Morocco

Morocco's textile tradition runs as deep as its football story. In the medinas of Fez and in the villages of the Atlas Mountains, Amazigh artisans have been dyeing wool and cotton using natural sources for centuries — indigo extracted from the indigofera plant for their characteristic deep blues, madder root for warm reds, pomegranate rind for golden ochres, and saffron for the rich yellows seen in Berber weavings. The tanneries of Fez, where natural vegetable dyes still colour leather and cloth in open-air stone vats, are among the oldest working dye houses in the world. Morocco went further at the 2022 World Cup than any African nation in history — and their craft tradition is just as exceptional.

Japan

Japan was the first nation to qualify for the World Cup 2026, and its textile heritage is equally first-rate. Japanese indigo dyeing — known as Aizome — is one of the most refined natural dye traditions in the world. Artisans grow and ferment indigo in a process called Sukumo, building a vat that is nurtured like a living culture, fed daily with heat and turning. The resulting blues range from pale sky to almost-black navy across repeated dipping sessions — exactly the same physics that Bagru artisans use in their indigo vats. Japan also has Katazome, a resist-print technique using rice paste applied through carved stencils to create pattern on fabric before dyeing — a close cousin of Bagru's dabu mud resist printing.

Senegal

Senegal's textile world includes one of West Africa's most distinctive craft traditions: mud-cloth dyeing, closely related to Mali's Bogolanfini. In this tradition, artisans apply fermented clay paste — prepared from river mud — onto cotton fabric in geometric patterns. The mud reacts with the mordant-treated cloth to create deep brown-black marks. Strips of fabric are then dipped in plant dye baths to set the background colour. The clay paste is later washed away, revealing the undyed pattern beneath. If this sounds familiar — it should. It is the same logic as Bagru's dabu mud resist printing, practised on the other side of the world by communities with no documented contact, arriving at the same technique through centuries of independent craft evolution.

Mexico

Mexico is both host nation and a country with one of the richest natural dye traditions in the Americas. In Oaxaca, Zapotec and Mixtec artisans have been weaving with natural dyes for over 2,000 years. The most famous is cochineal — a deep crimson extracted from the dried bodies of the cochineal insect that lives on nopal cactus — which became so valuable after the Spanish conquest that it was the second most traded commodity from the Americas after silver. Mexican artisans also work with indigo for blue, marigold flowers (cempasúchil) for yellow, and a purple extracted from the murex sea snail. The colour logic is the same as Bagru: root, plant, earth, and insect as the source of every tone.

Argentina

Defending World Cup champions Argentina carry the Andean textile tradition of their indigenous Quechua and Aymara communities — one of the oldest and most technically sophisticated weaving traditions on earth. Andean weavers in the Argentinian northwest use natural dyes including indigo, cochineal, chica (a local plant giving bright yellow), and tara pods (Caesalpinia spinosa, a tannin-rich pod producing warm browns) on hand-spun alpaca and llama wool. The textiles carry encoded symbolic information — patterns that record community identity, seasonal calendars, and geographic markers — a parallel to the way traditional Bagru block print patterns carry the visual identity of the Chhipa community encoded in block design.