Museum grade Dhaka Muslin Shawl

In museum cases in London, Manchester, and Cleveland, the last surviving pieces of original Dhaka Muslin sit behind glass. For two hundred years, no living weaver could answer them.

This shawl is our answer.

We wove it as a faithful counterpart to a historical muslin held in the Manchester Museum collection. We use the same fiber, the same loom, and the same sixteen-step process our ancestor weaved. We film the journey step by step, keeping documents. So the claim can be verified rather than believed.

The fiber is Phuti Karpas, the ancestral cotton rediscovered in Bangladesh after 200 years. It measures under 10 microns, finer than vicuña and cashmere. The yarn is hand spun in the humidity of dawn to a count of 400 to 600, a fineness no machine can create. The cloth is woven on a traditional pit loom by our master artisans in Dhaka. 

The numbers behind this piece:

Three months on the loom. 1,500 hours of artisan handwork. Yarn count of 400 to 600.  From seed to finished cloth, sixteen different steps, each performed by hand. One shawl,

This is the fabric the Mughals called baft hawa, woven air. It drapes as the historical accounts describe, with a weight and translucence that photographs cant express.

The shawl is GI compliance (Dhaka Muslin, GI No. 39, Bangladesh, 2021). We always follow the rules, keep the record. It is the only piece of its kind. When it sells, there is no second.

We are open only for collectors.