In 1688, a family mill and traditional textile house named HOSOO was founded in Kyoto. Over the past three centuries, its focus on Nishijin weaving—a yarn-dying and weaving technique developed more than 1,200 years ago for garments such as kimonos, popularized by the Imperial Court and samurai class—has brought these textiles to the forefront of global design and fashion scenes. Today, HOSOO’s President and CEO, Masataka Hosoo, a 12th-generation family member, is leading its intricate textiles into the future, expanding its legacy into the global design and luxury landscape with clients and collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Gucci, and The Ritz-Carlton, Teresita Fernández, Peter Marino, and Lady Gaga, and more.
Under his leadership, the mill balances centuries-old craft with advanced looms, software-driven processes, and strategic partnerships—including a landmark 2023 agreement with LVMH Métiers d’Art—ensuring that Nishijin weaving remains a living practice, defined by both preservation and reinvention. Hosoo spoke with Whitewall about bringing textile creation into contemporary life and why the brand continues to challenge beauty, history, and invention.
A Living Tradition
Courtesy of HOSOO.
Courtesy of HOSOO.
WHITEWALL: You’re known as a “kimono specialist.” What activities is the brand engaged in to bring kimono culture into contemporary life and the future?
MASATAKA HOSOO: At HOSOO, we see beauty as a living force. Just as wearing a beautiful kimono can uplift the spirit, textile beauty has the power to move people emotionally and physically. Rather than preserving kimono as a static form, we have expanded the techniques cultivated for kimono into contemporary architecture, interiors, fashion, and art. We collaborate with architects, designers, and artists around the world to allow Nishijin weaving to enter new environments and new bodies.
For us, tradition is not something to protect by freezing it. It is something to protect by continuously challenging it. Creativity, experimentation, and innovation are not separate from tradition—they are the very means by which tradition survives and moves into the future.
“Tradition is not something to protect by freezing it,”
–Masataka Hosoo.
WW: HOSOO is over 300 years old. What has changed, and what has stayed the same since 1688?
MH: Over the past three centuries, society and daily life have transformed radically. Yet textiles, beauty, and kimono have continued to exist alongside humanity. Textiles themselves hold a history of over 6,000 years. They have always been present wherever humans have lived. In that sense, weaving is not simply a technique, but a fundamental human act.
What has remained constant at HOSOO is the pursuit of beauty through textiles.What has changed is the context in which that beauty is questioned. Through weaving, we continue to ask the same essential questions: What is beauty? What does it mean to be human? Those questions, more than any product, are what connect 1688 to today.
Memory and Reinvention
Courtesy of HOSOO.
WW: Can you tell us about your five-floor flagship store in Kyoto?
MH: Our flagship store in Kyoto opened in 2019 after the renovation of our former headquarters, originally built about fifty years ago. The building brings together the knowledge of independent master artisans, combining different materials and techniques into a single architectural expression. We approached the building itself as a woven structure — layering materials, light, and spatial rhythms much like threads on a loom.
Nishijin weaving has always integrated diverse materials into harmonious structures. We translated that DNA into architecture. The result is what we call “Craft Architecture.”
Modern society has long prioritized efficiency over beauty, production over presence. Our space stands as a counterproposal: a place that values slowness, tactility, and longevity.
Craft culture teaches us that objects are not consumed — they are cared for, lived with, and inherited. That worldview is what we hope this building quietly communicates.
WW: When beginning a new project, what do you feel responsible for preserving? Creating anew?
MH: Behind every HOSOO textile lies the story of Nishijin weaving—over 1,200 years of continuous aesthetic pursuit. Our responsibility is not to preserve techniques as museum artifacts. It is to continually re-question what beauty means in each era, and to create expressions that could only exist now. Each project must hold both memory and risk. Innovation without memory is shallow. Tradition without reinvention is fragile. Our task is to carry forward not forms, but attitude—a commitment to challenge beauty itself. That is the true baton we pass to the future.
On Slowness and Human Scale
Courtesy of HOSOO.
WW: How do you translate Nishijin weaving into contemporary material language?
MH: Nishijin weaving is built on ritual, repetition, and time. Each textile condenses countless human gestures. When we bring it into contemporary contexts, we do not simplify it. We expose its structure. We allow its layered temporality to become visible. In interiors, fashion, or art, our textiles do not function as surfaces alone. They act as atmospheres. They hold memory, light, and movement. We believe contemporary space needs not only efficiency, but resonance. We translate tradition not by decoration, but by allowing time itself to remain present within the material.
WW: What does fabric make possible that other materials—like stone, wood, or steel—can’t?
MH: HOSOO textiles are yarn-dyed figured weaves. They are constructed structures, not surfaces. Every piece contains thousands of choices—fibers, colors, tensions, rhythms, and architectures. Threads resonate within woven systems. Light changes them. Movement activates them. The textile responds continuously to its environment.
Unlike stone or steel, fabric is never fixed. It breathes. It transforms. It absorbs atmosphere and reflects emotion. Each textile becomes a kind of orchestra—a composition that only fully exists in the moment of encounter. Multiplicity, harmony, and perceptual change are the essence of cloth.
“We are not slowing down. We are returning to the human scale,”
–Masataka Hosoo.
WW: Do you consider slowness resistance, refuge, or necessity?
MH: In craft, slowness and tactility are essential because they are bodily. They require presence.
Through textiles, we seek a balance appropriate for human perception—a tempo aligned with breathing, touch, and memory. In that sense, it is not resistance. It is not refuge. It is necessity. We are not slowing down. We are returning to the human scale.
Beauty Beyond the Surface
Courtesy of HOSOO.
WW: Why are you drawn to the threshold between surface and space
MH: This question is deeply philosophical for me. Textiles exist precisely on that boundary — between material and immaterial, object and atmosphere, vision and sensation. That threshold is where beauty becomes experience rather than image. Where surfaces begin to behave like spaces. Where perception becomes unstable. My pursuit of beauty is fundamentally driven by this unstable zone—where seeing transforms into sensing.
WW: How has Kyoto shaped your thinking?
MH: History resembles a vast tapestry. Time forms the warp. Each era inserts its weft.
Kyoto is a tapestry that has been continuously woven for over 1,200 years. It does not preserve the past. It layers it. Growing up within this rhythm, beauty never appeared as novelty. It appeared as continuity. Renewal was never ruptured. It was addition. Kyoto taught me that legacy is not inheritance. It is participation.
WW: What is HOSOO working on this spring?
MH: In the Tango region of Kyoto, we are developing a 42,000-square-meter sericulture facility.
Our goal is to reconstruct silk itself—from the genetic level—to create a future standard of beauty rooted in Kyoto. Beautiful textiles require beautiful material. To truly shape the future of weaving, we must also shape the future of silk.
We will take part in Matter & Shape, the design salon held from March 6-9 at the Tuileries Garden in Paris, unveiling a new vision of Artisanal Hemp. The presentation reinterprets hemp, a material deeply rooted in the brand’s heritage. During Milan Design Week, at the Largo Treves 5 showroom, we will unveil WAVE WEAVE, a collaboration with internationally acclaimed artist Carsten Nicolai, where textile culture is reimagined through contemporary art and technology.
