Bhagalpur Linen by the Metre

Details

Pure linen woven in Bhagalpur, Bihar, at 180 GSM in 25 Lea yarn, 34 ends by 32 picks to the inch, 58 in usable width. Say the obvious thing first: at 58 in this is powerloom cloth. No pit loom is that wide. It carries no Handloom Mark, it is not claiming one, and if you want the hand-woven line it is on the same shelf. What the width buys you is cloth: a shirt takes 1.6 m here against 2.5 m at 44 in, so a person used to handloom widths will over-buy unless they read this row. The standing cheat in Indian linen is the blend. Viscose costs a fraction of flax and takes the same dry slubby hand, so linen-viscose at 55:45 is sold as pure linen across the country, and polyester-cotton printed with a slub is sold as linen-look and then simply as linen. Fibre composition settles it, by microscopy and FTIR, and it is printed below. The second cheat is sold to you as a feature: crease-resist resin, a formaldehyde-based finish that stops linen doing the one thing linen does.

• 100 percent flax by microscopy and FTIR, no viscose and no polyester in the yarn
• 180 GSM measured and 58 in usable width declared
• No crease-resist resin and no softener coating
• Yarn-dyed azo-free, below 30 mg per kg on the 24 restricted aromatic amines
• Residual size under 1 percent after desizing, no starch to fake a crisp hand at the counter
• Loom-state, not mercerised
• Powerloom, stated, with no Handloom Mark claimed for it
• It will crease within an hour of putting it on, and it relaxes about 4 percent on the first wash, so pre-wash the full length before you cut it.