Ibulliance: Becoming True Blue - Introducing Indigo Alchemy Fall 2025

 

With gentle prodding from a woman in headscarf and full skirt, a skein of wool yarn sinks slowly into the amber-green mystery of a dye pot. On a dusty road in rural Turkey, I'm watching some ancient alchemists at work.

The fibers circle to the bottom of the soup, one wiry filament at a time, lying still in deep color. She goes to the next vat, and the next, submerging and stirring as delicately as you might tend an egg sauce over flame. This is indigo. It's alive and breathing, this brew, blooming with a foamy flower at the top of each vat, only after weeks of feeding it exactly what it needs . . . in this case with bacteria, and honey, and lime.

When she lifts the skein from the first vat—raising it like a flag to the sun, slapping it across a clothesline—it sloshes its grassy green color everywhere. I've since watched the miracle of indigo in Bangalore, in Kyoto, Chiang Mai, in the sacred valley of Peru, and in my own back yard, where once it was grown. But what happens next never fails to take my breath away. In a slow rippling moment, as air begins to finger the yarn’s tresses, as oxygen meets the dye's indicum, before my eyes the green threads—just like that—turn blue. 

This is the magic of indigo. A pale blue it is, this time, like a summer sky. The dipping and drying will be repeated as many as two dozen times to reach the color of midnight, or any one of the sky shades in-between. My eyes are wide as I watch; I notice that in that long miracle minute of transformation, I haven't taken a breath. 

No wonder indigo is a universal language, Though the name itself means from India, cultures in West Africa, the Americas, Indonesia, Central Asia, Europe, China and Japan have all fallen under its spell. It sings in deep notes we instinctively understand.

The artisans who keep this language alive tell me the hardest thing isn't building an indigo vat, but keeping it alive. If not tended properly, the magic of the temperamental leaves can simply die. The process is arduous and long; the labor of tending a vat requires seasons of experience and love. I have deep respect for people with blue hands.

In the Guizhou province of China, women still coax this blue to create the coat I am wearing (above). In Burkina Faso, strip weaving is indigo dyed with patterns older than memory; this vintage piece Deniz is wearing we made into a skirt that celebrates that heritage. The new pieces in our Fall Indigo Alchemy Collection, which is released today, pair well with denim, a nod to our American legacy of indigo, with which Levi Strauss originally dyed his jeans.

Indigo is more than color—it's topical medicine for infected skin; is also ingested to treat troubled stomachs. It's worn as protection from evil, crafted for rituals, both sacred and mundane.

In the end, indigo is a kind of secret. This true blue is hidden in vats of green, after all. I wonder if we don't all have our true color hidden in the murky swirl of our lives, not yet revealed? What if it needs only the gentle prodding of other women to stir us, the lightness of air and oxygen to reach us; what if we simply need to be raised like a sloshing flag to the sun? 

That's the magic I'm counting on. That's what this work is all about. The world of women rising from our depths, together, into our own true colors . . . bright against the wide, open sky.

All the Best,

Susan Hull Walker

 

Today, we are excited to share our newest collection, Indigo Alchemy. ✨

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.