Forty metres of silk nobody wanted

The call came on a Tuesday. A mill had woven 40 metres of mulberry silk for a label that then cancelled the collection, which happens more often than anyone outside the industry would guess. The silk was finished, inspected and rolled. It had nowhere to go.

Surplus like this has three normal endings. It sits in a warehouse until the moisture marks it. It is sold by weight to a jobber who resells it as an unnamed fabric. Or it is shredded for filling. None of those endings involve anybody wearing it.

We measured what we could get out of it. At 2.4 metres per dress cut on the bias, 40 metres gave eleven pieces with a metre and a half spare for straps and facings. Eleven is not a production run by any commercial standard. It is what the fabric allowed, so it is what we made.

The bias is what made it difficult. Silk cut on the true bias moves under the needle, so each panel has to be pinned, set and left to hang before it is stitched. A run of eleven took our tailor nine working days. A factory would have fused the seams and finished in a morning, and the dress would have hung differently within a year.

All eleven have gone. We will not remake the Noor Slip in another silk, because it would be a different dress wearing the same name.