Into The Blue

Husband-and-wife team Philip Huang and Chomwan Weeraworawit use traditional Thai craftsmanship and natural indigo dyes to create seductively sustainable clothes. Now they’re ready to introduce their ‘indigo grandmas’ to the world

- Oliver Giles

Fashion designers have always been obsessed with youth. They parade teenage models down runways, favour millennials over boomers and fall all over themselves to court the latest fresh-faced Hollywood stars.

Not Philip Huang—his closest collaborators are grandmas. “It was April 2015, and we went on this road trip to find the indigo grandmas,” recalls Huang. He had recently left his home in New York, where he had enjoyed a successful modelling career, to relocate to Bangkok with his wife, Chomwan Weeraworawit, a co-founder of creative consultancy Mysterious Ordinary and an expert on intellectual property in the textiles industry.

The couple had long been intrigued by how clothes and colours are made, having attended indigo dye-making workshops years earlier, and so were intrigued when they started hearing stories of communities in Thailand’s northeast province of Sakon Nakhon that specialised in making the pigment. “We didn’t have any [work] in mind when we went on the road trip; we were just curious about this blue colour and where it comes from—and I wanted to see more of the country,” says Huang. Weeraworawit adds: “We did a bit of research, printed out a list of villages, and just dropped in on them—it’s about 13 hours’ drive from Bangkok.”