The wax print, reconsidered.

Wax print arrives in the world already speaking. That is both its gift and the reason it is so often asked to do too much. We do not use it as decoration. When we use it at all — as on the school blazer, as a facing inside a jacket — it is as structure. A trim. A lining you discover rather than display.

This is not a rejection of a cloth we grew up with. It is a refusal to treat it as costume. The weavers we work with in Bonwire and Kpetoe understand this instinctively. They have been making cloth that lasts longer than a season for longer than our house has existed.