Tanoti Brings Borneo's Woven Heritage to KL Fashion Week
If you have ever looked at a handwoven Sarawakian textile and thought it belonged behind museum glass rather than in your wardrobe, Tanoti has spent fourteen years politely disagreeing. This month the Kuching social enterprise made the argument in the most public way available to it: a solo show at KL Fashion Week 2026.
The collection is called SUMMITS, and it is a first for the event. It is the inaugural KLFW presentation to bring three distinct Sarawakian textile traditions together in one contemporary collection: handwoven songket, pua kumbu ikat, and indigenous anyaman.
Mountains, woven in rather than printed on
The motif running through SUMMITS is a set of Southeast Asian peaks: Bukit Pagon in Brunei, Phnom Aural in Cambodia, Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia, Puncak Jaya in Indonesia, Mount Apo in the Philippines and Fansipan in Vietnam. They appear as the undulating patterns in the cloth itself rather than as a print laid over it, which is a slower and less forgiving way to make a garment and rather the point.
The collection was designed by Fitri Nasaruddin with Tanoti's textile design team, and made by the artisan communities whose techniques it uses: songket weavers from Tanoti House in Kuching, pua kumbu weavers from Rumah Gare in Kapit, and anyaman artisans from Long Tegan and Long Lunyim. Tanoti asked specifically that those communities be named, which tells you something about how the organisation works.
You can still see it in person, until 19 August
The runway show has passed, but the more useful part for anyone in Kuala Lumpur has not. Tanoti's pop-up gallery at Isetan KLCC, on Level 2 of Suria KLCC, runs until 19 August, and it is the first time the full range has been in one place in KL: apparel, accessories and home pieces, alongside consignment work from fellow Sarawakian labels The Ranee Artisan Gallery, Ran & Nong Creations and Atelier Chim.
It is built to be handled rather than admired from a distance. There is a working loom you can try, mini workshops in songket weaving, rattan plaiting and loom beading run by practising artisans, and one-on-one sessions with Fitri Nasaruddin for custom pieces. The schedule goes up on Tanoti's own channels.
Why a craft label is opening a shop in Merdeka 118
Later this year Tanoti opens its first KL flagship at 118 Mall, in the Malaysian Artisan District on Level 3, at the podium of the Merdeka 118 tower. The store will also house a Maybank Women Eco-Weavers section with work from partner weaving communities in Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
What the flagship is really selling is provenance. Every piece identifies the artisan who made it, the village she comes from and the technique she used, which is a level of traceability that very little else on a Malaysian shop floor offers. Tanoti works with more than 800 artisans across 25 rural communities in Sarawak, representing seven of the region's thirty ethnic groups.
"Our ambition goes beyond retail, we want to centre-stage the work, life, history and culture of our artisans," said Dato' Jacqueline Fong, co-founder and chief executive.
The wider point
Malaysian fashion week has hosted plenty of heritage-inspired collections, and we have covered the more commercial end of it before, from last year's KLFW to Carlo Rino's jacquard monogram. What separates SUMMITS is that the heritage is not a reference: the people who own the technique made the clothes, and are named for it.
The pop-up is at Isetan KLCC until 19 August. More on the label at tanoticrafts.com.
