Vietnam
Area: 331,344 km²
Time zone: GMT+7

TikTok helped make Vietnamese coffee popular in the West, but in Vietnam people have been drinking coffee sweetened with sugar, condensed milk and sometimes egg since the French began using the country for plantations in the 1860s. The Giang Cafe in Hanoi also gives you the option of adding cheese.

In Vietnam, craft is geography: each region has shaped its own form of making. From the misty terraces of Northeast Đông Bắc Bộ to the serpentine tributaries of the Southwestern Mekong Delta, traditions of weaving, carving and dyeing trace the contours of the land. In the village of Thụy Ứng near Hanoi, artisans have been transforming cattle horns into decorative hair combs for over four centuries. The Hmong people in the hilly northern region of the country are renowned for paj ntaub (“flower cloths”) decorated with intricate geometric designs and talismanic emblems. Silk, perhaps Vietnam’s most famous textile, is also its oldest: legend has it that Thiều Hoa (also known as Mo Nham), a princess and daughter of the sixth Hùng King (around 1,700 BCE), gave up the luxuries of court life to live in the village of Cổ Đô, teaching sericulture to the local women. From planting mulberry trees to harvesting silkworms, to dyeing and weaving thread, the silk industry has long been seen as a symbol of women’s skill and enterprising spirit. Vietnamese crafts, historically a female-led industry, speak to the resilience and quiet authority of the women whose hands have shaped the country’s material and cultural identity over the centuries.

In 2018, when fashion designer Thao Phuong travelled to Lào Cai, a city on the Northwestern Chinese border, she found herself in an environment where Vietnam’s handicraft legacy met the reality of our globalised present. Visiting a “compassion home” for local women who had been victims of human trafficking, she found a craft industry in rapid decline. Unable to compete with an influx of cheap, mass-produced goods, women were abandoning traditional handicrafts en masse, seeking better-paid work far from their villages, where they were vulnerable to kidnapping and slavery. In a cruel irony, many women had ended up working at industrial garment factories that were directly contributing to the erasure of their traditional practices.

By now, the environmental repercussions of fast fashion should be familiar even to casual consumers: massive carbon emissions, polluted waterways, clothes that will take hundreds of years to decompose, and that leach out microplastics as they do. But the social implications are similarly calamitous: once the value of craft is predicated on its profitability, its cultural value erodes in tandem. Generations of artisans are displaced, communities are severed from spaces of ancestral knowledge, and creativity is reduced to a cycle of consumption. In 2019, Phuong sought to change this paradigm with her women-led tour company TextileSeekers. Through thoughtfully curated workshops, exhibitions, and tours across Vietnam, the initiative looks to redefine the future of traditional crafts in Phuong’s birth country.

Given that Vietnamese craft is a largely non-verbal tradition, with knowledge acquired over years through look and feel, TextileSeekers tours emphasise hands-on experience, allowing visitors to engage directly with artisans, not through the lens of third parties. (Many garments sold for tourists in tribal villages are mass-produced and of poor quality compared to their traditionally-made counterparts.) By fostering this direct engagement, Phuong hopes to create sustainable economic opportunities for the women who choose to continue these ancient practices. Visitors leave not only with a nuanced understanding of the work that goes into every stitch of a garment or tooth of a comb, but a connection to the people who maintain Vietnam’s craft heritage. In turn, the artisans gain recognition and income that can help them pass on their knowledge to the next generation, and resist the pressure to abandon their traditions for precarious factory work. Preserving craft need not mean rejecting modernity; rather, it can provide a model of ethical consumption and cultural continuity. In a world dominated by fast fashion’s tawdry allure and extractive economics, initiatives like TextileSeekers remind us that to slow down and truly see how things are made is, in itself, an act of preservation.

During a TextileSeekers retreat in 2022, photographer Anouk Nitsche witnessed the rhythms of Vietnamese craft firsthand. She observed Hanoi’s energy, alive with movement, colour and sound, and noted how it shifted as travellers reached Mai Châu, where life slowed into something more grounded; women weaving in the open air, children running nearby, and families sharing quiet moments together.

The images that Nitsche took in Mai Châu, in the northern Hòa Bình province, are a testament to the centuries of heritage that initiatives like TextileSeekers look to maintain. “It was like stepping into a world where time moves differently,” says Nitsche: “Seeing the weavers’ hands, these amazing artisans, the patience in their craft, and understanding what Phuong is doing to preserve these traditions made me see even more the importance of keeping these stories alive.” In other words, the work goes beyond textiles: it is about people, their history and the beauty of everyday life. .