This is a guest post written by Masha du Toit. It is only part of the original post covering projects by Dai Fujiwara.

Talking about Dai Fujiwara's (creative director for Issey Miyake) presentation at Design Indaba 2009... Another amazing video was the documentary of Dai Fujiwara’s colour hunting trip into the Amazon forest.  He went there to collect a colour palettes for Issey Miyaki’s new spring/summer collection for 2009.

As you can see, Dai and his team traveled with a huge collection of cloth colour samples.  They tested these against trees, leaves, bark and mud to find the palette of the forest.

To test the veracity of their choices, they strung strips of cloths over open spaces like the river.  If the colours “melted away” and did not stand out from the background, they knew they had chosen the correct ones.

The last couple of frames shows them testing colour samples from a motor boat over the Amazon.    The river, they found, had more in common with human skin than they had anticipated.

This was the point of the expedition.  Dai Fujiwara told us that where he had expected bold and brash colours, he had found shy, quiet, muted tones.

You can watch the movie at this site.  Click on the “menu” link and scroll down to the “Color Hunting Movie”.

Further colour hunting took place in the cities of Brazil.  Here they used some different methods.  They took many photographs, and then spun them to create streaks of colour.  These streaks became the basis for their Urban Brazil colour palettes.

All images are screen captures from the documentary available to view here.