The aristocrats of the Heian period made a game of awase, pairing. Shell matching, incense matching, poetry contests, the Hundred Poets card game: two things were brought together, and people competed in and delighted at the subtlety of the match. Not to decide which was better, but to find beauty in the pairing itself.

AMUAMI’s light Kinu-awase, as its name says, pairs silk with silk.

The shade is a rare piece made on a special machine in Okaya, Nagano, winding as much as 6,000 meters of thread from more than 300 cocoons. To pair with this sphere clothed in soft light, it needed a worthy partner. We arrived at sanada-himo, a silk cord said to be the narrowest woven fabric in the world, long cherished for ties on armor and tea utensils.

But we did not use the sanada-himo for its original purpose. We let it stray from its proper role and, taking advantage of its hollow structure, dressed the frame in it. This is mitate: treating A as B. Seeing the cord not as a cord, but as a garment wrapping the skeleton. The moment it leaves its intended use, a new beauty rises.

A round shade on three legs. Isamu Noguchi’s lights are, for us, simply too great. But we did not want to join that lineage. The pairing of silk with silk, and the method of mitate: that was AMUAMI’s own answer.

Sanada-himo in its original use