Tomoyo Yoshikawa

Knitted fabric with beads and original fancy yarn

Tomoyo is a knitwear designer and textile artist.

She specialised in knitting and weaving during her BA in Tokyo and London. After graduating with a BA in London, she went to Italy to develop her career as a knitwear designer.

Materials, especially yarns, are significant for Tomoyo, as the texture and colours of yarns are the first inspiration point to make her creations. Depending on the yarns, she decides what kind of techniques and combinations of colours and materials she uses for her textiles.

During her MA at the Royal College of Art, she explored making original yarns with various materials and combining knitting and weaving techniques to make mesmerising textiles for one-of-a-kind garments.

K/W00 is the first Tomoyo’s Knitwear/Woven wear collection.

In her collection, she used original yarn from deadstock (leftover yarn), NABBI Bio Beads (biodegradable iron beads), vintage beads, and paillettes. She has been using the original yarns with different materials and techniques, such as machine and hand knitting, hand weaving, computer jacquard weaving and hand embroidery, to create high-quality and unique textiles for one-of-a-kind garments.

For the first collection, she took inspiration for the silhouette of the garments from details of traditional menswear such as British Guernsey sweaters, commando sweaters, tailored jackets and bomber jackets. She interpreted and applied the details to her collection pieces.The outcomes are warm, comfortable, unique and emotionally charged garments to transmit a special feeling and thoughts to the wearer and onlooker.