Thai silk company Jim Thompson has kept its founder’s ethos to modernize the Thai silk industry while keeping its craft completely local. The company sustains its own silk farms, mills and design studio, producing all its fabrics in- house thanks to the hands of Thai master weavers, spinners and dyers. For this piece, the brand has teamed up with renowned French graffiti artist Olivier Burel, aka Ogreoner. Off the back of a highly buzzed collaboration with Chanel, which held prime position in colette’s Rue Saint-Honoré store window during Paris Fashion Week earlier this year, Ogreoner was invited to make his mark in a new country.

The artist took his spray cans to Thailand, and after more than 50 hours of freehand work, brought Naga Pitak to life. Ogreoner first encountered the naga at the Jim Thompson House; a mythical serpent, a symbol of protection, it is a hallmark of traditional Thai architecture. He then reinterpreted the naga in his own signature style; the serpent’s eye, though, is a nod to Thai master Thawan Duchanee, whose iconic paintings Ogreoner came across in the private collection of Eric Booth, Jim Thompson’s deputy managing director. The brand logo – rendered in Ogreoner’s own graffiti font appropriated from the Thai alphabet – is encircled by the naga, protecting the brand, and with it, the heritage of Thai silk. Surrounding them is a sea of Siwilai’s Chao Phraya motif.