If you’re looking at this on your phone, it’s worth a moment to zoom in for this photo, to check out the texture of this finely woven gown. It’s a rare and valuable sample of a type of cloth called “Dhaka muslin,” and in its heyday, sold for vast sums and was esteemed as the finest fabric in the world — far more valuable than silk. And today it is virtually extinct, like the plant that produced it.
Dhaka muslin, named for the eponymous city in modern Bangladesh, had been internationally famous since Ancient Greece. It was extremely soft, almost scandalously transparent, and fine enough that one writer claimed you could put a sixty-foot measure into a snuff box. The Bengal imperial poets referred to it as “baft-hawa” or “woven air,” and no wonder — the thread counts could be upwards of 800-1200, where modern muslin versions have between 40-80.
Dhaka muslin was known across the globe, in 14th-century Africa and 15th-century China, flourishing the most during India’s Mughal Empire in the 16- and 1700s. Wealthy Europeans greatly desired this fabric — in the mid-19th century a yard sold for £50-400, equivalent to about $5,300-$9,300 US dollars today.
There were a few reasons it was so expensive to produce Dhaka muslin. First, the cotton plant used, Phuti karpas, only grew along the banks of the Meghna river (90% of modern cotton comes from another plant called Gossypium hirsutum). The short fibers of this plant were extremely difficult to work with, with strings that easily snapped without the utmost gentle care. Making the fabric from this plant was a 16-step process, each phase conducted by different families in villages in the area. So finiky were the fibers that they only could be stretched in very humid conditions, so that skilled women would do this step on boats in either the early morning or late afternoon, when the air was as damp as possible.
The entire industry collapsed in the early 1800s, as the British East India Company demanded ever-higher amounts of fabric from their empire, and then the spinning inventions created during the Industrial Revolution undercut cotton prices with vastly cheaper products. Even the plant went nearly extinct.
Sources: “Evening dress” (French), 1804-5. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1983.6.1. “The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make,” BBC, Zaria Gorvett, 16 March, 2021.
