Why ao?
Indigo powder
Welcome, and thank you for visiting ao textiles and our exciting new blog.
In these first few entries, we aim to talk a little about who we are, a little about our work, and a little about our ethos and philosophy.
Why ao? – Green and Blue:
If you are coming here from somewhere other than our website, or you didn't get a chance to read our about section, ao textiles is fashion and interiors based design consultancy, specialising in sustainable production methods. Natural dyeing is at the core of our creative model.
So, as you would imagine, colour is a collective fascination; it's properties and elements, it's ambiguities. During the course of our lifelong experimentation with and research of colour, we discovered that the wide palate of colours we know today haven't always existed in language.
The colours first registered by early humans in language were black and white, then red, then green. But it wasn't until the ancient Egyptians that there was a word for blue that was distinct from green. There are languages that even into modern times have no word for the colour blue, labelling what we would call blue as a different shade of green.
For us, ao represents the realm between this part of the spectrum, so vivid in the natural world, yet so intangible. Watching fabric in an indigo dye vat turn from chlorophyll green to deep blue when it hits the air.
Our work is intrinsically linked to these concepts, and that is why we are called ao textiles, ao being the western translation from Japanese of the word blue which in old Japanese meant green.
Indigo dye vat