SILK SHIRTS

Silk is a quotidian object before it is a luxury. For China, where it developed, weaving silk is associated with the women of the home. A daily practice, it becomes an example for romance and politics. On the seventh day of the seventh month, maidens were told to trap a spider in a box. If, when morning came, they found a clear web, they had been gifted with the art of weaving. Of Ji Lu, it is said she declared: ‘I will tell you the essence of a country’s lead: it is all in the weave.’

It is in women's clothing that silk meets its first fortunes. Horace writes of women clothed in silk that one ‘can see them/almost as nude.’ A cold fabric, Yves Saint Laurent often shows it with twill or velvet. It interrupts the seriousness of the former, and marks the sensuousness of the latter. As a buttoned blouse, a pussybow, a scarf or lingerie, silk is a liquid fabric.

The butterfly bombyx mori yields the most desirable silk. With its triangular profile, hers reflect light the best. Fed on mulberry leaves, larvae produce a long string which they wrap around themselves during chrysalis.

Lombardy, France plant their white mulberries to encourage the weaving of silk. If silk quickly excites, its use in shirtmaking comes late. Shirts, up to the start of the twentieth century, are undergarments. The luxury of silk is first an intimate luxury. When silk does come out, it is sandwashed: the shirts shine less.

The silk filament’s fibre is extremely fine and extremely long: 1200m at its longest. It is to prevent larvae from breaking their cocoons by emerging from them, that silk farmers suffocate them. The cocoons are then washed, dried, wrapped and woven into long threads.

It is with the 20th Century that silk shirts return to their first use. During World War II, the United States lose access to the raw material. A synthetic alternative is introduced: nylon.

The addition of nylon guarantees a lower cost and a wider reach. The silk shirt becomes the uniform of city dancers. In bright colors, they highlight the body without risking transparency. Bowie, Hendrix, Travolta show themselves.

In the 1990s, British bands find silk shirts in charity shops. Oddly resistant, the fabric dresses Jarvis Cocker and other young Englishmen on stage, in discos, sometimes in the office. Worn under a traditional English suit, the silk shirt undresses its owner.