First collaborative capsule of the year

Shibori-dyed wool scarves, with natural color by Ryan Taylor

First of all, happiest of birthdays to Echo Yun Chen, my dear friend and multi-talented photographer extraordinaire — whose warm gaze continues to make my work look its very brightest, and never ceases to inject pure magic into the most everyday of moments.

Love you, Echo — I’m eternally grateful for your glowing heart!

Echo at the Chores 2024 Exhibition, photographed by Luka Asatiani

Collaborative “capsule” collections of 2025

One of my goals for this year was to make four collaborative collections — each with a different maker, experimenting with a new mode of making.

The aim of each of these projects is to create a small collection of unique objects that blend my creative practice with that of another like-minded artist or designer. Since we’re prioritizing experimental co-creation with fairly tight time constraints… I imagine that each collection would be quite small — hence “capsule” collection!

I’m very excited to be sharing today about the work and process behind the very first capsule of the year, made with my friend and fellow slow fashion craftsperson — Ryan Taylor.

Natural color with Ryan Taylor

Ryan Taylor is a menswear designer and natural dyer based in Brooklyn, whose dye practice is built on a deliberate and scientific foundation that supports the uniquely organic, kaleidoscopic beauty of natural color. His work is deeply rigorous (obsessive, some might say) — subtle and classic in flavor, yet considered and subversive in detail.

Swatch from Ryan’s exploratory article on “cross-dyeing,” highlighting how different fibers’ unique affinity for dye can create multicolor effects

“For millennia, humans perceived color through nature and its reflections in human interpretation. Throughout the ages and around the world, dyers relied on the color obtained from plants, fungi, lichen, insects, shellfish, and rock minerals. In ancient cultures such as China and Japan, things that yielded color were often associated with medicinal and mystical powers. A similar reverence and curiosity about colors derived from nature is growing among contemporary dyers and artists who choose to experience themselves working within the biosphere, in partnership with nature rather than trying to exploit or control it.”

—Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, in The Art and Science of Natural Dyes by Joy Boutrup and Catharine Ellis

Ryan and I met nearly seven years ago in a textiles class at Parsons School of Design (shoutout to our passionate professor and textiles scholar, Lorenza Wong!), where we were both shocked to learn that synthetic dyes had only been used (and abused) since the late 1800s. Prior to that, all textiles had been dyed with natural colorants — including plants and insects.

As I furthered my research into the social, environmental, and health-related impacts of synthetic dyes, I became increasingly interested in how the practice of natural dyeing can showcase the connected beauty and resilience of native ecosystems.

At the same time, Ryan was deepening his understanding of how to actually produce natural color in a consistent way — a slow, complex, and finicky process that requires patience and precision. Over the last five+ years, he’s developed some of the most vibrant and consistent outcomes that I’ve come across in the natural dye world.

It was a real joy to work with Ryan on this collection, which at the close of 2024 invited me to return to some important foundations of textile work:

Fiber, color, construction, chemistry, connectedness & collaboration — just some ways in which the earth and its treasures guide us toward new (and ancient) possibilities.

Ryan Taylor wearing 01 Scale — collection photography by Echo Yun Chen

Our collaborative capsule: Serpentine Scarves

Serpentine Scarves is a capsule collection celebrating Lunar New Year 2025, the year of the wood snake. Created in thoughtful collaboration between slow fashion designers Joy Mao and Ryan Taylor, the limited collection features eight one-of-a-kind merino wool scarves, treated with a color-shifted natural dye.

(Shoutout to my best babe, Shaina Yang, for naming the collection and writing these lovely descriptions of the work! My commentary in parentheses.)

Each scarf began with Joy, as an oversized white ribbon of 100% merino wool, manually knit on a hand-powered Silver Reed SK280 knitting machine. The knits themselves were intentionally patterned in an elegant full-needle rib construction that would give them their surprising weight and durability.

(For my fiber and knitting nerds: it’s a 2-ply sock weight yarn with a high twist, which gives the resulting fabric such a lovely sheen and strong stitch definition.)

Once with Ryan, they were then treated to a bath of lac (kerria lacca): a deep burgundy-hued natural dye that has been extracted from the resinous shellac of scale insects since antiquity.

(Lac of one of Ryan’s favorite natural dye sources, due to its rich color and sensitivity to iron-shifting. It’s been used as early as 250 A.D. throughout India, Southeast Asia, Nepal, and China — as a lacquer to protect wood, and to color silk and leather. Ryan used an alum pre-mordant to help the dye adhere to the wool fiber during our dye process.)

Both makers then worked together to fold, twist, bunch, and bind each scarf with a different shibori-dye technique.

(So fun — a technique usually seen on wovens, seldom on knits!)

During the final step — color-shifting — each piece was then plunged into a bath of iron. The resulting alchemy transmuted the bright reds into deep purples, along and beyond the crinkles and twists of their binding.

(We experimented with a bunch of different approaches to this step, which yielded some unexpected results. As such, no two scarves are the same — nor exactly replicable, for that matter.)

Just in time for Lunar New Year

When developing this collection at the close of 2024, I was thinking a lot about transformation, both within myself and in the context of my community. The incoming year of the snake invites us to consider the necessary shifts occurring in our worlds, large and small.

As usual, Shaina described it most beautifully:

“In a world that feels increasingly unknowable, returning to the primordial weight of the serpent feels timely: the wood snake invites us to lay on our bellies in the dust and desert, and to feel every vibration of the earth in concert with our every movement and motion.

2025 is a year of complexity yet full intent, of coming full-circle whilst still embracing that which is open-ended — and this capsule holds these reflections accordingly at its core, through its complex process of making that combines carefully planned intentionality with letting go and allowing for that which is uncontrollable — individual body and world vibration intertwined.”

“As we shed our skins together this year, we celebrate rebirth, cyclicality, and that which ties our world together. These scarves — each completely unique and unreplicable — bring with them their own story embedded into their color shift, having undergone their own rebirth cycle. They wrap the wearer in the comfort of the wood snake’s wisdom; universally mythologized, and older than time.”

—Shaina Yang

Wishing a happy new year to all those who celebrate. May the year of the wood snake bring you introspection, shedding, and new growth.

Much love,
Joy (and Ryan!)

Explore the collection on joymao.com starting January 27, 2025 at 12pm EST.