• Artwork & design by Gareth McConnell
• 100% silk
• Double-sided print
• Hand-rollled hem
• 42 x 42 cm
• Pocket Square / Neckerchief
• Recycled presentation box
• Shipping UK £5 / Europe £10 / USA £20

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The blossom arrives each year, more beautiful than before, they say this happens as you age—its unfathomable beauty growing harder to comprehend the longer I look. I remember returning to London in 2001 from a year exiled on the coast, feeling like a different man (at least for a while), and looking up at an explosion of pink glowing under the streetlights like an alien brain, wondering how I had never noticed this before.

In Tokyo in 2004, the land of true blossom lovers, I walked at night inside a bubble of my own otherness, untouched by the recognition of any spoken or written language, and free from the firefly glow of smartphones (those Blackberry days we’ll never know again). One jet-lagged morning I rode a taxi to the fish market and felt, with a sudden heaviness, that if anything in life ever said “this cannot go on,” it was that sight—like every fish in the sea had been caught and laid out before me. A salty tear falls into my sushi.

London again, this time in 2020—the year of the plague, a world of masks and queues outside supermarkets, a collective confrontation with mortality—where the blossom reminded us, as it always had, that this dance is brief and that we all must fall as petals to the floor, "though come on man surely not like this"… and the blossom whispers that life may be eternal but its expressions are not.

The Japanese have a term for it

Mono no aware

The tears of things 
The pathos of things
An empathy toward things
A sensitivity to ephemera
The quietly elated and bittersweet feeling of having witnessed the dazzling circus of life while knowing, always, that none of it can last.
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Tomorrow is promised to no one