It begins in a grove. The air smells faintly green, the way a vineyard smells in May — not sweet, but living. Rows of mulberry trees stretch toward the foothills around Hangzhou, their leaves broad and waxy, trembling slightly under their own weight. Somewhere in the canopy, the leaves are being eaten. The sound, if you listen for it, is the sound of soft rain on paper.
The eaters are silkworms — the larvae of Bombyx mori, a moth that has not existed in the wild for more than five thousand years. It is the only fully domesticated insect on earth, dependent on human hands for everything, including the leaves it cannot reach. A single silkworm will eat its body weight in mulberry leaves every day for roughly four weeks, increasing in size ten thousand times between the egg and the cocoon. It will eat nothing else. The flavour of the leaf, the variety of the tree, the minerals in the soil — all of it travels, eventually, into the lustre of the finished thread.
This is why the Hangzhou basin matters. The region sits on the Yangtze delta, a flat, alluvial plain laced with rivers, where the soil is rich in calcium and the climate stays mild and humid through the spring and summer. The mulberry trees there have been cultivated, generation after generation, for the specific purpose of feeding silkworms; some of the strains have been selected and re-selected for over a thousand years. The result is a leaf so consistent in quality that the cocoons drawn from worms raised on it are uniform in colour, in size, and — most importantly — in the length of the single filament that can be reeled from each one.
That filament is the miracle. When the silkworm reaches the end of its larval life, it climbs into a corner, anchors itself, and begins to move its head in a careful figure-eight. From two glands beside its mouth, it extrudes a single continuous strand of fibroin coated in a natural gum called sericin. Over the course of three days, working without rest, it wraps itself in this strand until it has built a cocoon roughly the size of an olive. Inside, in the dark, the larva would normally transform into a moth.
For silk to be reeled in unbroken lengths, however, the cocoon cannot be allowed to break open. The cocoons are harvested at the end of the spinning, and the pupae inside are gently stilled — a step that has troubled some over the years and continues to be the subject of careful, ongoing innovation in the industry. The cocoons are then sorted by hand. Only those that are perfectly oval, evenly coloured, and free of stains will be reserved for Grade 6A processing. The rest go to lower grades, or are spun rather than reeled, becoming a different kind of silk altogether.
The reeling room is quiet. The selected cocoons are floated in basins of warm water, which softens the sericin and releases the loose end of each thread. A reeler, working at a small wooden machine, finds the end of three or four cocoons at once and joins them — not knotting, but allowing the still-sticky filaments to bind themselves into a single thread strong enough to handle. This combined strand is then drawn upward onto a reel. From a single cocoon, in skilled hands, eight hundred to a thousand metres of continuous filament can be drawn. The thread that emerges is so fine that a hundred of them, laid side by side, would not equal the width of a human hair.
The reeled silk is then twisted, washed, and degummed — a process that removes most of the sericin and reveals the pearlescent lustre of the fibroin beneath. From there it travels, in skeins, to the weaving mills. The looms in this region run on the slow side. A bolt of 22-momme silk takes hours to advance a few centimetres, the warp threads lifting in their ancient rhythm, the weft passing through in a single, almost silent pass. The cloth that emerges has a hand that is hard to describe and impossible to forget — dense and weightless at once, cool to the touch, faintly luminous under any light.
From the loom, the bolt travels to a finishing house, where it is washed once more in soft river water, inspected by hand for the smallest deviation, and rolled onto a wooden core. Some of it will become pillowcases. Some will become camisoles. A small portion will become a long, slow-cut robe with French seams and a single hand-stitched buttonhole at the throat.
Then the bolt is folded, wrapped, and sent, eventually, to a room on the other side of the world — where it is unboxed, perhaps in the soft light of a lamp, and laid over a bed for the first time. The thread that began in a grove in Hangzhou ends, after months of patient handling by dozens of people, against a sleeping shoulder. It is one of the longest, quietest journeys an everyday object can make.
This is what we mean, at Rêvery & Silk, by sourcing. Not a paragraph on a label, but a chain of small decisions stretching back to a leaf.