Dye for Indigo

Johan Åberg grew up in Dalsjöfors near Borås, a Swedish region built on textile manufacturing, and worked summers as a teenager at Almedahls, a textile company founded in the 1800s. He spent nearly two decades afterward in the fashion trade before growing disillusioned with poor quality and working conditions, leaving to open the vintage shop Göteborg Vintage in Gothenburg in 2013.

The turn toward indigo came in the summer of 2015, when Åberg took a natural-dyeing course at Capellagården, a craft school on the Swedish island of Öland. He has said simply, "I wanted to learn everything about indigo." He began shifting his vintage business toward dyeing, gradually converting it into what became Dyeforindigo, a studio in the Majorna district of Gothenburg devoted to plant-based indigo and Japanese resist and mending techniques.

Today the studio takes commissioned dyeing work for designers and brands and runs open workshops in shibori resist-dyeing and sashiko mending, alongside lectures and collaborations with institutions including HDK-Valand, Chalmers University of Technology and the Borås Textile Fashion Center. Åberg has described the work as "my reaction to the consumer society," positioning hand-dyeing and mending as a deliberate alternative to disposable fashion.