A LETTER FROM DECHEN
A few words from our co-founder on the thought, research, and design process behind our AW26 collection.
Since its founding, Norlha has evolved through continuity; each year builds upon the one before it.
AW26 brings together the past seven years of design and development: a grand symphony of what has been learned, discovered and refined over time.
Rather than approaching each collection through a new theme, our designers have allowed one year to grow naturally from the last. In this, the collections resemble the landscape around us. The silhouette of the Plateau remains, yet it is never quite the same: colours shift with the seasons, textures emerge and disappear, and changing light transforms what is familiar into something new. Our designs have evolved in much the same way, shaped by the land and its people and by years spent understanding the extraordinary fibre that is yak khullu.
At the heart of this evolution is a careful interplay of design and handcraft. A weaver creates the structure; a felter adds soft layers of loose fibre, matted with water and worked into the woven surface. As techniques evolve, boundaries fall away and once-separate processes become one.
Yak khullu responds to the hand, to a handling born of patience and experience. This gentle human touch reveals its remarkable softness and warmth, while retaining the strength that has protected yaks through generations of life on the Tibetan Plateau.
There is something fitting in thinking of these seven years as a cycle. Life on the Plateau has always moved in cycles; the seasons, the migration of herds, the turning of prayer wheels. Each returns, but never quite as before; each carries with it what has been learned.
AW26 completes one such cycle: seven years of experimentation, learning and accumulated skill coming together, not as an ending, but as the foundation for what comes next.
~ Dechen Yeshi
Norlha Co-Founder
Words
Norlha
Norlha
