Kilomet109 Brings Vietnamese Textile Traditions to Fashion Week Asia

Designer Thảo Vũ‘s Quyên collection explores heritage, memory, and resilience through natural fibers, earthy dyes, and fluid silhouettes.

Before the first look emerged at the inaugural Fashion Week Asia, Kilomet109 took the audience deep into the Vietnamese jungle. The opening film followed designer Thảo Vũ with Nùng An ethnic community on an extraordinary journey to a lost grove of wild banana plants, where stalks yield a silk-like thread rooted in an ancient Asian textile tradition spanning more than 800 years. It was an evocative introduction to a collection concerned not simply with what clothes are made of, but with the lives, landscapes, and knowledge carried within their fibers.

Titled Quyên, the collection takes its name from the chim quyên, a bird woven through Vietnamese literature and folklore. Its call is said to travel across great distances, carrying memory, longing, and resilience. The metaphor finds its way into the clothes themselves. Fluid linens, dyed hemp, and sheer bomber jackets moved with an ease that softened utilitarian details, from discreet buttons and considered pocket placements to asymmetrical constructions. Indigo and earthy natural dyes established a muted rhythm, interrupted by a vibrant pink silk top, a scarlet-red dress, and the subtle electricity of a pleated skirt wrapped around the body.

Texture was equally central to the collection’s language. Intricate hand stitching, chunky necklaces, and a statement tailored jacket brought dimension to otherwise fluid silhouettes. Even a dark trench coat seemed to surrender to movement, its structure giving way to the natural rhythm of the fabric. Across the runwayRunwayThe platform or catwalk on which models present a designer's collection to an audience of editors, buyers, and guests. Runway shows establish the creative statement of a season, and Vogue'sGo to Runway Glossary, Kilomet109 demonstrated that utility and delicacy need not exist in opposition.

For Vũ, whose label explores the meeting of traditional textile methods and contemporary design, each material offers another way of understanding craft. Quyên brings together techniques from across Vietnam and extends its reach to neighboring textile traditions, including mud-dyed silk from China, Indonesian batik, and Philippine piñaPiñaA luxurious, translucent fabric hand-woven from pineapple leaf fibers, most closely associated with Aklan in Panay. The painstaking process of extracting and knotting the fibers makes piña rare and costly,Go to Piña Glossary, which appears in one of the collection’s bomber jackets. The collection also introduces ikat woven by Khmer artisans in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

Among the techniques explored is calendering, a process in which fabric is polished with stone to compress its surface and produce a soft sheen. Applied to cotton, ramie, and silk, the method reveals how differently each fiber responds to the same gesture.

In Quyên, tradition is neither preserved behind glass nor treated as an aesthetic reference. It remains in motion, shaped by the hands that work it and the bodies that wear it. Like the bird that gives the collection its name, these textiles travel, carrying traces of where they came from while finding new ways to take flight.