Chiang Mai · Bangkok · Paris · Tokyo · Kyoto · Milan · New York · Seoul
Two dogs founded the house. The masters who joined it are a cat, a chick, a tortoise, a panda and a penguin — because when the factories forgot how to do this, the ones who remembered were not who anybody expected.
Why these names
The house is not a family and not a nationality. It is a trade route — the one raw silk, indigo, technique and breeding stock have moved along for four hundred years.
Chiang Mai, Bangkok
The loom, the relic, and the Isan Mudmee resist that reached the north in somebody's hands and never went home. Tao carries it because he was in the room. Kuma keeps the room. Kai knows every door in Bangkok and has outlasted most of them.
Tokyo, Kyoto
Guild families who moved between Ayutthaya, Kyoto and Edo on the same route the silk did — Miko's hem, Sora's dye vat, Ren's ledger. Their names are Japanese because their teachers were, and their species differ because craft was never a bloodline.
Paris, Milan
The salons that decide what counts. Lumi, Bao, Luna and Yuki are of that world — which is precisely why their judgement carries, and why leaving it cost them something.
New York, Seoul
The ones who move it. Chika plans the route, Pika has never put a package down, Hikari turns up on the far shore at 3am without being asked. No passage, no house.
The founders
Chiang Mai · Shiba-Spitz pup
The Heir — who was handed the thread
Tao grew up between the teakwood looms of San Kamphaeng and can tell a hand-rolled hem by sound. He was in the room when the last loom was broken up for scrap, and he is the one the dying master pressed the square into. He has not put it down since. Named for the path, which is the only thing he has ever been certain of.
Brings
The relic, and the obligation that came with it
Paris · Toy Poodle
The Architect — who said it out loud first
Lumi declared the house on a Chiang Mai rooftop in a monsoon, with no silk, no money and no buyer. Everything since has been him making that sentence true. He is vain in the way that is forgivable, because he is the first to share and the last to quit. Named for light, which is what he keeps insisting is at the end of it.
Brings
Belief, spoken before there is any evidence for it
Appears in
The guild
Each holds one craft, in one city, and stands for one idea — which is what lets any of them carry a twenty-second story alone, and what makes a set of twelve a set worth completing.
Shiba Inu · Tokyo
The Edge · Craft
Miko studied their first scarf for four minutes, then cut it down the middle with iron shears and showed them the frayed edge. A loose thread is a lie told to the customer. Then she rolled the edge by hand and gave it back, and it was a different object.
Scottish Fold · Kyoto
The Dyer · Craft
Sora works the indigo and madder vats and will only dip in the twenty minutes after the sun clears the ridge, because that is the only light that does not lie about a colour. He has made the whole crew wait a full day rather than dip early, and did it without raising his voice or putting down his coffee.
Panda · Tokyo
The Ledger · Honesty
Ren watched two fashion houses go under and keeps the books of both. He talks about the failures rather than the survivor, which makes him the least glamorous voice in the room and the most useful one. He reads the accounts in sunglasses so nobody can tell which line he stopped at.
Italian Greyhound · Milan
The Judge · Honesty
Luna is the most feared independent eye in European luxury and she is merciless for exactly as long as it takes. Eleven minutes on the first collection, right about all of it. She is the reason the house improves between cities instead of only between years.
Fox · New York
The Planner · Enterprise
Chika has read the contract. All of it, including the part everyone skipped. She keeps the ledgers, the maps and the production calendar, and she is the reason a sample that has to be in three cities on Thursday is in three cities on Thursday.
Bichon Frise · Paris
The Artist · Craft
Bao paints every print by hand before it ever reaches silk — the cloth only gets the second draft. He recognised the weave across a crowded backstage and asked where it came from, which is the first time anyone outside Thailand had seen the pattern before.
Chick · Seoul
The Courier · Never give up
Three cities, forty hours, one sample, one storm and a ferry nobody has fully explained. Pika has never lost a package, though several have arrived by remarkable routes, and he has never once put one down.
Rabbit · Seoul
The Bright One · Positive thinking
Hikari arrives first, leaves last, and has never once been talked out of a good mood. She met Pika halfway across a country in a storm at three in the morning and has never mentioned it since, which is the part that tells you who she is.
Penguin · Milan
The Keeper of Names · Friendship
Yuki keeps a hand-bound ledger of every customer, their animal, and the date. He greeted a returning client by asking after a spaniel's paw four hundred days later. Small, round, and always the first one out onto the ice.
Bear · Chiang Mai
The Hearth · Family
Kuma keeps the workshop. He was there the day the loom came apart and he is still there, which is why there is a workshop to come back to at all. Turns up with the heart — that is the entire job and he is extremely good at it.
Tortoise · Bangkok
The Explorer · Never give up
Slowest in the house. Has been to more cities than anyone else in it. Kai carries a brass seal older than most of the companies that refuse to see him, and he has never once accepted that a door is closed — he simply outlasts it.
Mochi · Kyoto
The Little Joy · Friendship
Does nothing. Is essential. Everybody checks on him before they leave. When the crew has been awake for thirty hours arguing about three grams of drape, Mochi is the reason somebody eventually laughs.
The figures are not yet made — the characters are finished, the line is not. Vote for the one you want and we make that one first: fifty of it, and you hear before anyone else.