Fibers

Silk is such a seductive, luxurious, and desirable fiber that its price has, at times, exceeded that of gold.

Silk possesses a magnificent, shimmering richness that can express a lush, sumptuous personality when woven into precious satins, jacquards, and brocades. It is also capable of a sensuous, supple, liquid drape that will be forever associated with the ultimate in luxurious lingerie and glamorous eveningwear.

Silk is widely perceived to be the most beautiful and elegant of all the natural fibers, and even after more than a century of attempting to provide a man-made substitute, no single synthetic fiber has come close to replicating either the magical, myriad properties of silk or the breadth of applications that it can embrace.

Natural fabrics have been the fashion designer's frequent choice, but silk has remained the designer's dream.


Contributing significantly to silk's mystique is its long history, laden with evocative tales of legendary romance and adventure.

Silk is one of only a handful of commodities that has shaped world history.

 

The ancient Chinese developed the art of cultivating the delicate silk moth and produced threads of incredible quality.

The ruling dynasties were acutely aware of their precious commodity, and managed to possessively guard the complex secrets of sericulture from the rest of the world, therefore becoming the sole cultivator and producer of silk for many centuries.

An enduring ancient Chinese legend reveres the Lady Hsi-Ling, favored and chief wife of the Emperor Huang Ti (2677-
2597 BC), as the "lady of the silkworms." Her serendipitous discovery reputedly came when a cocoon dropped from a mulberry tree into her cup of hot tea.

She then wound the resulting thread around her finger, thus supposedly accidentally discovering the principle of reeling silk. Contemporary archaeological excavations, however, suggest that sericulture had long been established in China by this date.

The earliest examples of cultivated silk date back to around 3000 BC, and evidence of cocoons goes back to
5000 Bc.
There is also evidence of small quantities of wild silk being produced in the Mediterranean area, India, and the Middle East by the time the superior quality and stronger cultivated silk from China began to be exported.

The original wild ancestor of the Bombyx mori is believed to be Bombyx mandarina moore, a silk moth particular to China, and which lived on the white mulberry tree.

This uniquely superior moth was the key to China's domination of the cultivation, production, and artistry of this natural resource.

Initially, the development of this luxury fiber was seen as frivolous, and sericulture was restricted to women.

The allure of the fabric quickly provoked a craze and it rapidly became so completely fundamental to Chinese life that out of the 5,000 most-used characters in Mandarin Chinese, 230 incorporate the symbol for silk.

The imperial family decreed strict regulation on its use and for 1,000 years the right to wear silk was restricted to the emperor, the imperial family, and the highest dignitaries.
Later, other members of society were permitted its use.

Peasants did not have the right to wear silk until the time of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

China's virtual monopoly on production of silk was maintained for another 1,000 years, enforced by an imperial decree condemning to death anyone attempting to export silkworms or their eggs.
Sericulture was eventually taken outside of China in the second century AD. Legend tells of a Chinese princess who was to be married to a prince of Khotan (now Hotan in Xinjiang Province) concealing the silk cocoons in her elaborate coiffure and smuggling them to her adopted country.

The introduction of sericulture made Khotan, positioned at the southern end of the Silk Road, very prosperous.

 

The Silk Road, or Silk Route, is an interconnected series of ancient trade routes, through various regions of the Asian continent, that connected China with Asia Minor and then the Mediterranean.

It extends over nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 km) across land and sea, and linked Antioch and the coasts of the Mediterranean to Beijing, with a journey time of about one year.

In the south a second route went via Yemen, Burma, and India.
The trade that took place on these routes played a significant role in the development of the great civilizations of China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and Rome, and helped establish the foundations of the modern world.



The earliest record of the cultivation of silk in Europe was made by Greek philosopher Aristotle, who described the metamorphosis of the silkworm, and suggested that the produce of the cocoons was wound onto bobbins for the purpose of being woven.

The very origin of the term "sericulture" is derived from the Greek word ser, meaning "silk." Raw silk was brought from the interior of Asia and manufactured in Cos as early as the fourth century BC.

First the Greeks, then the Romans began to speak of the seres, or "people of silk," a term used to describe the inhabitants of the far-off kingdom of China.

Roman poets writing at the time of Augustus allude to the desirability of these remarkably thin, elegantly textured fine textiles.

China had jealously guarded the secret of sericulture so effectively, and shrouded its provenance in such mystery, that many Romans mistakenly thought that silk was obtained, like cotton, from a tree, or as Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote "they weave webs like spiders that become a luxurious clothing material for women called silk."

Perhaps it was in ancient Rome that silk's associations with decadence and excessive luxury began. The emperor Caligula, notorious for his love of luxury and excess, reveled in wearing it.

Rich and powerful Roman men aspired to ador themselves and their wives with silk. This increased demand provoked consternation among the more severe subsequent rulers who considered silk to be decadent and immoral, and vigorous measures were undertaken to restrict its use: men were forbidden to wear it.

The Senate, in vain, issued several edicts to try to prohibit the wearing of silk on economic and moral grounds, attempting to characterize it as an excessively frivolous commodity, since this greed for silk had resulted in a huge outflow of gold, threatening the balance of trade. Demand had reached such a pitch that by the end of the third century the finest silk textiles sold for their weight in gold.

To counter this demand, silk woven with a warp of an inferior value began to be much more widely worn by both men and women, with pure silk reserved for the upper echelons of society. Silk woven with gold was kept under the control of the imperial family.

The production of raw silk in Europe was first attempted in the sixth century. It is believed that two monks smuggled silkworm eggs in bamboo rods to Byzantium from Central Asia.
As in China, silk weaving was restricted by a strict imperial monopoly. The Byzantine church made fabrics for the emperor and was able to develop a large silk industry in the eastern Roman Empire.

The legendary magnificence of Byzantine textile techniques was due to the meticulous attention paid to the
execution and embelishment, while actual weaving techniques
were derived from Egyptian technology.

The cultivation of the white mulberry, the breeding of silkworms, and the manufacture of silk textiles had been long confined to Greece, but by the twelfth century this expertise was transported to Sicily, from where it was extended to Southern Europe.

In the twelfth century the Normans invaded Byzantium, Corinth, and Thebes, centers of silk production, and seized the crops and production infrastructure, as well as deporting all the workers to Palermo, thus prompting the flourishing of the Norman silk industry in Sicily.

When Constantinople fell, many skilled silk weavers left for Sicily and Italy and contributed to the development of Italy's increasingly large domestic silk industry.

The sudden boom in the silk industry in the Italian city state of Lucca, beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was due largely to Sicilian, Jewish, and Greek immigration, along with many other immigrants from neighboring cities of southern Italy.


Venetian merchants traded in silk extensively, and encouraged silk growers to settle in Italy. Italian silk was a significant source of trade by the thirteenth century, with silk produced in Como becoming the most valuable in the world. In order to satisfy the demands of the rich and powerful, the cities of Lucca, Genoa, Venice, and Florence were soon exporting silk all over Europe. By the late fifteenth century there were over 80 workshops and at least 7,000 craftsmen in Florence alone; its great wealth was built largely on textiles made of wool and silk.

Italian silk cloth was very expensive; a result of both the price of the raw material and production costs. Nevertheless, it remained highly prized for its brilliance of color and elaborate perfection.

Italy's only rival was Spain; however, the expulsion of both the Jews and the Moors in the late 1490s, during the Catholic re-conquest, dealt a blow to the country's silk industry.
Some weaving did manage to survive, primarily in Seville, Granada, and Valencia, and would be revived again in the 1700s.

In the mid-1400s in France, Louis XI started to develop a national silk industry with the sole objective of reducing France's trade deficit with the Italian city states. In 1535 a royal charter was granted to two merchants to develop a silk industry in Lyon. Later a monopoly on silk production was granted exclusively to the city and by the beginning of the sixteenth century Lyon had become the capital of the European silk trade.

The oriental style of silk was gradually abandoned for their own Lyonnais textile identity. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were over 14,000 looms in use in Lyon, and the silk industry was so prolific that it fed one-third of the city's population. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Provence experienced a boom in sericulture that would continue until World War I, with much of the silk shipped north to Lyon for production.
In England Henry IV investigated the possibility of developing a domestic silk industry but the lack of expertise did not make it viable. It was not until the igos, with the first mass immigration of thousands of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution, who brought with them their skills in sericulture and weaving, that the silk industry was established.
Queen Elizabeth I encouraged them to establish their trades in southwest England. In the north, cities such as Macclesfield saw many high-quality artisan workshops spring up; in London, Spitalfields was the center of silk expertise. However, the unpredictable British climate prevented England's domestic silk trade from becoming a globally dominant force.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution was marked by a massive boom in the textile industry, and changed much of Europe's silk industry. Remarkable technological innovations galvanized by the cotton industry in England informed the modernization of silk production.

Silk manufacturing benefited from simplification and standardization, as advances followed one another. Bouchon and Falcon invented the punch-card loom in 177s, which was later refined by Jacques de Vaucanson, but ultimately named after Joseph Jacquard, who invented the loom with a string of punch cards that could be processed mechanically in the correct sequence. Skilled workers feared it would rob them of their livelihoods and immediately denounced the jacquard loom, but it swiftly became vital to the industry. By the mid-eighteenth century the French and English were rivals in design innovation, and, along with the Italians, were producers of the highest quality silks.

In the 1850s the silkworms of Italy and France were virtually wiped out by a 10-year epidemic of the parasitic disease pébrine. Italy was able to rebound from the crisis while France was unable to do so.

Urbanization in the twentieth century prompted many
French and Italian agricultural workers to abandon silk growing for more lucrative factory jobs, and raw silk began to be imported from Japan to fill the void. The Asian countries that were once exporters of just the raw material began to develop their own production techniques, enabling them to export higher value finished fabrics and clothing.

Today Italy and France no longer domestically farm silk, however they remain important manufacturers of woven and knitted silk fabrics and exceptional clothing. The centers of silk manufacturing remain the regions of Como and Lyon.\


Silk cultivation is believed to have spread to Japan around
300 AD. The yamami silk moth is thought to be an indigenous species, but exactly when Chinese silk technology reached Japan is unclear.


Japan had become the eastern terminus of the silk routes during the early Han period (206 BC-220 AD), and took a step forward in the silk trade at the end of this period by establishing its own sericulture. In the third century, following the Japanese invasion of Korea, important expertise in silk technology was brought back into the country. Succeeding emperors encouraged sericulture, and throughout the following centuries the skills and experience of Korean and Chinese weavers were brought to Japan, ensuring progress in technology. Over time Japan increased the domestic silk rearing it had begun. As a result of this expansion Chinese silk imports became less important, although they still maintained their fine, ultra-luxurious status.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant that raw silk imported from Japan became more competitive. In the middle of the nineteenth century Japonisme joined Chinoiserie and Attention was turned to the possibilities of expanding silk production for home and exports, and in 1876 Japanese weavers were sent to France to study weaving methods and to copy French brocades.

The Japanese government invested in the most modern equipment and established a model factory to instruct Japanese weavers in power-driven jacquard looms. Enormous strides in silk production were made throughout the nineteenth century, and this drive toward the modemization of sericulture in Japan rapidly made it the world's foremost silk producer.

By the 1880s Japan had supplanted China as the largest supplier of raw silk: for a period until World War II it was the major supplier of raw silk to the West.

After the war Japanese silk production was restored, with vastly improved modernized methods for reeling, inspection, and classification of raw silks in place.

Japan again became the world's foremost exporter of raw silk-a position it held until the 1970s-and remained the biggest producer of raw silk, until broader industrial expansion led to a decline in sericulture and China made a concerted effort to regain her historic position as the world's biggest raw silk producer and exporter.

Today Japan consumes the greatest amount of silk per person in the world, due in part to its inextricable link with the most important Japanese garment, the kimono. Despite the adoption of Western clothing, traditional garments are still culturally important, and synthetic materials have never replaced silk in status.

Much of Japan's silk is produced in the narrow width necessary for the uncut loom-width construction of the traditional kimono.


Today a combination of a hand-woven aesthetic fused with modern technology can be found in the innovative textiles produced in Japan.

Sophisticated technology employs advances in computerized design and manufacture to reproduce the complex and extraordinary weaves of earlier centuries, as well as to develop new ones.

Silk-known as pattu or reshmi-has a long history in India and is widely produced today. Historically, silk was used by the upper castes, while cotton was traditionally for the poorer castes.

Elaborate silk saris for Hindus and lehnga, sharara, and shalwar kameez for Muslims have a particular significance in celebratory ceremonies such as weddings.

The brocade-weaving centers in India grew in and around
the capitals of kingdoms and holy cities in response to the demand for expensive fabrics by the royal families and deities of the temples.

The rich merchants of the trading ports further contributed to the development of these fabrics: as well as trading in the finished product, they also advanced money to the weavers to buy the costly raw material. The ancient centers were mainly in Gujarat, Malwa, and south India. In the north of the country Delhi, Lahore, Agra, Benares, Mau, Azamgarh, and Murshidabad were the main centers for brocade weaving.

Ancient traders introduced the complex jamawar weave from China, which gained immense popularity among royalty and the aristocracy. Maharajahs and noblemen bought the woven fabric by the yard, wearing it as shawls. Jamawar weaving centers developed in Assam, Gujarat, and Malwa.

The region that is now Pakistan has been known for excellent silk weaving since the first millennium. In the Middle Ages the gold and silver silk brocades found eager buyers from Europe, the Middle East, and even China.


In 1947 the partition of British India into independent states resulted in mass cross-migration. A large number of Muslim weavers migrated from Delhi and Benares to set up workshops in Lahore, Karachi, and Khaiphur, now part of Pakistan. The towns of Orangi and Shershah have emerged as the biggest khadi hand-loom markets of Pakistan.

The weavers continue to weave brocades in traditional patterns, but have also introduced newer designs deriving inspiration from the old Mughal silks. These weavers mostly fulfill domestic demands using cocoons imported from China and cultivated at Orangi and Shershah.


Islamic teachings forbid Muslim men to wear silk, because it is perceived as feminine and unnecessarily extravagant. The devout were advised "he who dresses in silks in his lifetime forfeits luxury in the next." Despite injunctions against silk for men, its popularity for women was retained. A cotton and silk mixture called mashru (meaning "permitted") was developed in this part of the world to allow men access to the luxury of silk.


Mashru has silk warps and cotton wefts. The construction is usually of a satin weave, which gives it a smooth silken face and a cotton underside. This satisfies the Muslim edict that silk must not be wor next to the skin.
Today, India and Pakistan produce very competitively priced silk fabrics in traditional and contemporary designs, and are an important source for international designer labels and mass-market retail chains.



Silk production in Thailand can be traced back over 3,000 years, to the region of Ban Chiang in the northeast province of Udon Thani. Archaeological discoveries in this area suggest that Thailand's sericulture and weaving history may be as old as that of China.

After the fifteenth century the importance of the Silk Road began to decline as less hazardous sea routes were discovered. This promoted trade between China, Southeast Asia, India, and the West.

Sea traders reached the Dvaravati Kingdom, which controlled the settlements along the Gulf of Siam, and silk was one of the commodities traded.

The Thai silk industry began in the Khorat plateau in the northeast region.

Elsewhere, the prevailing Theravada Buddhists' religious belief system forbade the killing of the silkworm inside the cocoon, but the northeast had more relaxed religious views, allowing silk production to flourish.

Cultivation is still centered in the Khorat region, and production is mainly in Chiang Mai, the northern captital.
The area known as Isan is traditionally famed for its ikat weaves (or mudmee) which use a painstaking space-dyeing (dveing sections of continuous varn in different color along its length) technique passed down through the generations.
Complex weaves and arresting color combinations typify Thai hand-loom silks.

Elaborate and sophisticated brocades have, over recent centuries, attracted the patronage of the royal families and ensured that the unique variety of local silk weaving techniques has not completely died out.

In the nineteenth century, King Rama V introduced advanced techniques in weaving and created the foundation of the country's expanding silk industry.

In 1901 King Chulalongkorn invited a team of Japanese experts to advise on the modernization of silk production.

This marked the beginning of a rapid sericulture development and technological advancement in Thailand.

By 1910 more than 35 tons of Thai silk were exported annually. Then in 1948, American entrepreneur Jim Thompson founded the Thai Silk Company, producing distinctive and beautiful handwoven fabrics that inspired many copies.

The artisan appeal of the fabrics was due to their uneven surface, caused by the inconsistencies in the hand-reeled silk from which they were woven.

Thompson was a master of public relations, who managed to get his products introduced to fashion luminaries including the influential fashion editor Diana Vreeland, costume designer Irene Sharaff, and Parisian designer Pierre Balmain.

Custom-made weaves produced for Hollywood epics such as The King and 1 and Ben-Hur inspired a craze for his distinctive look in fabrics.

Sustaining growth on a long-term basis, however, proved a problem in the face of cheaper factory-produced fabrics from China and Japan.

In 1994 the European Union provided funding for a five-year project to sustain and upgrade sericulture in Thailand. An initiative designed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, based upon the Japanese "one village, one product" model, was launched in 2001.

The project has given small villages the opportunity to make a good living keeping traditional Thai arts alive.

Queen Sirikit has effectively promoted this initiative and, to this day, silk production in Thailand is still primarily a hand-loom cottage industry, with some larger factories in Bangkok producing cheaper silks.