was astonishing to me as someone who takes an interest in 19th-century feminism.

And I recently visited an old Shaker village – have you heard of the Shakers?

Liz: Oh yeah.

Sofi: That was mind-blowing, because they had water-powered laundry systems. Individual women used to spend entire days doing laundry by hand, but the Shakers organised it collectively with water-powered machinery. Women had a lot more time on their hands. That’s part of the story Dolores Hayden is telling.

Liz: If people haven’t read your book yet, is there a takeaway or some kind of foundation you think is important for people to understand about their relationship to clothing and textiles today?

Sofi: People make clothes.

Sofi Thanhauser writes about global history and politics. She is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon, 2022), with a second book, Shelter, forthcoming from Riverhead. Alongside her writing, she works as a multimedia artist with language, image, song, textile, video and performance. https://sofithanhauser.com

Hello precious people,

Before Liz returns to Paris, I wanted to share something important.

Once a year, we open submissions for The Lissome. It’s a special moment when the magazine becomes a shared space of inquiry, shaped not only by us, but by the wider community around it.

For Issue No. 6, we invite you to respond to a theme that feels both ancient and acutely contemporary: Deep Beauty – a thread that runs from William Morris’s News from Nowhere to our own unsettled times.

We are living through an era in which vast decisions about how we live and what kinds of worlds are built around us are increasingly made without care or consent. Ugliness, in this sense, is not incidental. It is a by-product of systems that value speed, extraction and control over dignity and life.

In such a moment, beauty is neither surface quality nor escape. When approached with seriousness, it sharpens our discernment. It helps us sense what kind of world we are participating in – and whether we can imagine, and practise, something different.

We are interested in beauty as a moral and imaginative force. Beauty that re-attunes us to the living world, that asks us to stay present with complexity rather than offering easy comfort. We are drawn to how these questions surface in lived practice – in making, designing, writing, growing, repairing, teaching, organising and caring.

This issue is an invitation to journey with beauty in its many dimensions: luminous and difficult, nourishing and dangerous, intimate and political.

If this resonates with you, we would be honoured to receive your response. You can find the full call and detailed submission guidelines here: www.thelissome.com/submission-call

The submission deadline is 16 March.
If selected, final content will be due by 1 June.

And now, back to Paris – Liz continues her reflections from Fashion Week.

With warmth and curiosity,
Dörte
xx

Staying Connected Amidst the Noise of Ego

Paris Fashion Week Part 2, by Liz McLellan

Some of the most magical moments of Paris Fashion Week arose, unplanned, like seeds sprouting from the crack between bricks. Sometimes, entering into moments or events with an open palm to what arises, can allow for a certain freedom, flexibility and a spirit of adventure. The world responds. Moments unfold, and people enter into your world. Reflecting on the week, I’m feeling very grateful for the people I met, and the chance encounters that brought us together.

I started the second half of my week at the Gathering showroom, where Haider and his team were shooting friends and family in their pieces for their next lookbook. The collection consists of earth toned naturally dyed fibres, in rough durable finishes. Everything feels like it could be worn comfortably on a hike, yet equally inhabits a world of design and refined, thoughtful details.

Waxed cotton jackets feature heavily, from large billowing outer shells with compactable hoods, to button up chore jackets. Some stripes, herringbones, and kantha stitched pieces make appearances amongst the muted tones. The brand makes its mark through textiles and textures.

In a moment of serendipity, the designers from Wenjue Lu were in the showroom at the same time. Haider introduced us, and we dove into beautiful conversations about philosophy and materiality. I later had the opportunity to visit their showroom. I had no idea they were even in Paris, although I had been a longtime follower and lover of their work from the distant vantage point of instagram.

After gathering, I wandered, or if I’m being honest, sprinted, over to the collective showroom of The Backward Vendor, Seventy Five London, and Monad London.

April at The Backward Vendor makes everything in-house in her studio in East London. She has the word Backward tattooed across the first joint of her hands in a playful botanical font. Her approach to leather is unlike any I’ve seen before. She wet moulds it into sculptural forms that can become organic or architectural in different contexts.

Her new collection featured a plush chocolate brown padded leather jacket with sculptural three dimensional tan pockets, and as always, whimsical mismatched buttons. Shearling features largely in her work, and speaking to her about it brought forth her deep love of the animals and their personalities. Each piece has a sheep’s name associated with it.

Downstairs in the same space, Janny and Carwyn behind Seventy Five London were showing their new collection, deeply inspired by vintage Chinese patterns. Carwyn is a senior lecturer at SOAS University of London, focusing on global China in digital society and geography. He brings a critical theory and deep thinking to the brand, which, combined with the oral history and family photos from Janny creates something quite special.

The fabrics are impeccable, and finished with details like characteristically chinese asymmetric button ups. They have a signature folding pant, iterated in different fabrics, that from each side folds over pocketed panels that tie at the front.

A particularly luscious black velvet jacket caught my eye, finished with striped panels of the same fabric, creating difference simply through the way the light catches on the fabric. It’s amazing, and humbling, as a person who spends a lot of time researching and writing about niche brands and textiles to be introduced to someone entirely new.

I walked upstairs to find Monad London’s deliberate and elemental collection. He introduces asynchronous details, like a floral print on the inside of an otherwise understated wool jacket. The print was overdyed, creating deep muted tones - some small details kept the original print, in its bright vivacity. Raw edges feature prominently in his work: a black straight cut bomber jacket becomes intimate, warm and totally new with threads hanging from its edges.

Somehow, I had time to squeeze in a visit to Lois Dionisio, which was well worth it. Lois is a Frenchman, hailing from Lyon, who makes everything in-house in his studio there. He trained with Geoffrey B. Small in Italy, and this becomes clear is his meticulous tailoring married with a love of the beauty of imperfection.

Workwear is at the essence of his design work, featuring aged copper rivets with a perfect teal patina. Natural dying techniques colour all of his garments, but become evident in subtly eco-printed pieces, in muted tones. We spoke about the challenge of pricing, when such a level of detail is going into each piece, and the scale of the production is so small.

Finally, I ended off the day at Archivio J.M. Ribot’s 10th anniversary showroom, where I hadn’t made an appointment, but a chance encounter with upcycling artisanal maker Aaron Pinkert led me to arrive there. The door to enter is ornamented by an iron unicorn knocker: we were then greeted by a room full of horned giant paper mache heads atop patchwork wool jackets. The space reflects the brand’s aesthetic and energy: cluttered with antique art and crystal sconces.

Karim’s world feels very at home in this environment: with the addition of new prints, and a lot of patchwork, his newest collection stays within its tried and true identity. One new print features the art of American 20th century artists Henry Dager, whose vibrant watercolour scenes depict fantastical fairy children alongside violent battles. I found myself generously welcomed into a moment of celebration, popping champagne and relaxing a little after a long day of communicating with buyers.

On my last day in Paris I had a long visit with the designers at Wenjue Lu, before heading to Aleksandr Jurczak showing in the Lucentment showroom, and ending out the whole visit at Aviva Jifei Xu. The two creators behind Wenjue Lu are equal parts philosopher and designer: each collection is created with a book, in which every detail from paper, to ink, to binding feels considered. Images of their collection are threaded into a story with quotes from philosophers.

They go into detail about their textiles, like Peace silk, which is harvested without boiling the silkworms alive. One page in a collection’s book is dedicated to a text about their lifelong mending initiative. It is what it says: the brand will mend any piece from their collection for its entire life.

Much of their work is informed by Taoist principles: “unity between heaven and humanity” - which, for them, describes letting go of the ego to experience the innate connection we inhabit within the flow of the universe.

Oh, and then there’s the actual clothing! Created entirely in natural cotton colours and minimal natural dyes, the playfulness of the forms is paired with a simplicity of colour. From the beginning, their clothing has been integrated with a sculptural practice: moving from drawing, to plush three dimensional doll creatures, to clothing. There is a movement, a change, that arises through each piece because of this process. The final result IS what it is because of each step they took to get there.

Leaving the cocoon that was their intimate showroom, I headed to Lucentement where I met Aleksandr Jurczek whose practice also verges on sculpture. He uses a combination of traditional hat making techniques, with some inventive practices he has developed to create unique finishes.

Upon first viewing, one would expect the hats to be made of leather. A mix of shea and wax treatments, along with burning, takes soft felted wool and rabbit textures into hardened shapes with sheen and lustre. Aleksandr is based in Poland, and sources much of his fabrics from old hat companies, a sort of repurposing that still allows him to create something totally his own.

A few other brands, including shoemaker IDAS and designer Xaris were showing in the same space. Leo, the designer of IDAS produces all of his concise collection of shoes with horse leather from animals that die naturally of age. The historic feeling of the design is paired with functional details like magnetic closures of panels over the laces.

Xaris surprised me. I had never heard of the brand, and had the opportunity to chat with the founder, Kevin. His references and depth of thinking at every detail in the collection were astounding. Pulling from Art Deco references, jackets were lined with a geometric patterned cotton textile. Arm holes were stitched with a triangular pattern, meeting a circle that partly detaches from the rest of the sleeve. In this way, themes moved fluidly throughout the pieces in multifarious iterations, at varying scales.

In the finale of the entire week, I headed to Aviva Jifei Xu, where the space greeted me with warm patterned Afghan rugs, flowers, and rich fabrics draped over surfaces. The table in the centre of the room featured shoes made in collaboration with Japanese brand Shoe & Sewn. Perhaps the best word to describe The Aviva collection is cozy. I would hate, however, for that to be reductive of their approach and mastery.

Double layered and reversible pieces are a core tenant of their work, with puffers that are so beautifully constructed that they can be worn two ways, and shirts. Sometimes the treatment of liner versus outer fabric is surprising: what you would expect to be on the inside moves to the outer, and vice versa. Somehow it totally makes sense.

Once you visit enough showrooms, you could be overwhelmed by the experience of clothing. At the end of the day, it’s all just clothing. Yet, the experience of speaking to all of the designers and really understanding their perspectives, intentions and process fills their pieces with vitality and meaning.

It makes me wish that every consumer of these clothes, or any clothes, for that matter, could have the opportunity to have such intimate interactions around each piece they purchase. A connection to the maker and their process. Imagine how much would change about the way we consume if that was the case.

Fashion week really can be a beautiful experience in following loose threads, allowing unexpected moments to surprise you, and staying open to the possibilities of creation amongst the noise of ego and mass production.

Liz
xx

I came, technically uninvited, like so many other people there. Some of the most incredible, attentive and thoughtful conversations I had were completely unplanned. There’s a sort of magic to this feeling of existing and circulating in a neighbourhood of Paris, buzzing with people with adjoining intentions. While so many people come for the purpose of selling their work, or alternatively buying said work for their shops; the buying and the selling somehow felt secondary to this excitement and care for creation and beauty.

In a way, The Lissome is held by a similar kind of ecosystem – informal, relational and sustained through care. For many years, we’ve shared The Lissome’s online articles and newsletter freely, as a way of staying in touch and thinking alongside you. As a small, dedicated team, we put a great deal of love, time and attention into this work – and we’ve reached a moment where, in order to sustain it with integrity, we need to evolve how we hold and support it.

We want to approach this as an invitation, rather than a shift behind a paywall. Moving toward a paid membership would allow us to go deeper and work in a more intentional rhythm. It creates the conditions for longer conversations, more carefully held features and space to stay with questions rather than rushing toward answers.

Most importantly, it’s a way of turning The Lissome into something we sustain together. Your support directly shapes what we’re able to explore, commission and nurture – and helps protect the kind of tender, rigorous and holistic work that doesn’t sit easily within faster publishing models. Becoming a member isn’t about access or perks. It’s about standing with a way of working that values craft, culture and care – and recognising that this kind of storytelling needs time and shared responsibility to continue.

If this resonates, you’re warmly invited to be part of this next chapter. And if now isn’t the right moment, that’s okay too – The Lissome remains something you can return to in your own time.

That same attention to process and integrity showed up again and again throughout the week. I started out with a visit to the Maison Douillet showroom, a brand I’ve become increasingly familiar with over the last year, as I’ve been following along their process. It’s been incredible to watch their creative approach evolve and develop through both form and materials.

The brand is run by brothers Clement and Germain Douillet. One product we chatted about was a wool-filled cotton coat. Through trial and error they developed something plush with enormous integrity. They work entirely with french manufacturers, and natural fibres.

Starting from unisex pieces with fairly boxy silhouettes, they have developed tailored wool ensembles that can be layered up or down. A particularly beautiful and form fitting hood was the star of the show.

While the week is a “Men’s” fashion week, there were plenty of womenswear, or sometimes just more feminine pieces peppered through collections. This was an interesting conversation I had with one designer: the default of unisex tends to be menswear, which women can wear. Why not have more tailored or “feminine” pieces that can be worn by men?

Following this, I had the opportunity to visit Kai and his sweet dog Louis in his cozy showroom: a repurposed architect’s office. Kai’s brand, entitled An Irrational Element, references a quote from philosopher Karl Popper. The resulting essence of his orientation towards making seems to be an openness and intimate, imaginative connection to the process.

Some designers can hold trade secrets close to their hearts, but Kai talked warmly and openly about his production methods and process. He’ll freely admit that he’s not reinventing the wheel: his first shoe was a pretty classic GAT, and his latest knitwear is based off of a flight jacket. Yet, each of these pieces feels entirely new, recontextualized through materials, colours and his unique eye. I particularly love people that talk about their lives, spending time outside walking their dogs, and the importance of this in the scope of running their business.

That evening, I headed to the Aenrmous collection launch party, where we mostly chatted about language and its many charming vernacular turns of phrase. Aenrmous is an ‘artisanal techwear’ brand, which has evolved enormously over the last 6 collections. They started basically printing on t-shirts, and matured towards highly sophisticated and innovative construction details in wide-ranging collections.

Something beautiful about their designs are this combination of ‘technical’ construction and futuristic swooping shoulders or giant pockets with refined and artisanal details like mother of pearl buttons with loose thread hanging from them like hair.

The next day, I wandered into the Middle Distance, Tender, Working and Abicsi showroom, where I had a lovely chance encounter and chat with the owners of Goodies shop in Oxford. Matt and Rachael are longtime stockists of Tender, and it makes perfect sense why. Their excitement at construction details and eagerness to chat fibres feel very at home in the Tender Co. universe.

One striking element of our conversation, and others, is how much of buying and selling is about connection and relationships. People make things, and people buy things. They’re the most important quotient in the whole equation, and there’s no way around that wonderful truth.

The warm colours and down to earth fibres in workwear inspired silhouettes are something William Kroll has been doing for 15 years. He spoke to me about how, often, his design process is guided by materials and real world possibilities: emergent properties arise, but are not defined by a concept at the start.

There’s a degree to which, in operating this way, you need to let go of control. Jesus take the wheel, or what have you. Regardless, I think this is quite a beautiful way to think about any creative practice, and one I hope to work on in my own life. William seems to just be born with it.

His business partner Robert, who I also had the pleasure of visiting at his studio in Glasgow, is different. Together, they have created Working , which, when you see Robert’s brand Middle Distance, makes sense as the love child of the two of them.

Middle Distance is highly considered: it consists of garments for ‘technical’ outdoor wear, made with Irish linen and an innovative biodegradable waterproof film. The details are surprising and new: drawstrings cinched with balls that look like polished asteroids, and labels with Ursula K. Le Guin quotes printed in them.

There’s definitely something otherworldly about Robert’s work, but simultaneously, in materials that are SO of this natural world, in a moment where so much in this industry’s production feels alien to our organic, porous and soft bodies.

The next brand I saw is perhaps a lesser known, small french company called Céucle, run by Auriane Blandin-Gall. She works with entirely upcycled fabrics, creating unisex collections that are refined over the years, on a similar theme. She started creating kids clothes, then eventually had to admit to herself she actually wanted to own and run a fashion label.

The way she’s doing it, though, is definitely not the norm. She seems like a total nerd for the technical details, which I absolutely adore. The pieces are simple, and attuned for movement. An aspect of her design inspiration is hip-hop and dance culture, which is visible in both the construction and style. There was one particular grey seersucker top with two buttons at the collar and an asymmetric folded front seam that completely had my heart.

One other entirely upcycled brand I had the joy of visiting was Hul le Kes, out of Arnhem in the Netherlands. Sjaak Hullekes and Sebastiaan Kramer founded the brand using entirely upcycled fabrics, and throughout their journey have developed an entire social enterprise.

They created a recovery studio, where those recovering from mental health challenges work in their garment production facility. This degree of intention and action coming together in a holistic plan to create ethical clothing production is extremely, extremely rare. In the ways that sustainability have been taken up by the corporate marketing spurn, greenwashing has become common practice. Unions and social enterprises are simply less sexy, and do not hold the same possibility of profit.

The two founders were funny, down to earth and clearly care about the right things, in my opinion. What’s the point of creating, if we’re not creating something new? Living out our values?

I think a lot of people get lost in the process of trying to succeed and support themselves; and fair enough. Yet how refreshing to see a dream being actualized. They’ve created a garment passport for each piece, which allows the wearer to continue to document its lifecycle and the experiences, emotions, and changes it is a part of.

One interesting aspect of speaking to so many different designers, is that their approach really does seem to hinge on one major factor. Are they working with manufacturers, or producing in house?

Now, neither is necessarily better than the other, but it does considerably change the design process, and what it means to create clothing. For example, if you’re producing in-house your order quantities are generally smaller, but you also have more degree of control and conceptual freedom in your creative output.

Your process will naturally be different than someone who is researching, communicating with and developing ideas, patterns and fabrics with a manufacturer. Collaboration can be a beautiful thing, and working with certain manufacturers can bring a level of quality and mastery to the construction that you may never be able to achieve otherwise.

On the other hand, there is an intimacy with the process for those creating all their own pieces. It changes how the designers think and speak about their pieces and their work. Or, perhaps they themselves thought that way to begin with and that’s why they chose the path they did.

A bit of a chicken and egg situation, but either way, it’s an interesting framework to understand different design practices. I will admit, I have a soft spot for the in-house labels, but that’s just me.

I couldn’t possibly fit all the breadth of beauty and inspiration I experienced into one article, so you can look forward to a second part where I’ll talk about The Backward Vendor, Archivio J.M. RIbot’s 10th anniversary showroom, Seventy Five London, Aviva Jifei Xue, Aleksandr Jurczak, and Monad London, along with Gathering, IDAS and Wenjue Lu.

Now, I know this doesn’t sufficiently answer the question, what’s the point? But I promise I’ll get to it in part 2, which will be out in two weeks.

Liz
xx

Hello precious people,

I hope you had a gentle, festive time and I wish you a very happy New Year.

I always love to spend the days after Christmas in a cosy cocoon, with ample time to read and dream, meet friends, and walk without real destination. And when I slowly step back out into the world in early January, I often feel a moment of slight hesitation and melancholy, but paired with equal amounts of curiosity.

In the last few weeks, I picked up News from Nowhere by William Morris again and it brought me back to his vision of a future where values have fundamentally shifted, inequality has ceased and a reverence for nature, culture and crafts is foundational to everything.

And I was deeply moved by Jane Goodall’s Famous Last Words, where she reminded us of hope as an antidote to apathy. A force that helps us step into the light and keep working for what we know to be true and beautiful. I really needed to hear these words and remind myself that hope matters. And that it is all around us, despite everything. I sense forward momentum, the time of apathy is coming to an end. And I know, change doesn’t arrive fully formed; it grows because people come together and choose to act.

This first newsletter of the year feels rooted in that spirit. It opens with reflections by Sandrine Demers, a core long-term team member and steward of The Lissome, which feel like a natural continuation of questions we’ve been circling for years. For the second time, she has committed to an experiment of buying only a handful of new clothing items over a year, not as restriction, but as an invitation into creativity that opens new spaces of possibility.

Alongside her reflections, we’re grateful for the many voices that continue to shape this space. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who took part in our reader survey. Reading your responses has been incredibly nourishing for us, and they’re already informing how we’re thinking about the next issue and the directions we want to explore this year.

Sandrine’s reflections also echo something Jane Goodall spoke about: the power of living with awareness and integrity. Small, mindful choices may not replace systemic change (and we absolutely need political action and fundamental structural shifts!), but how we move through life every day shapes our mindset, our attention and our sense of care. When we act intentionally, with gratitude and loving-kindness, we stop moving through the world on autopilot. And that matters.

I want to end on this note of hope. I believe it’s worth allowing ourselves to step in and stay present, making the world more beautiful through both our creations and our way of being. Let’s return, gently, to planting the seeds.

And now, I’ll leave you in Sandrine’s good company,
sending much love!

Dörte
xx

What Happens When You Stop Shopping
and Start Playing with Your Clothes

Words by Sandrine Demers

Another year in clothes has come and gone. Here I stand, with my closet door opened, wondering where my clothes will take me next year. January is a good time to pause and listen more closely to what is already hanging in front of me.

Last year, at the same time, I shared a personal experiment I had just begun: committing to buying only five new items of clothing over the course of a year. What started as an experiment turned into a practice that I’ve continued to build on since.

The experiment is grounded in research by the Hot or Cool Institute, Berlin. Their report Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space helped me understand that the most impactful shift isn’t choosing the ‘right’ clothes, but radically reducing how many new ones we bring into our lives in the first place.

Here’s a quick reminder of the rules breakdown:

“If no other actions are implemented, such as repairing/mending, washing at lower temperatures, or buying second-hand, purchases of new garments should be limited to an average 5 items per year [with 85 items in total in your wardrobe] for achieving consumption levels in line with the 1.5-degree target.”
- (Hot or Cool Institute Berlin, 2022)

Reading this was sobering, but also strangely liberating.

The idea is simple: is it possible to spend one full year and buy only five new fashion items?

This includes everything from outerwear to jewellery, shoes, clothes, sportswear, etc. Core essentials such as underwear can be replaced on a 1:1 basis if they are unsalvageable. Everything else should be purchased second hand or saved from deadstock end-of-life.

Here is what the year looked like in practice:

The 2025 countdown

1. February: Studio Citizen contrast-stitch cargo pants

2. March: Maguire Carpi Cow Large Leather Bag

3. June: Kitdo MagniClip Glossy Sterling

4. October: Bare Knitwear Alpaca Beanie

5. No fifth item!

Although I’ve had plenty of fun with my four new items this year, the lessons that came with this year-long practice remain my personal favourite part of the process.

Over time, this practice helped me recognise three different versions of myself that show up in my closet:

The past self, the fantasy self, and the elevated self.

Your past self is the self that keeps something just because it was expensive, it was a gift, it used to fit, or [insert any other excuse here]. Allow yourself to have a closet where guilt isn’t taking up half the hangers.

Your fantasy self is the self that tries to wear something because it’s cool, it’s trending on Instagram, or [insert any other comparison here]. Allow yourself to dress in authenticity and let it act as a magnet.

Your elevated self is rooted in reality and what you know about yourself, with an added sparkle. Think about what the child in you has always loved (for me, it’s funky matching sets and chunky platform sandals). Forget about your past self and fantasy self and start creating your elevated self. It’s the real you, at its best.

This year, I’ve had the joy to reach closer towards my elevated self. I’ve spent hours playing in my closet, trying to recreate inspiration I found online or stumbled upon in the streets; fashion ideas that struck a chord of whimsy and excitement, just like when I was a kid. I’ve buttoned mismatched cardigans together, used necklaces as keychains, transformed blazers into dresses, and so on. This cost me about $0 and no outings to the store.

Yet I had, available for free play at any desired time, a closet full of what I know and the mystery of what I don’t know yet.

While playing with my clothes, one of my favourite and most frequent hobbies, I never feel outdated, uncool, or out of place. This play practice allows me to find the blind spots in my closet to enhance it with second hand items (and my four new finds), while remaining mindful of the 85-item closet limit. What should I switch out? What should I repair? Is there something that fits beautifully but would look oh so much better if dyed? Purchasing stands last on my list of options because it takes out part of the fun in the journey.

So I pull out all of my hangers and I lay them out on my bed, I browse through my accessories, and I play dress up in front of my floor-length mirror. The child in me is bubbling – after all, she’s the one who knows me best. I combine my items in an imaginative way, and let it stimulate the creative muscles in my brain. It feels very personal, almost identity-rooted. No other creative practice has allowed me to feel this as deeply, a spark that fulfils what we usually anchor in consumption.

New? No, but new to me

A reminder that novelty doesn’t have to be bought.

We are often tied to the idea of wanting to spoil ourselves, of buying clothes to ignite and feed this fabricated desire of newness. Throughout this process, I encourage you to reframe your own concept of fun and untie it from the one of consumption. This slower and more attentive way of relating to clothes feels deeply aligned with how we think about fashion at The Lissome.

Here is an example: If your raincoat is ripped up and water is seeping through it, you might need a new one if it’s unrepairable; and there is almost certainly one in an excellent condition second hand somewhere. If you need to buy a raincoat because you don’t like the one you have, that is not a need, that is a want. And wants, I’ve learned, deserve time.

Stay with the raincoat you dislike, take that time to sit with the discomfort and identify what you really love, and then slowly search until you find what you actually want. And of course, re-home* the one you dislike in the process.

(*Re-home: A more mindful way of donating where you find where the item will go, rather than making it disappear in a random donation bag; because trash doesn’t disappear, it just goes out of sight.)

I talk about clothes every day, with every type of people imaginable: those who deeply care about their clothes, those who never think about them for a day in their lives, people who have lost their entire wardrobes and others who have accumulated tons. What’s interesting is that we all have “clothes”, as a concept, in common. We all wear clothes: some that we adore, some with which we make do, and others that we despise.

This idea of owning only the clothes you love, in its simplest expression, does seem to resonate with almost everyone in the above categories – more so than the one of shopping. Because ultimately, that’s what brings us together: the clothes we love, why we love them, and the unique stories behind them.

The Mindfulness muscle

The discomfort I refer to with the raincoat is the ideal spot to sit in and listen to yourself, to channel your elevated self. So much so that I use the month of January every year as a month that actively creates space for said discomfort. I participate in No Spend January, where I spend nothing for 31 days, apart from my recurring bills and rent. I use up all my pantry and freezer items, finish my pile of to-be-read books, go on walks, invite friends over to have dinner at home or coffee in the park, and completely remove myself from consumer society.

I also use this month to daydream and plan for the rest of the year. What do I look forward to accomplishing? What brings me happiness? Where will I seek beauty? And of course, with all this free real estate in my mind, I think of my clothes. What is my style manifesto for the year? What areas of my closet fulfil me, and which areas bring me discomfort?

Because I train my mindfulness muscle all year long, the 5-items-a-year challenge is in itself immensely easier than one might think. It does not make my relationship with fashion dreadful or boring, nor does it make it absent of joy or interest. Playing around with the rule of 5 feels like a very expansive and entertaining exercise. The rumours are indeed true: when you are not shopping, there is so much free time left to play.

Soft Activism

The last idea I want to touch on before I leave you with your playground for the next year is soft activism. I count the rule of 5 as a form of soft activism, similarly to the idea of a no-spend month. The goal behind this is to bring to the mainstream the idea of counter-consumption – an idea that is still very challenging in countless social spheres – where we can feel full, content, excited, amazed and enriched, without having to participate in any trend chase.

As someone from Canada, which is one of the top polluting OECD countries, I believe that the simplest act we can participate in to considerably lower our environmental impact is to downsize our consumption as much as possible (and yes, holding corporations and governments accountable is crucial too); that rather than buying the best most sustainable option out there, we can simply not buy anything. That action in itself, if you take the time to sit with the discomfort of it, is truly revolutionary.

Voting with your dollar is a system-limited mindset. Think outside the box, let it change your world (and the one around you).

If there is one invitation I’ll leave you with, it’s this: make space this year. For some discomfort, for lots more play, and for discovering what you already have.

Warmest wishes for this next year ahead,
Don’t forget to have fun!

Sandrine
xx

Hello precious people,

As we near the end of this season of Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome, our final episode brings us into the world of visual artist and creative director María Baños, founder of the creative and curatorial studio Art Studies and co-initiator of the former female movement Muses of Now. María’s multidisciplinary practice spans film, art publications and scenography, all connected by a distinct sense of intuition and empowered female storytelling.

In conversation with our host, Hardeep Kaur, they explore the themes that guide María’s work: her fascination with the mystical and the communal, her dedication to transmitting the beauty of the intangible and her commitment to creating spaces that invite subtle, collective transformation. Together, they revisit Muses of Now as an exploration of contemporary female archetypes, before turning towards Shifting Landscapes, the seed-shaped sculptural and performative work María created alongside artist Berta Blanca T. Ivanow and architect Andrea Tusell i Falcó.

🎧 Listen to the latest episode:

Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome
María Baños on ritual, collective creation and the wisdom of the seed

→ Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

First presented in Barcelona, the artwork travelled through the city in a gentle procession accompanied by twelve women, a moment that unfolded, as writer Reeme Idris beautifully observes in The Lissome No. 5, “like a civic ritual – part protest, part prayer”.

When María first shared images of the procession with me, I was immediately struck by its beauty, but also by a deeper significance that felt important to explore more deeply within the pages of the magazine. The seed, in this context, was not just a poetic symbol; it appeared to me as a vessel of regenerative wisdom on which our existence (quite literally) depends. I sensed that María and her collaborators had created a work whose dreamlike appearance also carried a powerful political transmission, inviting viewers to look more closely at the humble seed as the bearer of life.

It was a joy to develop the piece with Reeme, who shaped this story angle into an incisive article, situating the artwork within the wider landscape of seed sovereignty and the escalating threats to our ecological commons. Her writing reminds us that seeds are not metaphors alone but repositories of biodiversity, cultural memory and future resilience. When we lose them, we lose entire worlds.

This living and embodied dimension also sits at the heart of María and Hardeep’s conversation. Shifting Landscapes treats the seed as a holder of regenerative intelligence and a reminder of the interdependence we so often forget in our accelerated lives. Its passage through the busy streets of Barcelona asked passers-by to pause and feel its ancient wisdom. This intentional form of presence became in itself a form of resistance.

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Our reader survey remains open until 31 December.

As we close this year, we are deeply grateful for the thoughtful reflections and suggestions that many of you already shared with us. Your insights are helping us understand what resonates and where The Lissome might evolve next. We look forward to sharing some of these findings with you in the new year.

As a thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with us, you’ll receive a 20 % discount for our online shop and the chance to win a copy of our latest print edition, The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees.

We’d love to hear from you!

Take the Survey

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Until then, we invite you to settle into Reeme’s full article below, available in full for our paid subscribers, with a preview for our free readers, as we continue tracing the wisdom held within Shifting Landscapes.

As the festive season is just around the corner, we invite you to gift a print or digital copy of The Lissome to someone who would cherish its beauty and depth. It’s a perfect companion for the winter months.

→ Share The Lissome with someone you love

Much love and see you next month,
Dörte & The Lissome team x

Shifting Landscapes

Seeds, Resistance and the Poetics of Regeneration

Words by Reemé Idris

In June last year, a quiet procession moved through the streets of Barcelona. Twelve women walked in gentle formation, accompanying Shifting Landscapes, an artwork making its way to the Palau Robert gardens, where it remained on public view until the end of the month. This silent performance unfolded like a civic ritual – part protest, part prayer – its slow, meditative rhythm contrasting with the city’s usual tempo. It centred women not as performers, but as stewards: guardians of origin, carriers of memory and sustainers of life.

Shifting Landscapes draws on the seed, humble yet potent, as both symbol and signal. As its creators, artist Berta Blanca T. Ivanow, creative director María Baños Egüen and architect Andrea Tusell i Falcó, explain: “Seeds reflect beginnings, an evolution that transforms into abundance, similar to art, which believes in the process of transformation, the cycle of life, and the nature of tangible and intangible things as catalysts for change.” Conceived as a sculptural offering to the Earth and its cycles, the work transforms the seed into a site of reflection – on ancestry, regeneration and possibility. It asks us to reconsider our relationship with nature, as participants in a living web of exchange (1). The procession became, perhaps unintentionally, a study in the power of nonviolent resistance. Its strength lay not in confrontation but in quiet presence, in choosing attentiveness over urgency, inviting collective participation rather than coercive force (2).

The seed itself, this ancient vessel of life, is increasingly under threat. During the so-called “Green Revolution” in the 20th century, a dramatic transformation in global agriculture took place. High-yielding variety seeds, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides and intensive irrigation became standard tools in efforts to increase food production. While the “revolution” initially succeeded in averting famines and raising yields, its ecological and social costs were profound.

Paid subscribers can continue reading Reeme Idris’s full essay below, exploring the political and ecological dimensions of Shifting Landscapes in depth.

Read more

Hello precious people,

In our latest episode of Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome, we journey into the landscapes of soil and fibre. Our guest is Emma Hague, a clothing and textiles systems ecologist, and founding director of South West England Fibreshed, Bristol Textile Quarter and Bristol Cloth.

With a background in political and economic anthropology, Indigenous rights, natural resource development and conflict, Emma’s career over the last 15 years has been at both grassroots and global policy levels with lots of hands-on experience in the UK and South America.

The Fibershed is a non-profit organization that has been one of my guiding lights for many years. It was founded by Rebecca Burgess in 2010 in Northern California as a way to revive localised textile industries through regenerative practices and processes. Since then Fibershed has grown into a global movement, and according to their latest 2024 annual report, there are now 79 Fibershed affiliates worldwide in 18 countries and 4 continents. It’s pretty amazing and makes me so hopeful!

What makes the Fibershed approach so relevant is its simplicity: it reconnects what we wear to the landscapes that sustain us. Instead of textiles travelling thousands of miles through long and opaque, global supply chains, Fibershed focuses on soil health, local fibre, regional processing and fair relationships. It’s a model that reduces harm, strengthens communities and brings climate-beneficial farming into the heart of design.

🎧 Listen to the latest episode:

Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome:
Emma Hague on Growing Regenerative Textile Futures

→ Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

At The Lissome, we collaborated with the South West England and South East England Fibresheds on several occasions. We interviewed their respective founders, Emma Hague and Deborah Barker, for our Rewilding issue, visited Deborah on Plaw Hatch Farm for a photo story with Jack Johnstone for our Cosmic Commons issue, and highlighted their vision and work in our second issue of The Book of Kin. And I had the personal pleasure to help develop and art direct their Farming Fashion: Wool guide.

In conversation with our Weaving Beings host, Hardeep Kaur, Emma guides us through Fibershed’s soil-to-soil philosophy, a framework that reconnects what we wear with the ecosystems that sustain us. And we explore some of her recent projects such as the educational guide Farming Fashion: Wool (that I mentioned), and the farmer-designer collaboration Future Fashion Landscapes. Both of these projects bridge fashion/textiles and regenerative farming, and it’s inspiring to listen to her reflections on what it takes to build new networks and community resilience within local textile economies.

To add to Emma’s insights, we’re also sharing an article by Dr Mila Burcikova of Centre for Sustainable Fashion at University of the Arts London, that is part of our current print issue.

Through her photography and words, Mila traces the year-long Future Fashion Landscapes project, that she collaborated on with the South East and South West England Fibresheds. Building on the knowledge base of the Farming Fashion: Wool guide, she shares how they helped farmers and designers connect through co-creation, finding a common language and new ways of working together –something that can now be used as a blueprint.

As a result of this collaboration, they created knitwear items with a diverse range of native and rare breed wools, demonstrating the beauty that can emerge from these new relationships. The project was recently presented at the British Textile Biennial 2025.

→ Continue reading the article below

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A Moment to Reflect Together

We are currently thinking about what’s next for The Lissome, slowly feeling into a theme for the new print issue, and much more. And for this, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

We’re opening a short community survey, a five-minute pause to reflect on what moves you, what you long for and how we can better serve our creative community.

Take the Survey

As a thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with us, you’ll receive a 20 % discount for our online shop and the chance to win a copy of our latest print edition, The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees. We’d love to hear from you!

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Future Fashion Landscapes

A bioregional journey into wool, design and regenerative farming

Words & photography by Mila Burcikova, published in The Lissome No. 5

As we drive back from moving sheep to fresh pasture, with muddy but happy-looking dogs on the back seats and a quad bike in the trailer, Andy tells me: “Farming, shearing, shepherding – it’s not all just warm jumpers. It’s not all lambs jumping around in spring looking playful. There is life and death, there is a lot of realism in it. You get miserable weather for months on end, the sheep look unhappy as it’s raining, you see people rushing by in their cars while you’re out there in the middle of the field. So, you do question at times whether you are doing the right thing. But then you have these (young) keen people who want to design clothes or fabrics from that very yarn that you’ve shorn off that sheep. This really puts pride into being a shepherd.”

Andy and his partner Jen run the certified regenerative Fernhill Farm, where their flock of nearly 3,000 sheep is carefully managed to produce high-quality meat alongside beautiful fine fibre that combines the qualities of several native British breeds. Wool, unlike plant fibre, is still produced in the UK in abundance. However, despite the rich history of sheep farming and Britain’s 60+ native and rare sheep breeds, wool’s potential for textiles and fashion is not sufficiently appreciated. This means that local wool is sold for lower-value purposes such as mattress stuffing or carpets or even discarded.

In response, two of the UK affiliates of the global Fibershed movement – the South East England Fibreshed led by Deborah Barker, and the South West England Fibreshed coordinated by Emma Hague – ran an extensive consultation with stakeholders in their respective bioregions. What they found was that one of the key barriers for British wool is the lack of connections, common language and mutual understanding of requirements and production cycles between farmers, designers and processors.

To help rebuild these broken links, the two Fibresheds joined forces and in early 2024 launched a beautifully produced guide, Farming Fashion: Wool (with the kind support of Farming the Future, UK). The guide is full of practical prompts, designed to help farmers, designers and processors ask the right questions, build trust and work together over time.

The timing of its launch was perfect for a research partnership with Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London. Following many previous discussions on our shared interest in nurturing bioregional textile ecosystems, the Future Fashion Landscapes project was set up to help pilot the guide’s practical application. It also presented an opportunity to advance the understanding of properties and biodiversity benefits of bioregional native and rare breed wool.

When native and rare breed sheep flocks are managed with landscape conservation and/or restoration in mind, the infamous reputation of sheep farming for depleting large areas of land through overgrazing can be dramatically reversed. Deborah Barker from SEE Fibreshed explains: “This kind of grazing aims to restore landscapes the way they will have traditionally been managed – naturally moving sheep through the landscape rather than set stocking (keeping them in one field). Lower stocking densities are a start, but you also have to mimic those older ways of farming. When you get the right animal for the right landscape, you get a beautiful expression of both the animal’s nature and the nature of the landscape. It is really poetic.”

Throughout the 12 months of Future Fashion Landscapes, the guide became a conversation starter. We organized multiple in-person gatherings and workshops for farmers and designers, as well as webinars for designers with little or no understanding of native and rare breed wool. Drawing on Deborah’s method of “walking the land”, to help future generations of designers gain first-hand experience of designing in tune with the farming year, we took two groups of London College of Fashion’s MA students to the biodynamic Plaw Hatch Farm. In their “Wearing the Landscape” brief that followed, the students were asked to design – through objects or storytelling – examples of how we might rebalance the power between our wardrobes and our (local) landscapes.

Our aim was to offer tangible examples of new designer–farmer collaborations in each of the two regions, including experimental design prototypes that can open conversations and lead to future development that can benefit farmers, designers and their bioregional communities.

In the South West, knitwear designer Ria Burns worked with Ellen Simon and her daughter Leila from Tamarisk Farm, which stretches along the beautiful Jurassic Coast in Dorset. Amelia Brown worked with Jennifer Hunter and Andy Wear from Fernhill Farm at the top of the Mendip Hills National Landscape, Somerset. In the South East we had a three-way collaboration between designers Phoebe English and Fabienne Gassmann, working with Gala Bailey Barker from the women-led Plaw Hatch Farm in the scenic Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. Deanne Wallace of Elwin worked with Diana Bird and her partner, Duncan Parker, who has spent all his life at his family’s Chilton Grounds Farm in Aylesbury Vale, Oxfordshire.

These four collaborations have now been turned into beautifully illustrated case studies that can serve as inspiration, encouragement, and ultimately proof of concept for designers, farmers and processors who wish to work within their bioregional wool ecosystems.

As we’re driving back to Fernhill Farm, down the bumpy track that repeatedly flooded over the last few months, Andy tells me that when the times get tough, it is working with others that can bring a whole new vitality back in again. “Seeing people use your wool gives a purpose to getting on, getting out there, working with the sheep, trying to keep the job right.”

The collaborations enabled through Future Fashion Landscapes are hopeful proofs that we can support each other in doing what feels right, even if the paths are sometimes bumpy. When we join our forces and skills, we can shift from exploiting our landscapes to satisfy the whims of fashion, to a way of working and living where our bioregions can (once again) inform and inspire what we design and wear. Examples are now out there for others to follow.

Many thanks to Emma, Mila and Deborah for sharing their knowledge and passion. Here you can learn more about their work:

→ South West England Fibreshed
→ South East England Fibreshed
→ Dr. Mila Burcikova
→ Future Fashion Landscapes
→ Farming Fashion: Wool

Much love and see you next month,
Dörte & The Lissome team x

María Goya is a mother daughter clothing line produced in Madrid, with a single, timeless permanent collection crafted in house by Virginia and Yolanda. For the duo, the designs and production are shaped by fabric and the body: garments are tested and adapted to wearability with constant refinement. In a fashion system built to reward novelty, concept frequently trumps craft and trends move faster than hands can sew. Innovation has become an empty gesture, which stands in stark opposition to the kind of innovation that comes from time and closeness with a fabric’s movement on the bodies of real people.

Yolanda’s journey with clothing began in her youth, when at 15 she embarked on a journey of self discovery through sewing her own garments. 45 years later, she created María Goya with her daughter. While their designs are deeply inspired by the victorian era, they skillfully bridge antiquity into modern utility. Extracting the best and most beautiful features of historical dress, with the improvements that come with time: the elegance of ruching on the bustle of a skirt, sans the constriction of a corset. Their garments are poetic, born out through inspired photographs and visual world building that feels less like a campaign, and more like a page in an antique fairytale.

We had the pleasure of chatting with Virginia and Yolanda about their inspirations and their process:

Liz: What’s the story behind your brand’s name, and how does it connect to your ethos?

MG: María Goya combines my mum’s first name, María Yolanda, and our family name, Goya. It started with her—she used to sew her own clothes, first with my grandmother on an old Singer machine, then later by hand. Over time, what started as a personal creative interest naturally evolved into something bigger, and we decided to turn it into a brand together.

The name reflects what we’re all about: thoughtful, handmade pieces with a personal touch. It’s rooted in our story, our family, and a love for clothes that feel special and expressive.

Liz: Your designs feel so richly steeped in history, are there particular periods you draw from, and what attracts you to them?

MG: We’re really inspired by a mix of Victorian fashion and traditional Japanese design, with a layer of modern tailoring. There’s something about the structure and detail of Victorian silhouettes paired with the clean, minimal lines of Japanese aesthetics that just works—it creates a kind of quiet elegance we love.

Also, we both lived in London for years, and the influence of that time—especially the way classic and contemporary styles mix there—definitely comes through in what we do. Altogether, it helps us create pieces that feel rooted in something timeless, but still very wearable today.

Liz: What are your favourite materials to work with?

MG: We always work with 100% natural, high-quality materials—things like English wool, Lithuanian linen, silk taffeta, and wild silks. We love fabrics that age well and have texture and personality. To get that slightly lived-in, vintage feel that’s part of our look, we sometimes pre-wash the fabrics and even store finished garments in bags made from the same material. It gives them a soft, slightly crumpled texture that makes each piece feel like it already has a story.

Liz: How do you develop new designs, what is the time flow for how you release them, and did you make a conscious choice to separate this release schedule from major fashion week collection timelines?

MG: Our process is super hands-on. Each design starts from a basic pattern that we tweak and test over time—pinning it on, moving in it, making sure it actually works in real life. We don’t design around abstract themes, it’s always about how the piece feels and functions.

We only produce made-to-order, so there’s no overproduction or unnecessary stock. Because of that, we can make small custom changes—like adjusting the length or fabric—while keeping within the same design language. Once someone places an order, we usually finish the piece in 2–3 days and ship it within the week.

And yes, we’ve definitely chosen to stay outside of the traditional fashion calendar. Our rhythm follows the pace of real demand and craftsmanship—not seasons or trends. It keeps things personal, sustainable, and more grounded in everyday wear.


Liz: The Book of Kin highlights craftsmanship. What can you tell us about your roles as artisans or craftspeople? How does this contribute to the brand’s identity?

MG: María Goya is entirely handcrafted by us, Yolanda and Virginia. We handle every part of the process ourselves: sewing, pattern-making, selecting fabrics, cutting, finishing, everything. Because each piece is handmade to order, no two garments are exactly alike. That’s a big part of what makes them feel special. That slower pace and attention to details are central to who we are as a brand—committed to quality, sustainability, and keeping that personal touch in every item.

Liz: What is the work flow like between the two of you, working in an intergenerational family unit? Do you find your mother-daughter connection brings interesting things to the table?

MG: Our workflow is very natural, though it’s definitely shaped by being mother and daughter. There’s a lot of passion, attention to detail, and patience involved. Sometimes it’s hard to separate the personal from the professional—we’re still learning how to manage that—but having clearly defined roles really helps.

Yolanda is the creative mind behind the brand: she selects the fabrics, designs the patterns, and makes each garment. Virginia handles the business side: sales, communication, and making sure our pieces reach the right audience. That division allows each of us to focus on what we do best, while still collaborating closely on every decision. Because we’re family, there’s also a deep sense of honesty. We don’t hold back our opinions, which means ideas get refined quickly. It’s not always smooth—sometimes we debate small details endlessly—but it always leads to interesting results.

It’s the first time we’ve worked together, and it’s been such a rewarding experience. Even when we disagree, it comes from a shared love for what we’re building. That generational dialogue, between her craftsmanship and my perspective, gives María Goya its balance between tradition and modernity.

It’s increasingly rare, even amongst small slow clothing brands, to have each garment made in house by the designers themselves. At María Goya, this closeness to craft gives each piece its soul.

To find out more about María Goya, you can peruse their beautiful website, or stay up to date with editorials and storytelling on their Instagram.

Dear precious people,

Over the years, I’ve come to understand beauty not as a surface quality, but as a living force that reconnects us to the mystery of life. I first began to sense its subtle power a decade ago, when I started imagining what would become this magazine, and noticed that each time I encountered something truly beautiful, I felt a tender and expansive sensation in my body and heart.

The artist Agnes Martin once described beauty as the mystery of life, and indeed, for wisdom seekers throughout the ages, it has belonged to the same realms of high consciousness as truth, goodness or love. Yet in today’s world, the word beauty can feel so uneasy. Many shy away from using it, as it has been co-opted and hollowed out by advertising and show business. So much around us claims to be beautiful and appears so on the surface, but let’s pause for a moment to think about what beauty truly asks of us, to contemplate its essence and its purpose.

Why does beauty exist? It can’t be here simply to sell us things, for it has lived in the world long before capitalism or consumer culture. While we often find beauty in attraction and seduction, it’s also pulsed through art, culture and craft throughout the ages, and been present in mystical experiences and even science. Mathematicians describe certain formulas as beautiful for their elegant simplicity. In Japanese culture, wabi-sabi honours the beauty of imperfection and impermanence. And when people return from psilocybin journeys, they often speak in awe of dissolving into unity, a felt sense that everything is connected.

Beauty comes in many forms, or sometimes in no form at all – simply as vibration. It is closely linked to wonder, and many of us perceive it most vividly in nature: light dancing on the surface of water, a rainbow suddenly appearing in a grey sky, flocks of birds murmuring in mesmerizing synchronicity. In these moments, beauty returns us to wholeness and acts as a reminder that we are of the Earth and not separate from it.

My hunch is that the deep beauty of beauty lies in its magic to connect us with life’s mystery, in ways that may be calm and almost invisible, or equally soul-stirring and earth-shattering. At The Lissome, we follow beauty as a practice of re-enchantment with the living world. When we give it our attention, it multiplies and we begin to see it everywhere. Life reveals itself as an orchestra of beauty.

Bringing beauty to life

In this spirit, I’m happy to share a small new experiment with you. For the next two weeks, we’re opening pre-orders for a limited-edition print from The Lissome’s current issue. This is the first time we’re offering a print, as a way for our community to bring a fragment of The Lissome’s world into their own spaces, to share intimate glimpses into how different artists in our community approach their work and to support the creative ecosystem that surrounds the magazine.

For this first release, I spoke with Argentinian multi-disciplinary artist and photographer Bela Mora Leal, who captures beauty by tuning into her inner child and allowing herself to be playful and present with life. Reading her words, I was moved by the thoughtfulness that shapes her process. Her work stands as a reminder that beauty, when approached with presence, can revitalize our relationship with the world around us.

As part of this two-week pre-order, we’re also offering a small gift of appreciation.
Everyone who orders a copy of The Lissome’s print magazine during this time will receive a limited-edition postcard featuring one of Bela Mora Leal’s artworks.

→ Pre-order the print until 31 October
→ Order a copy of The Lissome and receive a limited-edition postcard

Listening to the process:
In this two-minute voice note, Bela shares how she approaches her creative process.

Read our conversation below.

Dörte: Bela, could you take us back to the beginning? How did you first find your way into photography, and what drew you to analogue film as your chosen medium?

Bela: My father was my first inspiration. He was an amateur photographer before I was born. When I was fourteen, I had an assignment for an English exam where I had to describe what I imagined my adult path would be and bring an object to represent it. At the time, I actually thought I would study psychology, until I came across some large photographs my father had kept from a trip he took with my mother before I was born. They completely captivated me, and immediately sparked my curiosity.

Back then, as a hobby, I was collecting still life images from my favourite films. I borrowed those photographs from my father and brought them to my exam. I don’t think my teacher really believed I had taken them myself, obviously, but I vividly remember the impression they left on her. She encouraged me to experiment with the medium. Soon after, my parents gifted me all the equipment I needed to work professionally, and when I went to university I was lucky enough to have my own darkroom in my apartment. That’s where my journey into analogue photography truly began, and since then I’ve dedicated myself exclusively to film.

Dörte: Your process blends photography, set design and a sculptural sensibility. Could you paint us a picture of how one of your works comes to life, from the first spark of an idea to the moment you click the shutter?

Bela: In my personal work, I never really know what I’m going to do. I just feel an urge inside me to observe, and it can happen at any time, no matter the surroundings. I move entirely guided by intuition; every object or material I choose seems to speak in a way I can’t fully explain. I guess I catch glimpses, and that’s it. I collect and curate materials, and then I start playing with them. I experiment, improvise, and slowly it begins to take the shape of a mini installation where I can see my essence, and that’s when I click the shutter.

Dörte: You often build your compositions with plants, flowers, food and found objects, guided by zero-waste principles. When did you decide to work this way, and how does this commitment shape your creativity? What possibilities arise when you embrace only what is at hand?

Bela: I started noticing this approach at the beginning of 2020, and it came very naturally to me. I was also influenced by the chef Max La Manna, who works to transform the culinary industry through sustainable, zero-waste techniques, focused on fully utilising every part of every ingredient and minimising waste in the kitchen. I remember being fascinated by the way banana peels were used in so many recipes. I was obsessed, and it made me think: Wow, this is a channel, maybe I could apply this philosophy to my own discipline – not partially, but fully integrating it into my work.

Embracing this approach has opened up a kind of sensory expansion for me. It forces me to experiment, perceive textures and colours in new ways, adapt and be resourceful. In doing so, it opens possibilities I wouldn’t notice if I always relied on ideal, perfect and new conventional materials. It’s also an exercise in engaging with the idea of impermanence – transforming the notion of being a fixed definition into being part of a scene, where objects can have so much potential yet may exist only for a moment, and that ephemeral presence is already beautiful. For those materials that don’t decompose, I can work with them again, allowing them to evolve into something even deeper.

Dörte: You’ve collaborated with many different creatives and projects over the years. Is there one project that stands out to you, and could you share its story?

Bela: My mother is an incredible chef, and I grew up surrounded by her amazing food. She has great technique, but what I’ve always loved most is her experimental spirit. She doesn’t have a restaurant, so for a long time I wanted to experience the raw, chaotic energy of a professional kitchen. At that point, I had zero background as a food photographer.

In 2015, I discovered a new restaurant in the city where I was living at the time. I googled it and found out that the chef had worked in some of the best restaurants in the world, including Noma, and had come up with the idea of creating the narrowest fine dining restaurant in Latin America. Its ceiling was made of glass, which meant it was bathed in incredible natural light. Since I only work with natural light, I was immediately drawn to it. One day, I gathered enough courage to write to him, despite having no previous experience working in a kitchen.

It turned out to be a bittersweet but incredibly enriching experience. My boundaries blurred at times, but the freedom I felt in such an intensely sensory space was fascinating. It was the first time someone truly trusted my capacity, my eye and my slow process, and the films turned out so beautiful that I still love that work today. I witnessed technique, chaos, drama, tension, solidity, stress, anxiety, satisfaction, perfectionism, sensitivity and presence all at once. It was an explosion of emotions, and honestly, I would love to immerse myself in kitchens every day. But I guess I still feel all of that when I create on my own.

Dörte: For The Lissome’s current print issue, you created a series of images that accompany an interview with the renowned storyteller and host of the “Living Myth” podcast, Michael Meade. Could you take us behind the scenes – what ideas and emotions guided you as you staged these ephemeral moments?

Bela: This series explores the tension between resilience and vulnerability, transforming organic forms into symbols of survival. Through the interplay of leaves, flowers, fruits, eggshells and found objects, I delve into the cycles of change that mirror the rhythmic nature of my ongoing sensations. Each element of this metamorphosis carries the significance of individual and shared memories, serving as reminders of how I navigate expectations and self-perception.

The evolution of these natural elements resonates with the shifts in my own path, as each totem reveals a quiet strength nurtured by time and life’s unpredictable currents. In these tender and intuitive scenes, I find reflections of my experiences, with every fracture holding the potential to illuminate what truly endures beneath the surface.

Dörte: You told me that the limited-edition print selected from this body of work carries a special meaning for you. Why is this particular image so close to your heart, and what story does it hold that you hope viewers will carry with them?

Bela: That image is my favourite, forever. It’s a tribute. It captures fragility layer by layer, until life begins to bloom again. I experienced depression in the past, and when I took this shot, I was in such a good place that I wanted to capture how weakness can become unexpectedly beautiful when you shift your limitations. The days no longer felt heavy, and the image reflects the complexity of dealing with depression.

The most lovely part is that my dad was my assistant during the scene, and the natural light I wanted suddenly appeared in this incredibly intense glimpse. It was just beautiful. The moment was very touching.

Dörte: Your practice feels like more than image-making. To me, it reads as a philosophy of presence. In a fast-paced, digital world, how do you see your mindful, slow approach as an invitation to live differently?

Bela: Yes, it’s a way of being fully present. The things I choose naturally attract my eye – there’s no explanation, it’s simply a way to explore the unknown in the present moment. Everything I do is dedicated to the child within me. As a kid, I often felt overwhelmed and longed to belong to something true to myself, but I didn’t know how to approach that exploration or maintain it.

Now, when I engage with my practice, I feel fully expanded and genuinely myself. I connect with my inner child, allowing me to create intuitively. I’m not eager to please, I rely on my essence and refuse to be compromised by the idea of being someone I’m not.

In the immediacy of a digital world, this slow, mindful approach is an invitation to live differently – to slow down, to observe, and to embrace authenticity in every moment. It’s about cultivating gratitude, discovering the unexpected and honouring our own inner truths.

Bela’s way of seeing reminds me how much beauty lives in attention itself. You can pre-order her limited-edition print until 31 October as a way to bring her world into yours and support The Lissome’s community of artists and storytellers.

→ Pre-order the print until 31 October
→ Order a copy of The Lissome and receive a limited-edition postcard

Enjoy,
Dörte xx

About the Artist:
Bela Mora Leal is an Argentinian multi-disciplinary artist and analogue photographer whose work explores presence and the poetics of impermanence.

http://belamoraleal.com | www.instagram.com/belamoraleal

THE BOOK OF KIN presents:

Clara Pinto

Based in: UK

As WHITE Show returned to Milan’s Tortona Fashion District from 25 to 28 September, we were invited to seek out designers who embody creativity, innovative craftsmanship and slow making processes. Our spotlight this season falls on Clara Pinto, a London-based practice that explores wool as a sculptural, living medium.

Founded in 2019, the brand bridges material innovation with Clara’s Argentine heritage, a lineage rooted in embroidery passed down from her great aunt, a celebrated haute couture artisan who once created gowns for Eva Perón. Clara has since deepened this legacy through fieldwork into sheep breeds, felting methods and fibre experimentation, and she’s developed a passion for working with wool: “I fell in love with its texture, colours and limitless possibilities. With every collection, I try a different way of felting.” At the heart of her practice is nuno felting, a technique that allows her to layer, sculpt and create unique textiles that give her work a surreal and mysterious look – at once delicate and transparent, yet rough and full of volume.

www.clarapinto.com
@laclarapinto

Some things we read, listened to and watched:

The Crisps, Ready for the EmpCo Directive? / Substack Article, 14 Oct 2025
From “climate-neutral” to “plastic-free,” vague sustainability talk is a legal risk. Here’s what’s banned, what’s not, and what’s next.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What if we get it right? / Podcast Episode, 12 Sept 2025
Photons ☀️, Fogies 👴🏼, and Energy Liberation, with Bill McKibben

Barbican Art Gallery, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion
25 Sep 2025 – 25 Jan 2026, London

AA Gallery, The Word for World, 10 October – 6 December 2025, London
An exhibition and book presenting the maps of Ursula K Le Guin

Hello precious people,

Today, I’m excited to share one of my personal highlights from our current print edition with you – a conversation that our Weaving Beings host Hardeep Kaur recorded with the storyteller, mythologist and true wise elder, Michael Meade, and that I edited and shortened for the printed pages. This conversation is now available in its entirety as our latest podcast episode.

Michael Meade is the host of the Living Myth podcast (highly recommended!) and is known for his lifelong work with mythology and ritual. His own initiation into myth unexpectedly happened at the age of thirteen, when a book opened a door into the mythic world for him and subsequently shaped his life’s work.

There is much I took away from this conversation – new perspectives that I found helpful and eye-opening for the times of turmoil we are living through. Through Michael, I learned that myths invite us to look beyond the surface noise of our daily lives and explore the workings of the world from a more timeless and long-lasting vantage point. They can bring us back in touch with humanity’s eternal truths and help us gain more clarity of vision.

🎧 Listen to the episode:

Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome, Season 2, Episode 4:
On Re-Centring Myth in the Age of the Machine

→ Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

To give you an example: Michael describes the time we’re living in as liminal, as a kind of in-between space where the world we once knew is slipping away, and the new one hasn’t yet taken shape. It’s not an easy place to be, neither for us as individuals nor as a collective. But from a mythological point of view, this signals the fertile chaos that always comes before creation, the necessary turbulence out of which a new vision of the world can begin to emerge. As Michael shares: “In the old idea of the apocalypse, collapse and renewal occur simultaneously. The collapse may be obvious, but like a forest, the next growth is already beginning, hidden in the roots, in the fungi entangled with the trees.”

From a mythological perspective, the world has ended and begun again many times before. The question for us now is: how do we live through such a moment? How do we connect to our deeper selves, grow through challenges, and, as Michael beautifully puts it, “contribute to the re-weaving of the world”?

Human beings have always been storytellers. Through myth, we can tap into a kind of wisdom that is both ancient and timely for our times. If you’re seeking new insights or a sense of guidance, I warmly invite you to listen.

I hope you enjoy the richness of this conversation,

Dörte xx

❤️ P.S. Next week, we have a surprise for you. Make sure to watch this space.

Dear Precious People,

In this new episode of Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome, writer and sustainability journalist Anna Roos van Wijngaarden speaks with host Hardeep Kaur about her recent story, Fruits of the Forest, featured in The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees.

Anna takes us into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, where she travelled with curator Bianca Rivera to meet designers and researchers working with native materials – including kapok and shiringa – fibres that are deeply tied to place and carry the potential to regenerate the very ecosystems they come from.

What unfolds is not a neat story of solutions, but something more layered: a reckoning with scale, authorship and the fragility of relationships in a system that still runs on extractive logics. Anna shares what it was like to sit with the complexity, to listen to designers like Susan Wagner and Mozhdeh Matin, who are working at the edges of material innovation and spiritual integrity, and to witness the tensions that arise when business models clash with ecological rhythms.

This conversation is also about writing, about what it means to bear witness to stories that are not your own, and how deep observation, time and presence shape the way stories are told.

🎧 Listen to the episode:

Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome, Season 2:
On Travelling with Questions and Learning from the Forest

→ Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

📖 Anna’s story Fruits of the Forest is part of The Lissome No. 5, available now in a limited print edition. If you haven’t yet secured your copy of the limited edition print, we invite you to do so – order via our website:

→ Reserve Your Copy

What’s On: 29 September 2025

Roots of Resilience: An Online Workshop with The Lissome & CHANGE Festival

Join us for an online workshop inspired by In Our Own Words (The Lissome No. 5) and the film Climate Criminals?, exploring resilience through nature, story and community. Together we’ll practice breathwork, journaling and reflection and leave with personal commitments to nurture our own roots of resilience.

Date: Monday, 29 September 2025
Time: 7-9 pm CET (e.g. Berlin) / 6-8 pm BST (e.g. London) / 1-3 pm EDT (e.g. New York) / 10-12 am PDT (e.g. Los Angeles)
Location: Online via Zoom
Ticket Price: €15 (Note: Members receive a 20% discount)

→ Reserve your place here 🌿

This is an invitation to listen deeply, to breathe together and to find renewal in community. We would be so happy if you joined us.

We wish you an inspiring listen and hope to see you on September 29th!

With care,
Dörte & The Lissome team

As summer draws to a close, we’d love to gather with you for a special online workshop in collaboration with CHANGE Festival, inspired by our latest print issue – a space to breathe, reflect and nurture resilience together.

Hello precious people,

As the season begins to turn, we would love to invite you to join us for a very special online workshop at the end of this month (29 September 2025) – a gathering that brings the explorations of our latest print issue, The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees, into shared practice.

The workshop is created together with Becky Burchell, Sophie Austin and Simon Lamb – the contributors behind the article In Our Own Words in our last issue. Their piece reflects on a creative residency they hosted on a farm in rural England, where climate activists – some awaiting prison sentences – gathered with them as storytellers and coaches. In the safety of this circle, they spoke honestly about despair and exhaustion, but also about joy, solidarity and belonging. What they built together was what Martin Luther King once called a “beloved community”: a place of honesty, hope and renewal.

It is this spirit that Becky, Sophie and Simon are now bringing into an online space. As co-founders of the environmental arts organisation CHANGE Festival (Becky and Sophie) and as a qigong practitioner (Simon), they will guide us through breathwork, journaling, and reflection – exploring resilience not only as inner strength in times of crisis, but also as tenderness, truth-telling and belonging.

We’ll walk three pathways of resilience:

• Nature as a grounding source of renewal
• Story as a vessel for truth and perspective
• Community as a foundation of care and connection

And we will each leave with three personal commitments to nurture our own roots of resilience.

ONLINE WORKSHOP:
Nurturing Our Roots of Resilience Through Nature, Story and Community

Date: Monday 29th September
Time: 7-9 pm CET (e.g. Berlin) / 6-8 pm BST (e.g. London) / 1-3 pm EDT (e.g. New York) / 10-12 am PDT (e.g. Los Angeles)
Ticket Price: €15 (Note: Members receive a 20% discount)

→ Reserve your place here 🌿

We’d love to see many of you there – and as a thank-you to our members, paid subscribers receive 20% off tickets (details behind the paywall).

This is an invitation to listen deeply, to breathe together and to find renewal in community. We would be so happy if you joined us.

Discover the Full Story in Print

→ Order the Print Magazine

You can find the full article in The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees. If you haven’t yet, you can now order your copy online and explore many more stories in the complete edition.

Order the Magazine

With warmth and resilience,
Dörte, Felix & The Lissome team

This month, we had the opportunity to speak with the founders of ABAYA, a footwear – and soon also clothing – brand based in Portugal. Abaya is a Nigerian name meaning “to tread softly,” and it is also their family name. Esuga and Lisa are committed to doing everything with care – everything from the rubber sole to the cork insole are sourced from regenerative natural materials. What becomes clear in our conversation is that discovering these alternative solutions takes persistence and patience. It is not the highway, but a slower, more meandering path. And it raises the question, where are we really headed, and is arrival even the point? As Esuga says “It’s countercultural in a world that celebrates making the biggest mark possible and maximising profit.”

→ Read our full conversation below

Things We’re Loving:

• The Rooted Journal

  • We just got our hands on the second edition of the Rooted Journal, a publication out of California focused on food systems. We particularly love the article on the Microscopic Life of Compost: detailing the vital lifeforms that are being degraded more and more with our use of pesticides and fertilizers.

• Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

  • Written by Kohei Sato and translated by Brian Bergstrom, this true manifesto for a world without endless growth is both theoretically rich and emotionally evocative. He argues that there isn’t really room for compromise, or maintaining the status quo if we are to heal the planet. He argues for:

    • the end of mass production and mass consumption

    • decarbonization through shorter working hours

    • the prioritization of essential labor over corporate profits

    We think these are all ideas we can get behind!

THE BOOK OF KIN presents:

Weaving Worlds by Dr. Ania Zoltkowski

A 6 week online journey for creatives to connect to sacred & ancient practices for sustainability, starting September 16th.

This experience is for designers, creatives, and visionaries who know there’s so much more to sustainability than just fixing materials and processes. It’s about embodying a different way of being in the world. Through guided contemplations, rituals, creative practices, energetics and somatic work, our weekly live sessions will help you to reconnect with your creative sovereignty while developing a personal sustainability ecology that nourishes rather than depletes. This is a sacred container where your rhythms, intuition, and authenticity are honoured as you explore joyful, expansive ways of making that are grounded in care, reciprocity, and reverence for all of life.

→ FIND OUT MORE

From Sculpture to Sole:
The Journey of ABAYA

Interview by Dörte de Jesus

Dörte: I have so many questions, and I’m really looking forward to finding out more – could you take me on your journey of what sparked the idea for ABAYA, and what led you to create it?

Esuga: Ever since we met, we’d have these long, three- or four-hour conversations about design – architecture, furniture, art. Lisa is an artist, and one of the things that drew us together was our shared love of all kinds of design. We’d often say how amazing it would be to collaborate, especially in fashion.

The real impetus for ABAYA happened when I came across a sculpture by German artist Judith Hopf – a brick foot, or shoe. I immediately thought: “I want to make this into an actual shoe.” I shared it with Lisa, and we wondered how we could even do that. I made a small clay sculpture, and we went to a makers’ lab in Philadelphia to learn how to create a mould. At the start, we thought we’d do everything from scratch – carve aluminium, make our own moulds – a very DIY approach.

Then COVID happened. Everything slowed down, but it gave us focus. Lisa didn’t want to make anything that wasn’t as natural as possible. We even imagined a shoe you could bury with a seed in the sole so it would grow into a tree. We began researching soles that were truly natural and found Lactae Hevea, a natural latex rubber, which we still use today. Around the same time, our brother-in-law told us about regenerative leather, and from there things snowballed. We decided that if we were going to make something, we would make it as naturally and sustainably as possible. That also meant everything took longer. We were choosing the hardest materials to work with, and the ones that made manufacturing most challenging. Thankfully, our suppliers were willing to work with us, even if we were probably their most difficult client.

It took eight years to go from that first idea to full production. A big turning point was moving to Portugal. We realised the US wasn’t the right setting for making the kind of luxury shoe we wanted. At first, we were looking to manufacture in Italy, but our French rubber supplier, Brice, suggested Portugal over Italy. He said the quality would be just as good, the price lower, and the manufacturers more open to small brands. When we first visited Porto, it was love at first sight. We stayed a block from the beach, walked there our first morning, and I thought: “I could live here.”

Our first Portuguese manufacturer was incredibly supportive and got us close with our prototypes, but we eventually moved on to a small, family-run workshop in São João da Madeira – three generations of high-end shoemaking. Working with them finally allowed us to make the shoe exactly as we had envisioned it.

Dörte: It sounds like you began almost as an art project – inspired by a piece of art, diving into research, learning the skills DIY – and then realising you needed a different approach. Were you initially thinking of making just a one-off, or did you always want to bring it into production?

Lisa: I always wanted to have a company. I wanted people to be able to wear our work. Coming from an art background, one-offs felt too exclusive – they didn’t feel like part of everyday life. Moving into design fulfilled two desires for me: having my art out in the world, and solving problems.

Some problems I wanted to address through art seemed better suited to design, where there’s utility to the object. In clothing and shoes, one driving force for us has been creating a modern – even postmodern – interpretation of ethnic clothing. We both have Nigerian, Mexican, and Chinese heritage, and we look at the histories, motifs, and designs from those cultures, then bring that visual language into something entirely new. With the first shoe, we thought about moccasins – worn for both weddings and hunting – and wanted to create something equally versatile, beautiful enough to dress up, but practical for every day. With newer designs, we might start from something like a desert boot, but we put it through our own design language.

You’re right, it really did feel like an art project at first – it felt like we were making the most expensive shoe imaginable. We approached it with the self-indulgence of artists making exactly what we envisioned. But we’d always appreciated how fashion can democratise art, and wanted to be part of that. At some point, we knew – we wanted people to own these pieces, experience them, and carry their story into the world.

Dörte: And it also sounds like ecological regeneration and material mindfulness were there right from the start.

Lisa: Absolutely. A lot of that came from our veneration of native culture. On our honeymoon in Arizona, we visited Antelope Canyon on Navajo land and learned about traditional dress and footwear. In so many traditional cultures – whether Navajo or others – care for the land is deeply ingrained. If we were truly going to honour those cultures, we had to make our clothing and shoes in that same spirit. From the very beginning, we knew we couldn’t just put another thing into the world; we had to be thoughtful about how and why it was made.

Dörte: How did your research into materials begin? For a new brand, navigating that landscape can be quite overwhelming. How did you find the natural rubber and regenerative leather, and were there people who helped you along the way?

Esuga: I did a lot of Googling – the information is out there. With the rubber, I researched how it’s produced, the suppliers, and the processes for making it more sustainable. Most shoes use vulcanised rubber, processed for durability, but when I learned about natural rubber, it seemed strange that more people weren’t using it. That’s how I found RELTEX, a supplier south of Lyon. I cold-called them, explained what we were doing, and they were happy to talk. We later visited their factory while in France.

The key is commitment. Manufacturers often say, “We don’t have any natural insoles,” and it’s easy to give up. But we’d take an extra step – find someone using recycled cork and natural rubber for foot beds, source it ourselves, and send it to the factory. Being committed led us to partners who share our values. For example, Nina Conrad, our only leather supplier, sources and verifies everything, and that trust is invaluable.

Dörte: How did you first connect with her?

Lisa: That was a bit of a journey. We’d started working with my brother-in-law, who has a PhD in environmental economics and works in sustainability for a large food company. When we told him we wanted to use leather, he suggested looking into regenerative leather – something we’d never heard of. He said: “It’s going to be the new organic. Just look into it.” He was way ahead of the curve.

He sent us information about the Savory Institute, one of the leaders in creating criteria for regenerative farming. At the time, they were launching a programme to certify brands using materials from verified regenerative farms. It sounded perfect – we wanted that third-party verification. Esuga reached out, had a few calls, and during that process someone introduced us to Mark and Jim Kleinschmit of Other Half Processing in Minnesota, who were working in creating a US supply chain for regenerative leather.

We asked about getting their leather to Europe, but they advised us to look for suppliers here, and they made the initial introduction to. Nina Conrad of Regionales Leder, who’s based in Switzerland. The regenerative leather community is still very small – maybe one or two traceable sources in Europe, a few more in the US. Certification is tricky, especially in the EU where there’s no set standard yet, which is why working with Nina has been so valuable. She knows the process, traces everything, and ensures we’re doing it the right way. In a space with a lot of greenwashing, that trust is essential. And her material is premium quality. That’s important to us — we don’t want to source something only because it’s sustainable; it also has to be exceptional. That’s why we work with RELTEX for soles and Nina for leather – both are fully committed to sustainability and produce at the highest quality. We’re making a luxury product, so we can’t cut corners.

Dörte: And you even went as far as moving to Portugal – that wasn’t the plan from the beginning, was it?

Lisa: No, but we knew we wanted to leave the US. When we came to Portugal, it was an easy sell. The existing artisanal craftsmanship was exciting – I love cultures with a rich craft history. The manufacturing here is excellent; Portugal just isn’t as good at marketing itself as Italy. But the quality of the wine, the olive oil, the leather work – it’s all outstanding. When we visited factories, we saw names we admired in the luxury space, like Gabriela Hearst, already producing here. That reinforced our confidence – it felt like the right place for us.

Dörte: I read in your brand description that ABAYA comes from the Nupe heritage. I’d love to hear more about it – how it shapes your worldview, your values, your relationship, and your personal connection to it.

Esuga: Abaya is our last name, and I didn’t know its meaning until we started this project. My dad told me that in the Nupe language – the language of our tribe in Nigeria – it means “tread softly.” Nigeria has around 400 tribes and dialects, and ours is very small. Lisa’s background is Mexican on her mother’s side and Chinese on her father’s side, and we’d often talked about leaning into our cultural heritage. Before Portugal, we even considered moving to Mexico City to be closer to it. When we learned that ABAYA meant “tread softly,” it felt like a validation of the ideas behind our brand. We imagine a future where native cultures can exist free from the constraints imposed by colonialism — a “future modern” world where traditional crafts like block printing or moccasin-making evolve with today’s technology and ideas.

That vision runs through our brand: telling stories and finding endless inspiration in native cultures, motifs, and ways of making. And there’s an inherent connection between native cultures and sustainability – in my culture, traditionally you don’t take more than you need, because you leave enough for others and for posterity. “Tread softly” means thinking that way about design, the environment, and the use of resources.

It’s countercultural in a world that celebrates making the biggest mark possible and maximising profit. We’re still learning how to run a sustainable business while holding to our own guidelines. It’s not easy – even in marketing, we’ve avoided social media to grow intentionally. In my culture, there’s a saying: You start in the direction you mean to go. Starting out the way we intend means we’re more likely to stay on that path. We try to bring that mindset into every aspect of the brand.

Dörte: Where are you right now in terms of your customers and sales? Are you selling mostly through your website, or do you already have shop partners?

Lisa: We’re still at the very beginning. We spent a long time perfecting our first product and deciding how to enter the market. We’ve pivoted along the way – learning that the right partners are crucial. We’d planned to be online-first to control our narrative, but that meant we had to build the right infrastructure. When we first launched, we worked with a shipping partner who wasn’t a good fit – they were set up for large-scale orders, not small luxury brands. We stepped back, found a new partner aligned with us, and relaunched our e-shop only a few months ago.

Now we’re ready to share our story more widely. We’ve just launched the Griot, our second shoe, and are about to release a capsule clothing collection – a t-shirt, sweatshirt, shorts, and sweatpants – all 100% deadstock cotton, organic indigo-dyed and featuring my embroidery designs. We’re also finalizing production of our next shoe, a sandal we plan to launch next spring. This year feels like the point where our foundation is strong enough to do what we envisioned – be an online-first brand and tell our story well. The next step will be finding retail partners we trust to share that story.

Dörte: There’s so much involved – design is just the start. Then comes production, distribution, and of course the marketing and storytelling, which are so important …

Lisa: Exactly. And the more we do this, the more I wonder how brands manage to produce four or more collections a year. It’s a massive operation – spring, summer, fall, winter, resort – there’s so much work behind each one. We’re doing one release and already feel stretched to the limit. It’s also a comment on sustainability – if you want to do things this way, you have to accept a slower pace.

Dörte: Will your first market be the US?

Lisa: I think so. We still have a lot of connections there, even though we’ve moved to Portugal. We’re building relationships here too, but the US is such a big market, and we’ve seen sustainable brands thrive by focusing solely on it. That said, we’d love to expand – I think our clothing could really resonate in Japan, for example, with the natural indigo dye and handmade details. But starting with the US makes sense. We know the culture and the narratives there, so it’s easier to communicate our story in a way that connects.

Dörte: Do you plan to share more about your making processes? You have such a rich network of suppliers and collaborators, and the eight-year journey of your first product is an incredible story in itself.

Lisa: Yes, we’ve started a newsletter that goes to our customers and is also available on our website. We want it to be a place where people can explore and connect with the work we’re doing. Now that we’re making clothing with natural indigo dye, we’ll be sharing content about that. For example, the capsule clothing collection launching soon will feature a collaboration with Michelle Nunes, who does amazing hand-beading on some of our shirts, and we’ve done an interview with her that’s coming out soon. We’re also working with Minority Denim, a dye house in northern Portugal, on our natural dyeing, and we’ll publish an interview and process documentation with them too.

It’s about building community – showing that we care about these crafts and don’t want them to disappear, and inviting people to own a wearable piece of that story. We’d also love to feature Nina and talk about the leather, because communicating authenticity is the hardest part. With so much greenwashing, people are sceptical. That’s why we focus on showing as well as telling – introducing our partners, sharing their processes, and making it clear that we’re doing what we say we’re doing. Online, you can create any image you want, but we want people to see the real, handmade work behind our products.

Dörte: It’s so valuable, because as you say, so many brands use words with no real substance behind them. For me, I love seeing images of people going to places, meeting their suppliers, and showing the production spaces and the people at work. Especially when, as you mentioned, some small producers can’t afford certification but are doing things in far better ways.

Lisa: Exactly, we know this from our leather farmers in Switzerland – smaller farms simply can’t afford to be certified.

Dörte: And photography can take people there – it’s almost like a visual journal of the process.

Esuga: Can I ask you something? This is your space – storytelling – and I think you do it so well with brands and suppliers who are genuinely working with integrity. Do you feel you’re starting to see the fruits of that labour, some feedback that shows people are resonating with those stories?

Dörte: Yes, I do. Over the years, we’ve built partnerships with many amazing people, organisations and universities, such as Fibreshed or Centre for Sustainable Fashion at UAL. More recently, Morna Laing at Parsons interviewed me for a publication on alternative forms of fashion media, highlighting The Lissome as an example for creating a new paradigm. We’ve grown a community of readers and small brands, and I get a lot of feedback from people resonating with the work. When I first started exploring slow fashion in 2014, I didn’t come across that many brands I resonated with. For me, it has to be both – high design quality and craftsmanship, as well as authenticity and integrity in making. But in the last decade, I’ve seen so many new brands emerge that I find really inspiring.

Nonetheless, I think that since the pandemic, small slow fashion brands have been struggling more, and there’s more financial pressure overall. Sales of our first three issues were stronger than the later ones, which coincided with inflation. But I’m holding a long-term vision – what we’re building now might not fully come to fruition for years, or even decades. That’s why your phrase “future modern” resonated – but I believe that we’re at the cusp of a new way of doing things, and I see us as pioneers in that shift.

Esuga: I completely agree. In my tribe, we say you are planting a tree under which you will never sit. You have to be committed to that vision, knowing you might not see the benefits yourself. We’ve seen the opposite way of working, and it’s not sustainable. The only way is to truly be countercultural – to do things differently.

Dörte: It’s interesting you use that word – I recently started thinking about and using the phrase “counterculture of care.” At the moment, we are working against the grain, but planting seeds for something life-affirming to emerge.

Esuga: That’s something we hold onto strongly in our brand, and it ties into counterculture. One of our guiding principles is what we call “native punk minimalism.” The punk aspect is about saying: there’s another way to live – you don’t have to choose what’s being offered to you. Punk, as a counterculture, was co-opted over time, but at its core it was about living your values visibly. For us, that means using fashion to tell a different story. Punk style mattered because people wore their beliefs – they lived counterculture in their clothing. We see our brand in the same way. Yes, they’re “just clothes” or “just shoes,” but they carry a narrative that resists the dominant paradigm. Part of that is sustainability, but it also extends to our politics and our faith. We don’t often see faith expressed in the fashion space, but for us, it’s a centering rod – as relevant as politics in shaping the stories we tell. And when those stories run against the grain, they can be powerful.

Dörte: It’s interesting you mention your faith – I noticed you used the word “redemptive” and wanted to ask what redemption means to you personally and ecologically, and how it influences your creative decisions.

Esuga: It’s an excellent question. For me, faith isn’t separate from everyday acts – it’s about connecting the two. When we read the Bible, we see that God cares for the Earth and how we treat it. Redemption is taking something damaged or broken and restoring it, like kintsugi – repairing with gold. The break remains visible, but it’s made whole again. With the brand, that means showing it’s possible to make a fully regenerative shoe – harder, but beautiful – and inspiring others to value that kind of craft, ideology, and execution. It’s about exploring how our loves, our beliefs, and our creativity come together in what and how we make.

I was the one who chose that word, “redemptive.” We see Christian faith as largely absent from the fashion space, which is a loss. We love design and beauty, and we believe God does too. Redemption, in the biblical sense, starts with the acknowledgement that things are not as they should be – a truth most people feel instinctively. Faith validates that feeling, but also says: things can and will be made right, and that work begins now, with us.

Lisa: Our message is for everyone, but also for Christians who may have separated the “sacred” from the “secular,” believing only certain things matter. We believe all truth is God’s truth, all beauty is God’s beauty. Work outside the church can be holy – there’s a spiritual benefit in eating well, in dressing with care, in the harmony of body, mind, and spirit. The Bible is rich with agrarian imagery. One picture that comes to mind is the seed: it must first die for new life to grow. Sometimes parts of us need to die for something better to emerge. Decay in nature becomes fertile ground – from death, life.

Dörte: Yes, I see interlinks to other belief systems too. I’m not Christian, but I believe in what you’ve said – that the cyclical nature of life is one of its great truths, and that there’s a sacredness in everything.

Lisa: I think most people can sense that separation doesn’t make sense – even a child can see it. We don’t think the Bible supports that view, so why perpetuate it? Why not lean into people’s intuitions and start a real conversation? We feel blessed to do that through something we love – design and fashion. For us, it’s an act of worship. We believe that if you’re offering something as worship, you should do it to the highest standard. That’s why we look for the best materials and strive to make everything as sustainably as possible – it’s the level of care the work deserves.

Dörte: It’s a form of devotion.

Esuga: Exactly.

Dörte: I wanted to ask about your shoe names – they seem to carry a mythical or adventurous element. Could you share the stories behind them?

Lisa: I’m always telling stories, and I love archetypes. In the Bible, one archetype I’m drawn to is the prophet – the mouthpiece of God. Their words carry divine authority, often in a countercultural direction. Everyone may be moving one way, but the prophet calls them to turn and go another. That felt aligned with our first shoe – a strong, bold shape that challenges the direction of mainstream fashion.

The second shoe is the Griot, a storyteller. A griot might be a musician, a comedian, or a poet – someone who uses art to tell history, address politics, and open minds. I think of someone like Dave Chappelle in that role. Art can help people suspend disbelief and share new ideas in a way other mediums can’t. The Griot shoe reflects that – it’s a hybrid of ideas. Our next shoe will be the Sage, inspired by the village elder – the “Baba” – who sits surrounded by children and grandchildren, his face weathered, his beard gray, offering wisdom. He doesn’t hurry anywhere; people come to him. That’s the feeling we want for the Sage.

Dörte: I have one last question. If you could dream 10 years ahead, how would you love ABAYA to evolve, and what legacy would you like to leave?

Lisa: I’m always thinking five or ten years ahead. For us, success wouldn’t be measured by size or revenue, but by who we’re able to work with. We’d love to collaborate with artists we admire – many from native cultures – to dress them and have them reflect back their experience of wearing our work. If ABAYA could be in conversation with such culture-makers, amplifying ideas like slowing down, treading softly, and being more thoughtful – in dress, in consumption, and in how we treat others – that would be success. And we’d like to add to the picture of what it means to be a “new native.” Right now it’s a dream, but we’re slowly building it – dressing people who embody that spirit in music, comedy, or art, and giving them a way to carry it into the street. That would be full circle for us – people choosing to embody the ABAYA look.

Dörte: When I reflect on the journey you’ve described – the many years of research – I feel one of the key elements in achieving something is perseverance. Understanding that things don’t happen overnight, holding the vision, walking towards it, but also accepting that things unfold in their own time. Sometimes quickly, sometimes only after you’ve undergone your own evolution – through research, but also personal growth.

Esuga: Tom Waits has a song that says luck is when opportunity meets preparation. You can toil in obscurity for years, some of our favourite artists did exactly that – working away in their basements or perfecting their sound for a decade or two before anyone noticed. Without that time, they wouldn’t have been ready when the moment came. When you develop a vision in obscurity, without outside noise, it can be more pure – like an artist who shapes their voice over years. There’s a beauty when that work finally reaches people.

In fashion, we often see brands with no soul because they’re trying to please everyone – and end up resonating with no one. We’ve focused more on the story and the product than on making sure every demographic approves. We make what we love, what we wish existed in the world but doesn’t yet. It will be interesting to see who connects with it. We think it could be a very diverse group – and that’s exciting!

Dörte: This feels like a great place to end. Thank you so much for sharing your story!

→ Find out more about ABAYA on https://abaya.life/.

Much love and see you next month,
Dörte, Liz and The Lissome team xx

Dear Precious People,

We are delighted to welcome you to the second season of Weaving Beings – a listening space for tender conversations, where we explore how to live, create and care more consciously in a world in flux.

To begin this new chapter, we’re honoured to share a conversation with someone whose work has long moved between worlds – from fashion runways to grassroots movements, from film sets to forest paths, always guided by a deep sense of curiosity and care.

Our first guest this season is Lily Cole – writer, filmmaker, former model and, above all, storyteller. In this episode, Lily reflects on her journey from early childhood convictions (a handmade “Don’t Wear F-E-R” sign at age eight) to becoming a prominent public voice for sustainability and justice. Yet, as she shares with clarity, her relationship with “activism” has evolved. She now finds herself drawn not to bold declarations, but to questions, complexity and nuance.

Weaving Beings: Conversations with The Lissome, Season 2:
Lily Cole on Living in Alignment and Reclaiming the Power of Story

You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.

Together with host Hardeep Kaur, Lily explores what it means to live a life of aligned values – one where creativity, spirituality and action are not separate threads but part of a larger weave. They speak of surrender and agency, of Rumi and Ram Dass, of the importance of storytelling in polarised times, and of cultivating joy, gratitude and inner peace as radical practices in an age of overwhelm.

This podcast conversation is an extended version of our cover interview with Lily featured in the current issue of The Lissome magazine, accompanied by a beautiful fashion editorial photographed by Thea Sneve Løvstad.

If you haven’t yet secured your limited edition print magazine, we warmly invite you to do so – a collector’s item to savour slowly.

Reserve Your Copy

It’s a conversation full of lightness and depth. One that invites you to slow down, listen closely and reconnect with what matters.

We’re so happy to have you with us for this next season, and we hope this first episode will leave you feeling both grounded and inspired.

With warmth,

Dörte xx

As a special thank-you to our members, we are sharing the fashion editorial behind the paywall – a story we’re proud to have brought to life.

Read more

As summer ripens and the days stretch long, we’re delighted to share The Book of Kin 2025, a community of designers and makers whose practices speak to a slower, more attuned way of creating. This year’s editorial was photographed in the flourishing grounds of Prinzessinnengärten, an urban community garden in the heart of Berlin. The setting echoes the spirit of the work: rooted in care and alive to the relationships between land, nourishment and clothing. Alongside the images, we’re excited to share a conversation with Paula Firmbach of Prinzessinnengärten on what it means to cultivate resilience in our cities and gardens in times of change.

Created as a source of inspiration, The Book of Kin is our annual curation of designers whose work reflects our values of thoughtful design, ecological awareness and social care. It offers a living example of how fashion can be approached with intention and imagination, inviting us to rethink our relationship with the material and the natural world.

We chose Prinzessinnengärten Kollektiv Berlin not only for its natural beauty, but also for its resonance with the theme of our latest issue: Rise Up Rooted Like Trees. Guidance for Growing Resilience in Challenging Times. As a community garden rooted in collective stewardship and ecological education, it embodies the kind of grounded resilience we believe is essential in navigating the future.

Team Credits

Photography: Philipp Köhler
Words & Styling: Dörte de Jesus
Hair & Makeup: Yuka Sudo
Set Styling: bela mora leal
Photography Assistants: Alister Rhodes, Anya Flar, Valentina Murtazaeva
Talents: Hadassa and Hiyori Higashi @vivamodelsberlin

The images below showcase the selected The Book of Kin brands of our 2025 edition, accompanied by short introductions to each. For further images and more detailed information, we invite you to explore our online brand book.

→ Explore the Online Brand Directory

BUNON | Japan & India

BUNON – meaning “weaving” in Bengali – emerges as a bridge between cultures, carrying forward a slow craft tradition that has endured for more than 1,300 years. Rooted in Kolkata, the silk textiles are entirely handmade, woven from hand-spun yarn derived from wild silkworms sourced in the local forests. Immersed in the local culture, a collaborative team from India and Japan navigates the complexities of production together – a shared conversation, a commitment to honouring the past while creating something meaningful for the future. Every thread tells a story of patience, skill and deep respect for nature.

www.instagram.com/bunon_jp

SUZ | Germany

Reviving a dying craft, SUZ transforms traditional wheat straw braiding into contemporary hats, accessories and objects of timeless beauty. Based in Berlin, she works with sculptural forms, graphic minimalism and meticulous handcraft. Each piece, made slowly in her Kreuzberg workshop, reflects a dedication to longevity and care – hats designed for city streets and country meadows alike, inviting a slower way of living with the things we choose to wear.

www.suzberlin.com, @suz.berlin

BAIUSHKI | Switzerland

BAIUSHKI has been crafting sculptural jewellery locally and sustainably since 2016, working with recycled precious metals and fair trade gemstones produced to ethical standards. In their Basel studio and showroom, creative director Lea Good works intuitively, drawing and shaping by hand, inspired by nature’s perfectly imperfect forms – the soft riverbed worn away by water, the angular rock of the mountain and the curve of driftwood.

www.baiushki.com, @baiushki

MAGATA | Germany

MAGATA creates wearable relics for modern rituals. Rooted in Berlin and shaped by Mediterranean ancestry, the label explores the space between softness and structure, gesture and transformation. Each piece is made to order, cut from high-quality natural fabrics and crafted slowly to carry a story over time. Through fluid, sculptural forms that move with the body, MAGATA honours archetypes that reflect different moods, phases and ways of becoming. The name MAGATA originates from the Italian word ammaliata – wild, enchanted.

www.magata.co, @ateliermagata

KOEN | Switzerland

KOEN – Japanese for “public garden” – reconnects clothing with place and purpose. Based in Switzerland, the brand works with 100 per cent organic, biodegradable materials, sourced close to its production site. Each relaxed, minimalist piece is handmade with care, promoting wellbeing through clear design and high-grade finishing. By returning to local craftsmanship, KOEN offers garments that revitalize communities and celebrate the joy of the unique.

www.koen-organicfashion.com, @koen_organicfashion

LAVIE | Switzerland 

Guided by minimalist aesthetics and crafting from certified natural fibres, lavie envisions a regenerative future where textiles enrich our everyday lives, gently and meaningfully. The Swiss home textile brand is rooted in circularity and nature-inspired design – from Cradle to Cradle Certified® Gold bedding to organic towels, homewear and table linens, each piece is made to combine longevity, beauty and ecological responsibility.

www.lavie-home.ch, @lavie_hometextiles

Wol Hide | USA

Wol Hide approaches garment-making as a holistic practice, working with regenerative, minimally dyed natural fibres. Crafted with care in the USA and Peru, each piece reflects softness, simplicity and intention. This season sees the launch of a capsule of sweaters made entirely in the USA – from seed to garment – using mid-gauge cotton yarns in their purest state: unbleached, undyed and resonant in their material presence.

www.wolhide.com, @wolhide

ABAYA | USA

Named after the Nigerian Nupe-language word for “tread softly”, ABAYA was founded on the belief that design holds the power to be redemptive – for the individual, for society and for the Earth. Crafted in Portugal from regenerative leather, cork and natural rubber, each pair is made using only natural materials and ethical processes. Made with truth and beauty as the impetus for creation, ABAYA ascribes all truth and beauty to God.

www.abaya.life

Devlyn van Loon | Canada

Devlyn van Loon’s garments unfold in measured lines. Made in small batches in Canada, each piece reflects mastery: French seams, fine tailoring, and textiles chosen for their quality and longevity. Sourced from mills in Japan, Korea, India and Canada, the designs offer a modern uniform of ease – garments that hold space for comfort, confidence and subtle precision.

www.devlynvanloon.com, @devlynvanloon

Johanna Gauder | Germany

Founded in 2015, Johanna Gauder’s Berlin-based jewellery label has cultivated a purist aesthetic, creating modern yet timeless designs for all genders. Each piece is designed in Berlin and sustainably crafted in Germany from recycled silver or gold. Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, the label has become a recognized voice in the sustainable jewellery industry, known for collections that balance clean lines with playful, elegant elements and for shaping the discourse around conscious resource use.

https://johannagauder.com, @johannagauder

Arctic Summer | Sweden

Arctic Summer, founded in 2020 by two friends sharing a vision of beauty and nature, is a clothing brand based in Uppsala, Sweden. Devoted to creating in collaboration with nature, the brand believes that making new garments can be a process that gives back rather than takes away. This philosophy shapes Arctic Summer’s 11-piece collection, available online and at their atelier in Uppsala.

www.acsr.com, @acsratelier

Natascha von Hirschhausen | Germany

Only favourites worn often can ever be sustainable – a belief at the heart of Berlin-based label Natascha von Hirschhausen. Rooted in zero-waste design, each piece is regionally handmade from certified organic and fair natural materials. With a commitment to transparency and ethics, the brand continues to explore future-oriented innovation while maintaining a clarity of form: minimalist, high-quality garments designed to endure beyond the moment.

www.nataschavonhirschhausen.com, @natascha.von.hirschhausen

Van Tricht | Germany

Rugged yet refined, thesrments explore a quiet dialogue between body and fabric. Heavy materials become soft over time, giving the wearer a sculptural appearance. Created by Hamburg-based designer Hanne Ludwig-van Tricht, the collection is crafted in small editions by artisans in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands – working outside fashions seasonal rhythm and into something altogether more enduring.

www.vantricht-fashion.com, @vantricht_hamburg

→ Explore the Online Brand Directory

Discover the Full Editorial in Print

→ Order the Print Magazine

The Book of Kin fashion story appears in its full layout in The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees. If you haven’t yet, you can now order your copy online and explore many more stories in the complete edition.

Order Your Copy

Urban Gardening for the Common Good

A Conversation with Paula Firmbach of Prinzessinnengärten

For over twelve years, Paula Firmbach has been part of Prinzessinnengärten Kollektiv Berlin, where she coordinates educational programmes, manages community projects and helps steward the garden’s broader activities. Prinzessinnengärten is a pioneering community garden that reimagines urban space as a place for ecological learning, social connection and grassroots transformation. In our conversation, Paula shares insights into their work and reflects on the wider role of community gardens in cultivating resilience in our cities. We’re grateful to the Prinzessinnengärten team for kindly welcoming us into their garden as the location for our The Book of Kin editorial shoot.

Dörte: Paula, could you share with me how the original idea for the Prinzessinnengarten came about and how the project has evolved over the years?

Paula: Sure, the Prinzessinnengärten started in 2009 at Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg. Around 2018/2019, we gradually moved to our new site at the St. Jacobi cemetery in Neukölln, and the move was finalised in 2019.

The original idea came from Robert, who started the garden. Robert had previously been travelling in Cuba and came across a community garden, which was partly the inspiration for Berlin. There have been urban gardens in Cuba for a long time. I found that very interesting. In my master’s thesis, I wrote about the tensions between city administrations and urban gardens. Cuba is a good example of how these kinds of resilience-building projects can emerge in places where urban planning and politics fail. It’s very much about empowerment – about reclaiming the city.

That was also Robert’s motivation. He saw young people gardening together, and there was something so special about it. At Moritzplatz, there was this empty plot – it used to be the historic site of the grand Wertheim department store that was demolished at the end of WW2 – and a call went out to clean it up, and lots of people pitched in. The goal was never to supply all of Berlin with healthy food, that would be impossible. It was always about sharing participatory knowledge and making nature tangible.

I remember when I was still an intern, we had a school class visit, and one child said, “This is my first time riding the subway.” It really makes you realise how limited some children’s worlds are – and how few chances they have to experience nature. That’s what motivates me personally: I want people to understand what it means to plant a carrot, how long it takes to grow, and everything that goes into it. Once you understand that, you also realise that some supermarket prices can’t be right – somewhere along the way, either nature or people have been treated unfairly.

Dörte: What was it like in those early days at Moritzplatz? Did the city support you, or was it difficult to get permission?

Paula: I wasn’t there right at the beginning, but I know that the local district was the landlord of the site. As I mentioned, it used to be the Wertheim department store, and after it was torn down, it was just a huge empty lot – classic Berlin, basically a dumping ground for rubble. I’d say the garden played a big role in bringing that “nowhere” space back to life. We received a lot of support, especially from the neighbourhood. Moritzplatz is in Kreuzberg, where many people are open-minded and alternative – so yes, we had a lot of encouragement.

Dörte: I also have fond memories of it. I live nearby and was really sad when the garden left Moritzplatz. Before the garden opened, it had been such a dead space, and suddenly it was full of life, and so romantic. Under the trees, with the little clearings – I always thought it was so beautiful. You touched on it earlier, what do you think is the role of community gardens in building ecological and social resilience in cities?

Paula: It’s hard to generalise, each community garden has its own concept and unique character. There are intercultural gardens, neighbourhood gardens, gardens with a strong educational focus. But generally, I’d say community gardens preserve or revitalise urban green spaces. They bring nature back into the city and create new communal areas. You can think of them as open-air neighbourhood centres. I think it’s important that cities start to recognise the long-term value of gardens like this. The Prinzessinnengärten was at Moritzplatz for many years, and because of that, it was able to have a lasting impact on the neighbourhood.

Gardens are places where people can learn about nature and climate change – and that applies to adults just as much as children. They also offer safe spaces, especially for people who might not feel comfortable elsewhere. Gardens can be very inclusive – when you’re gardening or cooking, you don’t need a shared language or special knowledge. It’s low-threshold and open to everyone. And then, of course, there’s the urban nature itself: at the St. Jacobi cemetery, many animals have made a home – long-eared owls, bats … they find shelter here.

A cute behind-the-scenes moment with our talent Hadassa:

Dörte: What do you offer specifically, in terms of educational formats or open programs, for people who want to get involved?

Paula: It really varies. We offer environmental education workshops, for school groups as well as for adults. There are upcycling workshops, soil workshops, sometimes dance or nature education sessions. A lot of these can be booked through us. We also have a weekly environmental education day for children aged five and up.

Last year, many of these workshops were funded, but unfortunately, that funding has now ended. That means we’ll have to start charging fees this year, though we’re making sure it remains affordable. The weekly children’s day will still be free of charge. And of course, we have open garden days two days a week when anyone can drop by, whether it’s to work in the fields or the garden. That’s completely free. We show people what needs doing that day, and they can just join in.

We also run gardening projects for other spaces, including schools. Last year, through BEK funding, we created two new school gardens. We also organise follow-up visits – we come back, bring seeds, and plant with the students. So it’s not just about setting things up, but staying involved.

Dörte: How many people take part in your activities regularly and how big is your team?

Paula: I think last year we had about 6,000 participants across our different programs: tours, workshops, open garden days, educational offerings and so on. We’ve helped initiate or co-develop over 160 urban gardens and created around 60 school gardens. At our regular open garden days, we usually have eight to ten people – many of them come regularly and organise themselves as a group. There are really committed groups who keep things going through the winter and plan together what to plant the following year. Others come and go.

Our core team currently consists of about 22 employees – but all part-time. The number of hours varies a lot, especially in summer, when we also have seasonal workers for the café.

Dörte: And do you get outside support, volunteers or donations?

Paula: Yes, a lot of people support us, by gardening or through volunteer work. Others donate regularly. That’s a big help, because we mostly finance ourselves. It’s not always easy. Our areas of work are like a patchwork, lots of small project-based funds that we have to piece together.

Public support can be very powerful. Our lease at Moritzplatz was only renewed year by year for a long time. At some point, we started a petition – and that eventually led to a five-year lease and a sense of stability. These are the kinds of “soft skills” that develop over time – when you’ve been doing it a long time and have seen what public support can mean.

Dörte: And what would you say personally enriches your work the most? What have you taken away from all these years?

Paula: What keeps me going is simply that the work is really beautiful. These days, I spend a lot of time in the office and also have my own garden – it’s not like I’m outside all the time. But I have such wonderful colleagues. When I head to work in the morning, it feels like I’m meeting up with friends. That feeling is a huge gift and brings so much joy to the work.

And I think what motivates me in the long term is the bigger picture. Sure, it’s fun to go outside now and then, see where the raised beds will go, or plan things with others. But what really keeps me committed is the awareness of how important urban gardens are – and perhaps how important the Prinzessinnengärten is in particular.

Of course, being a larger project also comes with challenges. Some people think we receive loads of funding or get constant requests, but that’s not the case. We also have to figure out how to make ends meet. Still, I feel that after all these years we’ve established a certain presence. And that really motivates me. I think: okay, we can open doors – for other gardens, for new projects. We can take on sponsorships, show how gardening can work even in a cemetery. We can be a model project. It feels like people are finally taking us seriously. One example is that our district launched the Park Custodians initiative together with us. It shows what the garden can contribute within an administrative structure, or rather, how collaboration with the district can work.

I just hope that this is being seen, and that other districts or cities might start asking: how do they do things in Berlin? What could we apply ourselves? I hope we can lead by example – for other gardens, too. Because I really believe gardens are vital, especially for the cities of the future.

Dörte: If you imagine the future of urban spaces, thirty or fourty years from now, what might a climate-resilient city look like?

Paula: I think it would require a shift in mindset. But if I could dream up a utopian version: why not make Alexanderplatz car-free, move the tram underground and plant a big meadow with trees that provide shade? A place where people can actually relax instead of rushing over concrete, constantly watching out for traffic.

Cities could be so much more climate-resilient if we had more spaces that were simply cooler. You really notice it – for example, on a hot day, when you’re riding through Berlin and suddenly feel a breeze coming off Urbanhafen, it makes such a difference. I often think: why not close more streets to cars? We don’t really need them. I think Gräfestraße is a great example – they removed some parking spaces, and you can instantly feel the improved quality of the space. You want to linger there.

Dörte: And what would it take for ideas like that to really catch on?

Paula: I think many people don’t necessarily want to garden themselves, but they will if they feel supported. If there’s someone there to guide them. I once gave a talk at the university in Lüneburg, and the city had placed raised beds in the town centre. They were disappointed that the beds got trashed. But honestly, just because a raised bed appears doesn’t mean people know what to do with it. Most people don’t have access to that kind of knowledge – and if no one feels responsible, nothing happens. For it to work, there has to be ongoing care.

Dörte: Do you have an example of that?

Paula: Yes, as part of the Edible City project in Hellersdorf, we once asked: what if we planted fruit trees instead of typical street trees? And if you continue to think utopian, then what if a nearby school took care of them? In autumn, there could be two weeks of apple harvesting, and in spring the kids could learn how to prune the trees. Many children don’t get the chance to experience that. Even if they grow up in districts with a lot of green space, that doesn’t automatically mean they have access. The spaces are there, but no one is really taking care of them.

What I can recommend is a position paper called Das gute Leben für alle. Wie Berlin zur Essbaren Stadt wird. (The Good Life for Everyone. How Berlin becomes an Edible City). It’s made up of different chapters: food, social justice, etc., with concrete references, responsibilities, policy recommendations and visions. So it’s not just wishful thinking, but full of practical steps. For example: “By 2030, every Berlin district will have at least ten community gardens on 20% of its public green space.”

Dörte: That sounds so relevant! Where can I find it?

Paula: It’s on our website, where you can download it. It’s only available in German for now, but we’re planning to translate it into English soon. At the moment, the whole project is run on a voluntary basis, so things move a little slower, but we meet regularly.

Dörte: I keep coming back to this question: climate resilience, what could that really look like in the future? Would it make sense if more people became small-scale gardeners again? To empower themselves, to re-learn how to grow vegetables and fruit, to rebuild that connection with nature and cultivation?

My father was born in 1945 and grew up in a small village. His family had a little semi-detached house, and everyone had a small garden. They all provided for themselves to some extent, growing food, keeping chickens. People simply lived with what was there. Then came the post-war economic boom, and suddenly it was all about supermarkets and convenience. But if you think back to the second world war, for instance – those who had gardens were much better off than those who were entirely dependent on the shops. And I think we’ve lost that awareness. Do you see a potential for a return to that kind of self-sufficiency today, especially in urban contexts?

Paula: Absolutely, yes. Even if you don’t have your own garden, you develop a completely different appreciation for things. And it’s also about food sovereignty, self-empowerment and environmental education.

I am part of a project with partners from Thessaloniki, Romania and the Czech Republic. It’s focused on young people between 20 and 35, who were neither working nor in training. We are developing a course on urban gardening using different cultural approaches. The project in Greece had already started, a part of the course is also about self-employment – how to build a small business around gardening. And I thought: yes, that makes total sense! In the Czech Republic, Romania and Greece, there are still many people who grow a lot of their own food – in contrast to Berlin. Some live near cities and grow so much that they have surplus to sell.

Then I was in Chicago last year and visited some community gardens. One of them was run by a Burmese community. They showed us how they largely grow their own food. Some families grow enough to sell the extra at the market. But their van barely makes it to the market – people from their community are already waiting and buying everything up before it even gets unloaded, because they need the vegetables or special spices they cook their traditional dishes with.

Dörte: It’s so interesting to hear how urban gardening can support food autonomy and even small-scale livelihoods elsewhere. But looking at your experience here in Berlin: what are some of the challenges you encounter when trying to bring those ideas into local urban spaces?

Paula: There’s a market in the outskirts, and the market planners reached out to us with support from the district. They asked us to take a look at how a certain square could be redesigned. I don’t know if you know the Britz-Süd station? There’s a huge car park there and an old building – it used to be a cinema, now it’s an Aldi supermarket. Around it, there’s a driving school, an old pub, and a supermarket with Eastern European groceries. It’s a wild mix! The idea was to make the square more ecologically valuable to increase biodiversity.

The market organisers had also asked us because we build mobile raised beds. We brought some over, designed so they can be moved with a pallet jack. The market vendors could then see how they might use them for their weekly markets. The goal was to make the markets more attractive again – they’ve been shrinking, with fewer customers, less appeal.

It was really fun, very hands-on. But honestly, I’m used to people being happy about our work, and suddenly we faced real backlash. This woman came up, visibly upset and said: “You’re taking away our parking spots, and now you’re planting raised beds here too!” At first, I was furious and thought: what kind of nonsense is that? But then I spoke with her. She told me that because of COVID, she hadn’t seen her son for three years, that she’d been feeling really low. And I thought: “Wow.” I nearly went home angry, but that conversation really taught me something. Isn’t that exactly the issue when we talk about liveable cities? Reaching people like her is really hard.

I find that really thought-provoking – the people who complain about raised beds often have a wealth of knowledge. Many have allotments, real skills, but they’re not part of our bubble. I think there’s this image of “those green types with their raised beds, getting district funding while we lose our parking.” And that triggers a lot. You still really feel that East–West divide in Berlin, too. And I genuinely ask myself: how can we bridge that? There’s so much we could learn from each other. It’s a shame that it doesn’t happen more, because what’s pulling apart is actually something much bigger.

This social polarisation – COVID, the rise of the far-right AfD, all of that. But honestly, if we were gardening together, I think we’d get along really well. You’d ask: “How did you grow your tomatoes?” But right now, everything is so charged, and the divide keeps growing, it’s a huge challenge.

When I studied organic agriculture, I thought: I want to change something in Berlin. Sure, I could go live in the countryside and run an organic farm, also great. But I wanted to create change in the cities, because that also has an impact on the farmers in the surrounding areas.

I was really frustrated by that situation. You spend a week building something, hauling soil and then just get shouted at. But experiences like the one at the car park are so important to me. That’s where we can pick things up again.

Many thanks to Paula for this inspiring conversation. To learn more about Prinzessinnengarten, join their garden activities or read the position paper, visit prinzessinnengarten-kollektiv.net, check out the open garden days, or download the German paper, Das gute Leben für alle. Wie Berlin zur Essbaren Stadt wird (PDF).

Thank you for joining us in the garden.

Much love and see you next month,
Dörte and The Lissome team xx

I’m excited to share with you the recording of our very first Substack Live – an expansive conversation between myself and Hardeep Kaur, host of The Lissome’s Weaving Beings podcast. We recorded this conversation to mark the launch of The Lissome No. 5: Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees, and to offer a window into the ideas and inspirations that shaped this new edition.

In this deep dive, we explore the central theme of the issue – resilience – not as a rigid show of strength, but as something tender, relational and rooted in care. Inspired by the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, “Rise up rooted like trees”, the issue invites us to ground ourselves, to connect and grow in ways that nourish both people and planet.

We speak about:

• How the idea for this theme emerged in response to today’s times of upheaval

• How myth and storytelling provide wide and grounding frameworks for understanding and navigating transformative times

• How practices of resilience are expressed through clothing culture and craft

• The role of embodiment in resilience, finding strength in our sensory awareness, inner coherence and somatic wisdom

• Highlights from the edition, including interviews with Lily Cole and Michael Meade, a story of activist care and somatic resilience and a photographic essay on regenerative fibre practices and craft education in Portugal

• And the wider invitation The Lissome holds: to build a culture of care in fashion and beyond

You’ll also hear reflections on the magazine-making process itself – how each edition is woven intuitively and in community, and how the magazine as a craft artefact in itself represents the values of The Lissome.

It’s a conversation that reflects the spirit of the magazine – reflective, hopeful and grounded in a sense of beauty and possibility. I hope you’ll enjoy listening.

The Lissome No. 5 is now available to order – we’d love to share it with you.

Reserve your copy

Here, you’ll find a few glimpses from the new issue that we took last weekend on the magical grounds of Omved Gardens in London:

Thank you so much for being part of this journey.

With love,
Dörte

We’re honoured to share a moment we’ve been tending quietly, collectively, for several seasons: the release of The Lissome Magazine’s fifth limited edition print issue – Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees is now available for pre-order!

💛 As a thank-you for your support, our paid members will receive a 15% discount code behind the paywall for the duration of the pre-order period (until 2 July).

Reserve Your Copy

Inspired by Rilke’s poetic wisdom, this issue has grown slowly – like roots threading deeper into soil, ideas shaped across distance. It gathers voices, visions and practices that ask what it means to stay grounded amidst a world in chaos, and how we might cultivate resilience not as a hardened shell, but as a tender and ongoing relationship with each other, with the Earth and the future we long for.

In her editor’s letter, our founder and editor-in-chief, Dörte de Jesus, shares:

Listen to the full Letter from the Editor here:

Across 144 pages of intimate interviews, critical essays and luminous photography, Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees moves through themes of embodied knowledge, regenerative craft, ecological attunement and radical imagination. From the power of myth as an anchor and guide in times of upheaval to storytelling as a practice of community care, from tactile rituals of making to frameworks and tools for inner and outer alignment, this issue is both a love letter and a blueprint – for living otherwise.

A Mindful Evolution in Design

Readers of previous editions will notice a subtle change in the format and feel of our new magazine. With these changes, we hope to honour both aesthetic sensibility and environmental integrity.

By slightly reducing the format, we’re now able to use the printing sheets more efficiently, fitting in more double pages per sheet and significantly reducing paper waste. We’ve also selected new high-volume papers that retain the same luxurious, tactile quality you know and love, while being lighter in weight. This change helps us reduce shipping emissions and costs.

What remains unchanged is our close collaboration with Druckhaus Sportflieger, our trusted Berlin-based print partner since day one, and our commitment to using sustainably sourced papers. Our new paper stocks – Munken Print White by Arctic Paper and Holmen TRND – are both certified and chosen for their environmental credentials.

Let’s celebrate the release with a special Substack Live conversation – we hope you can join us!

Hardeep Kaur, host of The Lissome’s Weaving Beings podcast, and editor-in-chief Dörte de Jesus, will reflect on the creative journey behind the issue, the themes that inspired it, and how storytelling and fashion can nurture resilience in challenging times.

🗓 Date: Friday, 4 July 2025
🕕 Time: 3:00 pm BST (British Summer Time) / 4:00 pm CEST / 10:00 am EDT
📍 Live on Substack – Join us here

👉 Need help with time zones? Click here to convert to your local time.

Bring your questions, your curiosity and a cup of tea – we can’t wait to open this space and set off on a new year of creative exploration together.

Working on this edition has been a grounding process for our team. We’ve spent the past year in deep conversation with contributors around the world, weaving together narratives that stretch across disciplines but converge in spirit. Holding these stories has reminded us that beauty is not decorative, but vital; that to slow down is not to escape, but to deepen. After all, community is one of the fiercest forms of resilience we have.

We’re proud of what we’ve created. And we’re so grateful for the support of our readers, whose belief in this work sustains it.

Reserve Your Copy

The Lissome Nº5 is now open for pre-order. We invite you to reserve your copy and join us in dreaming together and with the Earth as our guide.

With care and gratitude,
Liz and The Lissome team

💛 As a thank-you for your support, our paid members will receive a 15% discount code behind the paywall for the duration of the pre-order period (until 2 July).

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