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the-final-sif:

eldritchwyrm:

moonlightredfern:

Thinking about how wild it is that enshittification starts as a way for the rich to squeeze the populace for more money but ends up infecting everything so even luxury products decline in quality. They’ve got more money than fucking God now and for what? Literally they can’t even buy fun nice stuff for themselves because they killed craft.

Anyway this post is about Dhaka muslin but it’s also about everything.

The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make

guess it’s time to post agha shahid ali’s poem about dhaka muslin

The Dacca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes. –Oscar Wilde /The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says, "what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring. Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law. Those too now lost. In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England. History of little use to her, my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again. One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring.ALT

Fun fact! Revival of Dhaka Muslin has been ongoing for quite some time. The headline of the above article is very very misleading, we know exactly how Dhaka Muslin was made. The process was very well documented. We know how it was made, but colonialism ruined the fabric’s production area and devalued the skills needed to make it such that they no longer existed. But the process itself was not lost.

That being said, efforts to bring it back are underway, and they have been making amazing progress, and succeed in creating Dhaka Muslin yet again.

The Muslin Miracle: A passion for revival

This is a pretty good updated article, it has a lot of the same info as the BCC one (which also discusses some of the revival efforts) but with more of a focus on that process, an update to the story, and it details some of the other ongoing projects working on the revival!

Here’s the first weaver to manage to produce a finished piece in nearly 200 years, Al Amin.

His first piece was 300 threads, according to the article they have now been able to get into the 700s for thread counts, which is absolutely incredible.

Several projects are actually underway now each with different weavers and slightly different methods, producing fabric intended to meet or best the original!

And if you’re curious, “okay but can it pass through a ring” yes! Yes they can!

All three of these photos are of pieces made in the modern century, photos by Wasiul Bahar!


It’s a very time consuming process, and a very expensive fabric to purchase, but love and passion for it have been steadily bringing it back!