Bhagalpur Tussar Silk Stole

Details

A stole in pure tussar silk, 2.2 m by 26 in finished, 60 GSM, handwoven in Bhagalpur, Bihar, with a loom-finished selvedge and a hand-twisted fringe at both ends. Tussar is a wild silk. The worm feeds on Asan and Arjun in open forest rather than on mulberry in a tray, and the filament it spins is thicker, flatter and far less even than mulberry. So this cloth is coarser than a mulberry silk, it has a dry hand instead of a slippery one, it carries a natural honey-gold that no dye reproduces, and it has slubs across the width where the filament thickened. Those slubs are the fibre. They are not a fault, and a tussar with none of them has been blended or is not tussar. Two things get said dishonestly about this cloth and one gets dodged. The name is the first: polyester dupion has the same dry rustle and is sold as tussar constantly, which is what the Silk Mark exists for. Weighting is the second, an old silk trick in which metallic salts are loaded into the yarn so body can be sold by weight, and which rots the silk from the inside over a few years. The dodged one is the reeling, so here it is plainly: this tussar is conventionally reeled. The cocoon is stifled before the filament is drawn. It is not ahimsa silk and we will not call it that.

• Silk Mark on every piece, 100 percent tussar, no polyester dupion and no mulberry substitution
• No weighting salts, so the body is the yarn
• 60 GSM measured, 2.2 m x 26 in finished
• Conventionally reeled, not ahimsa, said in as many words
• Azo-free acid dye over the natural gold base, below 30 mg per kg on the 24 restricted amines
• Loom-finished selvedge and a hand-twisted fringe, no machine serge
• Silk is light-sensitive and a wild silk on top of that. Keep it out of long direct sunlight, dry clean it or hand wash it cold, and expect the slubs to stay exactly where they are.