Suzhou Silk Factory

The Suzhou Silk Factory taught us about the lifecycle of the silk worm, the challenges of silk production and the importance of both quality raw materials and design sensibility in making clothes. That is to say, even if you have high quality silk, if you make ass ugly clothes, my mother will not buy them.




Here’s a dead silkworm. Had this little guy been alive, pretty soon he’d wrap himself in a chrysalis made of a single strand of silk. Then, he’d be boiled to death and removed from the chrysalis. The chrysalis would be unwound and the silk thread joined with many others into a fiber.



Factory workers used this machine to untangle the threads, then join them into fibers. Maybe if I was into wearing things made of silk, I would have been more into this.