Deep in the jungles of northern Vietnam, fashion designer Thao Vu discovered the key to her new collection — in a centuries-old technique long thought forgotten. Read the improbable story, and watch the documentary video below

There’s a moment, on the eighth or ninth switchback out of Trà Lĩnh, when the paved road gives up entirely and the world reverts to green. The air goes thick with birdsong, cicada buzz, and smells of the forest: the peppery tang of wet leaf litter, the sweet rot of fallen jackfruit. To the east, bell-shaped karst hills rise from the valley, looking like a child’s drawing of a mountain range. To the west is only jungle.

The caravan sputters to a stop, and the group park their motorbikes in a clearing by the trailhead: eight women in hand-dyed indigo tunics and tribal headgear, two men in vintage camo jumpsuits. All carry blades strapped to their waists, which they use to carve walking sticks before setting out. The women wear thick rubber boots to fend off snakes, leeches, and giant centipedes. As raindrops trickle down from the canopy, the crew ventures into the forest.

“This might be my favorite part of my job,” says Thao Vu.

Three hours later, they reach their destination: a sun-dappled hollow in the hills, where the object of their search — a grove of wild banana trees — stretches skyward in search of light, trunks creaking in the too-warm breeze.

These bananas are not for eating. Instead, the group will haul the trunks back to the village and spend the next three days extracting their precious fibers, spinning those fibers into thread, and weaving that thread into luminous cloth.

You probably didn’t know you could make silk out of wild banana trees. But with a great deal of effort, you can. The practice dates back centuries here in rural Vietnam — yet until recently, nobody actually remembered how to do it.

Thao Vu is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated and forward-thinking fashion designers. The founder and creative director of pioneering Hanoi-based label Kilomet 109, she’s been profiled in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Singapore, and the New York Times, and her designs have been showcased at Harvard University, the Elle Sustainable Fashion show, and the London Design Biennale.

Raised in a small village in rural Thai Binh province, Thao wasn’t exactly thrilled when her parents gifted her a sewing machine for her 17th birthday. “I’d have preferred a new motorbike,” she admits. “I was a bit of a tomboy.” Eventually, Thao learned to make her own clothing, and was so taken by the process and its possibilities that she enrolled at the Hanoi campus of the London College for Design & Fashion, Vietnam’s leading fashion institute.

Unlike most designers, Thao doesn’t source her materials; she makes them, entirely from scratch. For 15 years she’s collaborated with artisans from Vietnam’s ethnic-minority communities, relying on skills that global commerce left behind: natural dyeing, loom weaving, hand-fashioned embroidery, beeswax printing — and, now, the forgotten art of making cloth from banana-tree fiber.

I first met Thao in 2012, shortly after she launched her label, and I’ve been in awe of her insatiable curiosity ever since. Equal parts historian and innovator, she’s forever seeking out old techniques that she can reinvent for the modern era. (If fashion hadn’t panned out she’d have made a great anthropologist.) In the age of fast fashion, Thao stands out for her insistence on slowing down and working at the speed of care.

Her eye is just as exceptional. With sleek silhouettes and minimalist designs, Thao’s pieces are elegant and thoroughly modern. In contrast to most eco-friendly clothing, there’s not a whiff of patchouli about them.

“Slow fashion doesn’t have to mean shapeless,” Thao insists. “We’re not making hippie ponchos!” Her tops, jackets, tunics, and scarves are of a style you’d expect to find in Tokyo or Stockholm. Which makes it even more surprising that they were born in the wildest setting imaginable.

Watch our behind-the-scenes look at Thao Vu’s wild adventure, reviving the forgotten art of banana silk

Banana silk — known as tiêu cát in Vietnam, zau chi in China, and bashofu in Japan — is made from fibers drawn from the pseudostems of wild banana trees. It has been produced in Asia for at least 800 years. It is not a job for the impatient.

With homemade tools fashioned from bamboo, the stalk is stripped and shredded into ribbons, steeped in a cauldron of ash water to soften and strengthen the fiber, then painstakingly cut into hairlike strands — which are then joined by hand into workable thread. “There’s no shortcut,” Thao says. “A machine can’t do this work.”

Tiêu cát from Vietnam was widely traded across Southeast Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries, until mulberry silk arrived from China and wiped the fruit off the loom. While banana silk comes from the plant itself, mulberry silk is produced by silkworms that feed on mulberry leaves — which you’d think would be a far more challenging process. “But since mulberry trees were easier to farm and can grow all over Vietnam, silkworm silk was the more scalable practice,” Thao explains.

Where banana cloth persisted, it did so as fine art. In Japan, bashofu has been a prized commodity since the early Edo period, and continues to this day in the subtropical climes of Okinawa, where smaller Musa textilis banana trees are now cultivated. That’s where Yasuhiro Fukushima, one of Japan’s greatest living bashofu artisans, still plies his trade. The septuagenarian master can spend months laboring over a single kimono; his pieces sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

A few years ago, Fukushima came to Vietnam hoping to learn more about hemp papermaking. Seeking an expert with connections among the hill tribes, he found his way to Thao, who offered to introduce him to her hemp weavers and paper artisans.

Coincidentally, Thao had just been reading about the history of banana cloth — and now here, in her Hanoi atelier, stood a bona fide bashofu legend. The two got to talking about the craft. To Thao’s astonishment, Fukushima revealed that he had an old hand-drawn map, labeled in Japanese, purporting to show a lost valley of Musa balbisiana banana trees, growing somewhere in the hinterlands of northern Vietnam, that could be suitable for making cloth.

And this is where our story veers into Indiana Jones territory. (Honestly, I didn’t believe it either, until Thao showed me Fukushima’s map.)

Thao asked the Okinawan master to join her team on a quest for the lost balbisiana trees, which would entail an eight-hour bus ride from Hanoi to Cao Bằng; a 20-mile motorbike ride from the bus depot to the trailhead; and finally, an hours-long hike into thick, unyielding jungle.

Amazingly, Fukushima agreed. “But he was skeptical. He didn’t believe we’d actually find the trees,” Thao recalls. “I think he was just humoring us.”

His skepticism was borne out when the team spent four days searching fruitlessly through the jungle. And then, on the fifth day: Brigadoon.

Thao recalls her elation when they stumbled upon the wild banana grove, notched into a hillside laced with waterfalls. “We were all in tears,” she says, still dumbfounded by their luck.

Fukushima, however, was still not certain. Was this the right balbisiana species? Would it work for making thread? He drew out a knife and cut into the trunk to reveal the fiber within. “We waited and waited while Fukushima took his time inspecting,” Thao recalls. “At last, he smiled and just said, ‘Arigato.’”

None of this would have happened without the women of the Nùng An community, with whom Thao has collaborated since 2009. One of the many ethnic minority groups scattered across rural Vietnam, the Nùng live primarily  in the northeastern province of Cao Bằng, close to the Chinese border, which is as beautiful and unspoiled as any rural landscape can be in 2025. (Much of the land is protected as a UNESCO Global Geopark.)

Thao’s artisans reside in a village of 220 households, where a university’s worth of knowledge has been passed down for generations. Some women specialize in weaving, some in dyeing, others in fashioning the bamboo tools used to strip and join thread. “They’re all brilliant,” Thao says. “One woman in her 50s — she really should teach engineering, because she can  build anything. She’s the MacGyver of the village!”

Thao makes the pilgrimage to Cao Bằng every few months, where she helps plant indigo, experiment with dyes, and develop new weaving techniques with the Nùng women.

But even the older ones were unfamiliar with the strange new/old practice of making banana cloth. “None of them had worked with it before, or even seen a sample,” Thao says. “There was no manual to guide us. We had to figure it out ourselves.”

No surprise, the Nùng women were quick studies. “I showed them this very intricate threading technique, which took me days to figure out,” Thao recalls with a laugh. “They watched me once, said ‘Okay, got it!’ then did it 10 times faster than I could.”

(See the sidebar below for a look at the process.)

The Nùng An are renowned for their prowess with natural dyes, which they cultivate or forage from the surrounding countryside. The village is framed by vast fields of Indigofera plants, source of the indigo dye Vietnam is famous for. Lac resin — secreted by forest beetles — produces the rich oxblood reds once used for royal garments. Pale oranges come from stone-rubbed mineral dyes, soft pinks from the coveted mountain yam root.

Banana cloth has a slightly waxy texture and a lustrous sheen, but it’s impressively lightweight and breathable. “It’s like linen’s wilder cousin,” says Thao. “And it takes color beautifully.” Compared to cotton and mulberry silk, the material interacts with the dyes unpredictably. Thao and the team are still learning its quirks as they experiment with new colorways.

One piece of blended fabric emerges from the indigo vat a stunning teal-green — a hue Thao has never seen before. “The warp is cotton, the weft is banana,” she explains. “The cotton takes the blue from the indigo, and the banana cloth takes the green. Together, they sing.”

Back at Kilomet 109’s studio in Hanoi, Thao and her team work up a handful of prototypes, to see if a banana-silk collection might be feasible. “It’s an incredible amount of work,” she admits, “but it’s worth the effort to try.”

They come up with two knockout pieces. The first is a sharply cropped bomber jacket with a banana-fiber outer shell and a mulberry-silk lining — a dialogue between two vaunted traditions. The second is a contemporary riff on Vietnam’s classic ao dai tunic, made from banana and hemp cloth. Dyed with indigo and ebony to a deep midnight blue, the tunic shimmers like rain-washed stone. Rubbing the soft fabric between my fingers, I pick up the faint scent of forest and woodsmoke. It feels like the most luxurious material on earth.

“People ask if I’m nostalgic,” Thao says later over a pot of jasmine tea. “But this isn’t about the past. It’s about the future. These materials, these practices — they’re sustainable, they’re local, they’re already here. We just need to learn to use them again.”

Peter Jon Lindberg, Further’s cofounder and Editor-in-Chief, lived in Vietnam briefly in the 1990s and has returned dozens of times since.

Quang Nông is a documentary filmmaker based in Hanoi and San Francisco. His feature film Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava was presented at Cannes Docs in 2023. He also directed two documentaries about queer culture in Vietnam for the Queer Asia project.

Ben Reich is the brand and visuals director of Kilomet 109, which was founded in 2012 by his wife, Thao Vu. He is also a documentarian and photographer whose editorial work has been showcased in leading journals and international exhibitions. He has lived in Vietnam since 1997.