Silk has been reeled on the shores of Lake Tai for nearly five thousand years. We did not invent anything here. We simply refused to skip any of it.
Mulberry silk is graded A to C, then 1 to 6. 6A is the top of the scale: filament up to 1,500 metres long, unbroken, from a single cocoon. Shorter fibres pill and dull. We grade every batch by hand before it is reeled.
Momme is the weight of silk: how much thread goes into the cloth. Most silk bedding is woven at 16 to 22. At 25 the charmeuse becomes heavy enough to fall like water and dense enough to last for decades of washing.
It also takes longer: nineteen hours of loom time for one bed. We have not found a faster way worth taking.
Each lot is a few hundred pieces, so every piece from it matches exactly. When a lot runs out, we mix the same recipe again. The water, the weather and the silk itself make each lot a shade different, the way a tea changes from one harvest to the next. We do not iron that out. We stamp the lot on your tag.
“A machine can sew silk. It cannot tell you when the cloth is about to pucker. You feel it a second before it happens.”— Head of finishing, Tsatli mill
Before a piece leaves the mill it is unfolded and inspected seam by seam by a master. If it passes, its number is stitched into the inside seam of every piece and stamped on a brass tag with its lot, tied inside the box.
If it does not pass, it is not sold. Not at a discount, not as a second. It is cut up.
Enter the number on a brass tag to see its colour, lot, loom and the day it was finished. Try No. 00047.