About Navohi
Not a product.
A story on silk.
Navohi is not a fashion brand. It is an argument — that the oldest craft traditions in the world are not relics. They are the most sophisticated design language that exists. We put that language on silk.
The Artist
From Lagos to Saimaa, from Tokat to Kyoto — each artist brings a tradition that has been alive for centuries. They do not decorate silk. They translate a visual language that their culture developed over generations onto a material it has never touched before. Some carve linden wood. Some grind iron-oxide pigment. Some fold silk seventeen times before touching dye. The work begins with them.
The Silk
Every Navohi piece begins in Şaki, Azerbaijan — a city that has been producing silk since the 7th century and exporting it since the Silk Road was the only road. The mulberry groves, the silkworm, the single 1,500-metre thread inside each cocoon — nothing in this process has changed because nothing better has been found. We source from the same valley that supplied Venice in the 16th century.
The Master
Narmin Hasanova is a fourth-generation kelaghayi master in Şaki. Her family has been pressing wooden stamps into silk for over a hundred years. The technique is transmitted exclusively through apprenticeship — it has never been written down, because writing cannot capture what the hands know after ten thousand wrong impressions. The work ends with her.
Why Navohi exists
The world produces 200,000 tonnes of silk per year. Most of it is printed by machine with synthetic dye in 40 seconds.
A Navohi scarf takes six weeks.
We are not competing with fast fashion. We are not even in the same category. We make objects that carry the DNA of a place, a person, and a tradition — objects that deepen with time rather than fade. There is a market for this. It has always existed. It is the market for things that mean something.
12
Artists
From 12 countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. Each with a living craft tradition.
5
Continents
Every region of the world except Antarctica has contributed a visual tradition to Navohi.
1,500 yrs
Of silk in Şaki
The Şaki valley has been producing silk continuously since at least the 7th century AD.
0
Synthetic dyes
Every colour in every Navohi piece comes from pomegranate, walnut, madder, indigo, or weld. From the earth.
What we believe
A scarf can carry a culture. Not as metaphor — literally. The buta motif pressed by Narmin Hasanova into Şaki silk has appeared on Azerbaijani fabric for five centuries. It is a symbol of fire and eternity and the divine. When you wear it, you wear that history. The object is a vessel.
The hand of a master leaves something in the fabric that a machine never could. This is not mysticism. It is precision accumulated over ten thousand hours. When Abbasali Talibov has been printing kelaghayi for fifty years, his hand knows where the stamp will resist and where it will yield before the impression is made. No algorithm replicates this. No quality control catches what it misses.
Making something slowly is the only way to make something that endures. Every Navohi piece takes weeks. Every piece is singular. In ten years, it will be a better object than it is today — the colours deeper, the silk more supple, the story longer. This is the only kind of luxury that matters.
Manifesto
“We believe that the oldest craft traditions in the world are not relics to be preserved in museums. They are the most sophisticated design languages that exist — refined over centuries by people whose entire lives were devoted to a single gesture.
We believe that silk from Şaki, pressed by a kelaghayi master whose family has done this for four generations, carrying the visual language of a Yoruba grandmother in Lagos or a Stone Age rock painter in Finland, is not a product.
It is proof that the world is more connected than it knows.”
Navohi · Made in Şaki, designed for the world
Get in Touch
For press inquiries, wholesale partnerships, artist collaborations, or if you simply want to tell us that something moved you.