Organza Puff-of-Smoke/Sketchbook Dress

Silk organza is a gorgeous fabric looking like a puff of smoke with its rustling sound and fluttery behaviour. About 2000 cocoons died boiling in the hot water so I would have my 5-meter organza. About 30 000 tons of raw silk are produced each year, requiring nearly 10 billion little lives.

The idea was to create adjustable transparency for the garment by overlapping another organza layer overhead - front to back and vice versa. About six layers of organza are necessary to achieve a non-transparent result, so I stitched the standardised format dress on the shoulder with an invisible seam, using 5 layers on both sides and the base dress.

I think sketchbook term is obvious up to this point, and also I had an idea of the version in the more rough fabric on which one can elaborate, write, print or draw some kind of visual poetry.

Organza layered garment

History of silk

Silk is not a pale floss growing on the trees as Romans in the 1st ct thought it was, in fact, it is made by Bombyx mori, a moth native to China. China mythicised and monopolised the production of the silk, carefully guarding the secret by a Great Wall and death penalty, and made everyone guess how its made. Sometimes silk was used as a currency or a precious gift to those who pleased the emperor. Romans were addicted to it and its price was significantly raising along the way to Rome, including costs of Royal Camel Shipping and all the taxes that those who liked the idea of a quick rip-off imposed. Constant outflow of gold and silver towards the East may be partially responsible for the economic collapse of the Roman Empire. In 550 AD Nestorian monks smuggled the eggs and the mulberry seeds into bamboo sticks in Byzantine Empire, and the Mediterranean independent manufacture began.

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Somehow I don't see how the advantage of wearing silk outweighs the cost of making it, ethically speaking. Maybe it is okay to wear it occasionally, but my conscience tells me no one should die for my need for beauty. At least not in the 21st century, when we aren't tribal savages anymore. At least I am not, some people still tend to have ad hominem arguments.

Is it justified to consume mulberry silk because Bombyx mori will be used for food and its whole ecosystem isn’t functioning anyway? I don't know, everyone to its own. I don't think I will use it (at least not so much) anymore, because I found it capricious to wear something someone had to die for. Also silk is prone to staining and moths eat it, that is right, moths eat their dead comrades. And there is plenty of wild silks, collected in forests after the moths fly away so I don't see why should I.

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Romans also criticized wearing silks because silk was seductive and transparent. Beautiful gowns Coa Vestis were connected with the ladies whose prudence is of questionable status, because stranger is not a more stranger to her body than her husband is.

Silk didn't succeed in Africa, and it is so because of the native’s indifference to the fabric. I get it it is hot and silk is prone to easily stain.

‘’With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.’’ - Chinese proverb
‘’An ape’s an ape, a varlet’s a varlet, though they be clad in silk or scarlet.’’ - English proverb

I found these two proverbs on silk, funny how one concentrates on the process, patience and growth (eastern), and the other on deception of image (western). How many proverbs, folk tales, legends and myths that have a silk as a motif have been around for centuries along the ancient caravan route called the ‘Silk Road’?

How It's Made

Lei Tsu, Chinese princess in about 2600 BC was drinking tea under the mulberry tree when a cocoon fell into her cup. She tried to pick it up and the cocoon started to unreel... she then figured out the whole process of silk production. Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex Reissued says that big discoveries happen to people loafing under the trees, linking this legend to that of physicist and apple. Funny thing is that I am writing this on a beautiful spring sunny day in a garden, and a white blossom petal fell into my cup of coffee. I found the analogy and awe.

Bombyx mori is native to China where the long-term domestication made the tiny creature incapable of feeding, flying, sometimes finding a mate and protecting itself from the predators. During the short life cycle of about 5 days, after it leaves the cocoon, its main purpose is to reproduce. The grown female moth lays eggs, silkworms come out and as monophagous insects, keep feeding on one type of food only - a mulberry tree leaves for about a month when the time comes to spin a cocoon.

Silkworm produces two kinds of protein - fibroin filaments wrapped in glue-like layer sericine - by moving head in 8-figure patterns. Before the time comes for pupae to turn into a moth, cocoon is processed in water at 95 degrees Celsius. This is done so the cca 1km filament can be reeled with ease and without interruption. Otherwise, the moth would damage the cocoon and sericine glue would make things harder.

Sometimes the pupae that remains when the fibre spins, is served roasted or boiled with accompanying sauce in Asian cuisine. Because it is an excellent source of protein it is proposed as a food for astronauts.

Down the Silk Road

''It would be a good day for him who might see you happy'' - that is how they greet in the ancient Sogdiana, a kingdom based in central Asia whose people, nowadays almost non-existent, were once crucial merchants on the Silk Road, so crucial that the word ‘Sogdian’ was equal to a word ‘merchant’. They were able to sell a fridge to an Eskimo, silk to a Chinese, anything to anyone… Their language was a form of ancient Persian, and it served as mediatory language, a lingua franca for people from West and East.

Silk road began in China's Xian and went through Tashkent, Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul and reached European shores. Back in the ancient days, people referred to the road – a road to Samarkand or the whatever was the next big city.
Samarkand, located in Central Asia, was a central point for the trade, as the road was too long to travel by a single caravan and trade was usually happening trough middleman. Those people were Bactrians, Sogdians, Syrians, Jews, Arabs, Iranians, Turkmens, Indians, Somalis, Greeks, Georgians, and Armenians and they traded silk in form of thread, woven cloth or finished product. It was a place where knowledge was exchanged, medicine, astronomy, fundamental principles of mathematics and Aristotle's ideas which affected our Western world indeed and too often we miss to give them the credits. Samarkand sounds like a city built of sapphires and rubies to me. I watched the BBC documentary on Silk Road, presented by the sexy historian Dr. Sam Willis. He claims that Europeans saw this place as exotic, as poem from James Elroy Fleckerdescribes it:

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Although silk was certainly the major item exported from China, many other goods were traded on the road, like paper, spices, gunpowder, musical instruments and food. Art, religion, philosophy, technology, language, science, architecture, and every other element of culture was exchanged and this world-wide interaction put the grounds to a phenomenon called globalization.