In an airy café in central Thimphu, teenage girls and women in their 20s are sipping iced coffees, sharing slices of cheesecake and discussing work over omelettes and quinoa bowls. Some are dressed in crop tops, baggy jeans and trainers. Others wear traditional kira – long columnar skirts cinched at the waist with embroidered kera, or belts. Accessorised with tego jackets featuring contrasting, turned-up cuffs, worn over crisp shirts or paired with court shoes, they're an arrestingly modern manifestation of Bhutan's long-standing textile tradition.

It's a living heritage you'll encounter in every restaurant and office, home and hotel, and on streets from Haa to Trashigang to Sarpang. The national dress – kira for women and draped robes called gho for men – is part of daily life. Schoolchildren in smart mini versions chatter on their way to class and professionals wear it to meetings. 

One young woman, Kezang Choden, cuts a striking figure on Thimphu's main avenue in her colour-blocked, golden-ochre kira. Her matching tego, with its geometric motifs, would be just as at home on the streets of Brooklyn or Aoyama. Her mum made it, she says, like all of her kira. But Kezang designed this one herself. "I chose the colours and the pattern. I was inspired by street style," she explains. "My mum found the design a little funny at first because [to her] it's so plain, but when she finished weaving it, and I put it on with the tego and sent her a picture of me wearing it, she was like, 'Oh, this actually looks nice!'"

The closer you get to Radhi, the more vibrant the natural world becomes. Neat vegetable gardens thick with corn and climbing beans line the roadside, wooden fences hold back encroaching banana palms, banks of ferns and stands of bamboo. Common peacock butterflies dance above pools of spring water bubbling from rocks. Cicadas burr noisily.

There's little to indicate that we're nearing one of the kingdom's most renowned textile-producing hubs. Cows grudgingly move aside to let our car through. Passing Trashigang Technical Training Institute, we see a sign: "Get skilled. Be somebody." We're headed to the small village of Radhi to meet some of the most skilled “somebodies” practising and preserving eastern Bhutan's weaving techniques today.

Ugyen Dema has been weaving since her future mother-in-law taught her at age 16. We ask her how long it takes a new recruit to learn. "That depends on how intelligent you are!" she laughs. After observing for some time, Dema was quick to master the generations-old skills of dyeing and weaving that she's practised for more than three decades. These processes survived the rise of synthetic dyes and pre-dyed yarn, and machine-made cloth that is far cheaper but no match in terms of quality.  

Today, Dema is using natural dyes to create the jewel-like green, ruby and violet yarns requested by a neighbouring weaver. Though many in the village weave, dyeing is less common – so Dema provides what's needed. Baskets on the floor of the outdoor kitchen where she works are full of leaves, barks and powders either foraged locally or grown in her garden. She works confidently, first chopping piles of symplocos (or “zim”) leaves that will mordant the fibre, enabling the dye to bind to it. The leaves are swept into large pots of water simmering over a fire. Long bundles of cotton yarn go in next. When it's ready, the fibre is removed and hung up to dry, and Dema turns her attention to achieving the right shade for the dye bath, judging quantities of turmeric, madder bark and strobilanthes by eye and experience. 

It's a family enterprise – her husband is responsible for collecting the plants needed for dyeing, driving to buy yarn and other supplies, and delivering the finished fabrics for sale. But her children aren't acquiring some of these skills. Her daughter is studying and doesn't have time to learn dyeing techniques – although, like generations of Bhutanese women before her, she does practise the most fundamental skill: weaving.

Dema's neighbour, Dechen Choden collects the dyed, dried and neatly wound yarn. Back at her home across the terraced rice field, after a customary warm welcome (and equally customary cups of ara), we watch her prepare the warp. In rapid, fluid motions, she darts yarns in various colours between and around its prongs to create the vertical background for her weave. 

Once mounted on the backstrap loom on the front porch, she gets to work. To an observer, it's a dizzyingly complex dance: shuttles fly between the layers of the warp, bamboo rods are passed through precise frameworks of thread, and sporadically, Dechen bangs a wooden sword on top of the weft threads to tighten them. Steadily, an intricate pattern of motifs emerges – stylised eternal knots, thunderbolts and butterflies.

This same captivating choreography was once common in almost every Bhutanese home. Today, especially among the kingdom's growing population of city dwellers, people increasingly shop for their kira or gho – providing important income for rural weavers like Dema and Dechen in the months when farm work yields little. Their finished fabrics sell through shops in Thimphu, Paro and Punakha. Some will be purchased by tourists, but the vast majority will be bought by local citizens to wear for, or mark, a special event or formal occasion – perhaps, a graduation. 

"My mum started weaving the kira for my college graduation in my second semester!" laughs Kezang. "It's the full-patterned silk kushuthara kira, which takes a really long time." Her mother, who hails from Samdrup Jongkar, spent months weaving it – but it was still ready two years before her daughter graduated from her sociology and political science degree. "It made me study hard," she says. "She put in so much effort."

As Ugyen Tenzin, deputy director of the Royal Textile Academy, explains, textiles have fundamentally shaped Bhutan – not just artistically, but socially and economically. "Weaving has kept families together because, in the past, the skill was passed down from the grandmother to the mother to the daughters. It's basically a family business that has kept families together." It's also kept villages, and rural traditions, alive. "For most people in the weaving regions, it's their livelihood. Except for some specific months [when they do farm work], the rest of the time, women are mostly on their looms. In places like Khoma and Radhi, weaving is their bread and butter."

If the textile industry here has empowered women, it's also benefited from their patronage – particularly that of the Queen Mother, Her Majesty Gyalyum Sangay Choden Wangchuck, who has revitalised the sector and raised the global profile of the kingdom's remarkable textiles. A long-standing advocate for Bhutan's textile artisans, she is the Textile Museum's Royal Patron, and the Royal Textile Academy's chair. Empowering Bhutanese women is a personal passion: she is also the founder of multiple initiatives and a non-profit organisation, RENEW. Established in 2004, RENEW (Respect Educate Nurture and Empower Women) focuses on sexual and reproductive health, and support for victims of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence – often equipping them with skills that create economic independence, such as weaving.