For most of the past decade, Asian craft, style and philosophy have moved through Psylo's design work in many ways. They showed up in the geometry of a print, the stroke of a brush, in the way a sleeve was cut, in the decision to leave a seam visible, unfinished, rather than hidden. Influence of that kind does not arrive as a mood board reference. It accumulates slowly, through proximity, through genuine study, through the kind of sustained attention that only makes sense when the people doing the work are actually living inside the culture they are drawing from.
The Psylo workshop has been in Bali since 2014. The stores are in Koh Samui, Mexico and London. That is not coincidence, and it is not branding. It is the reason the relationship with Asian visual and philosophical tradition has stayed substantive across so many collections, rather than dissolving into pastiche after a season or two.
Nippon SS26 is the most recent expression of that relationship. But to understand what it carries, it helps to trace the thread from the beginning.
The Winter 2017-18 Collection: Zen as Design Logic
The FW17-18 collection was the first time the Psylo design team made the philosophical source explicit. The reference was Zen, zen (禅), a school of Mahayana Buddhism that arrived in Japan from China and developed a distinctive aesthetic over centuries: one that valued asymmetry over balance, imperfection over finish, simplicity over decoration.
The specific principle that shaped the collection's cuts was fukinsei, the Zen concept of controlled imbalance: the idea that a composition gains life from irregularity rather than from symmetry. Psylo had already been working with asymmetric cuts for years. Zen gave that instinct a frame, a language, and a philosophical lineage to sit within.
The prints drew directly from Zen visual tradition. The ensō (円相), the circle painted in a single brushstroke and deliberately left open, became one of the collection's central motifs, representing enlightenment, the universe and mu, the Japanese concept of the void. The Gong and Yin Yang prints came out of a collaboration with tattoo artist Mahyar Traveler, whose practice has always sat at the intersection of Eastern symbolism and contemporary mark-making.
Mahyar Traveler: When Tattoo Art Became Cloth
Running through the FW17-18 collection and across several seasons that followed was a creative partnership that deserves its own mention. Mahyar Traveler is a tattoo artist whose practice draws on the visual traditions of Eastern symbolism, the same territory Psylo had been mapping through its collections. The collaboration produced prints that arrived on the fabric with the same weight tattoo ink carries on skin: the Gong, the Yin Yang, the ensō-adjacent circles and tribal forms that became part of the Psylo visual vocabulary in that period.
Tattoo art and clothing share a deeper logic than is usually acknowledged. Both are surfaces that carry symbols, and both ask the person wearing them to take a position, to say, through what they put on their body, something about what they believe or who they are. Mahyar's work understood that, and the prints that came out of the collaboration have that quality: they are not decorative in any lightweight sense. They are marks that mean something.
Indonesia: Batik, Jaya, and the Complexity of the Archipelago
With the design studio based in Bali, the relationship with Indonesian craft tradition has always been immediate and ongoing rather than researched from a distance. In subsequent collections, that proximity became visible on the cloth itself.
The Batik series engaged with one of the most significant textile techniques in the Indonesian archipelago. Batik involves applying hot wax to cloth to resist dye: the wax protects areas of the fabric from colour, and once removed, reveals the pattern underneath. It is a technique that demands patience and precision, and one that carries enormous cultural weight across Indonesia, from the courts of central Java to everyday ceremonial life. UNESCO inscribed Indonesian batik on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in October 2009, recognising both the technical sophistication of the craft and its role in marking the passages of Indonesian life across generations.
The Jaya series moved into more complex territory. The Jaya print brings together tribal patterns from Papua with an Islamic geometric mandala, holding two distinct visual and cultural traditions within a single design. The decision reflects something real about Bali and the wider Indonesian context: Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, while Papua carries its own deep and distinct traditions that predate the spread of any of the world's major religions across the archipelago. The coexistence of those traditions in the Jaya print is a reflection of lived reality rather than an aesthetic choice made for variety.
India: The Maha and Mudra Series
The design team's attention extended beyond the Indonesian archipelago through the collections that followed.
The Maha series draws from Hindu iconography, specifically from the figure of Lord Shiva and the Sanskrit mantra Om Namah Shivaya, one of the most widely recited devotional phrases in Hindu practice, directed at Shiva as the deity of transformation. In Hindu tradition, Shiva holds simultaneously the roles of destroyer and regenerator: the force that ends one state so another can begin. For a brand whose design language has always engaged with cycles, with endings that carry the seeds of renewal, the choice of source material is coherent rather than decorative.
The Mudra series explored the symbolic gesture language shared across Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. The word mudra (मुद्रा) means "seal" or "gesture" in Sanskrit, and refers to the ritual hand positions used in meditation and yogic practice to direct consciousness and energy through the body. Each mudra encodes a specific meaning: peace, protection, teaching, the granting of wishes. The tradition of wearing symbolic gestures on the body has a long history across South and Southeast Asian religious practice. As a print on cloth, the mudra functions in the same way it does as a gesture: quietly, without announcing itself, asking something of whoever carries it.
Buddhist Tattoo Art and the 20th Anniversary Collection
In 2020, marking twenty years since the brand's founding, Psylo released a collection that gave Buddhist tattoo art its own dedicated space in the work. The 20th Anniversary lookbook was set entirely within the visual world of Bali, the island that had housed the workshop since 2014, and drew on the tattoo traditions of Buddhist Southeast Asia as a central design source.
Buddhist tattoo art across Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and the wider region has been a living practice for centuries. The tradition of sacred tattooing, geometric prayers, protective symbols, figures of the Buddha rendered in disciplined, repetitive line, carries a different relationship to the body than decorative tattooing. The marks are understood as active rather than ornamental, as things that work on the person wearing them. The 1000 Buddhas motif that appeared across the collection sits within that tradition: a visual accumulation in which repetition is itself the point, where the same figure multiplied across a surface becomes something other than illustration.
It was one of the clearest moments in Psylo's history where the influence that had been moving through the work for years was stated directly, as the subject of an entire collection rather than as one element within it.
Nippon SS26: Japanese Philosophy as Structural Principle
The Spring Summer 2026 collection returns to Japan, and to the Zen philosophical tradition that first shaped the work in 2017, but with a different register, one defined by restraint, by quietness, by the decision to let the making speak rather than the surface.
The name Nippon (日本) is the Japanese word for Japan itself, meaning the source of the sun. As a design concept, the collection is structured around the Zen idea that the most considered response to complexity is stillness: that a silhouette, a fabric, a detail can carry meaning precisely because it does not try to carry too much.
The sashiko-inspired hand stitching is where the historical roots of the collection run deepest. Sashiko (刺し子), which translates literally as "little stabs", developed during Japan's Edo period (1603–1868) among rural farming and fishing communities as a method of mending and reinforcing worn cloth. Running stitches in white thread on indigo-dyed fabric, layering textile on textile, extending the life of worn cloth when new material was scarce. The technique was practical long before it became beautiful, and the Nippon styles carry it in that spirit: as a mark of care, as evidence of the hand, as a refusal to treat a style as disposable.
The technique was practical long before it became beautiful.
Boro, the related Japanese patchwork tradition, also rooted in the Edo period's culture of mending and making do, appears in the collection as a visual and philosophical reference. The coconut buttons, the braided rope drawcords, the hand-finished edges are all part of the same thinking: details that acknowledge the making process rather than concealing it.
The symbol on the Ikeda-shi styles is a chōchō mon (蝶紋), a butterfly family crest taken from the kamon of the Ikeda clan, one of the most prominent samurai families of feudal Japan, who rose to power during the Sengoku period and held domains across Tottori and Okayama provinces through the Edo era. In Japanese symbolism, the butterfly carries the ideas of transformation and impermanence: the brief passage of a form that is always in the process of becoming something else. The crest was carried on war flags and ceremonial kimono. Here it is printed on soft bamboo jersey, on a silhouette cut for ease and movement, an old emblem that has found a new way to travel.
A Decade of the Same Conversation
What connects the Zen circle of 2017 to the sashiko stitch of 2026 is not a consistent aesthetic (the collections look very different from one another) but a consistent set of questions. What can a style carry beyond its fabric? What does it mean to make something by hand when you could make it by machine? How do craft traditions that developed over centuries in specific places and conditions remain alive when they move into new contexts?
The Batik tradition, the Mudra gesture, the Maha print, the butterfly mon: each of these is an attempt to answer those questions through the work rather than through explanation. The conversation has been going on for nearly a decade. Nippon SS26 is where it stands in 2026.
Explore the Nippon SS26 collection, or read the lookbook for the full story behind the materials, palette and craft.
