Not all silk is one fibre. A field guide to mulberry, eri and muga — three moths, three temperaments, and how each behaves on the body.
We tend to speak of silk as if it were a single thing, the way we speak of gold. But silk is not a metal; it is the spun saliva of a moth, and the moth decides almost everything. Three of them matter to the woman who dresses with intention: the mulberry moth, the eri and the muga. Each gives a thread with its own grain, its own light, its own argument about how a garment should move.
Mulberry: the disciplined one
Bombyx mori is the silkworm of legend, and the only one that is fully domesticated — it can no longer survive without us. Fed an exclusive diet of mulberry leaf, it spins a single unbroken filament that can run over a kilometre long. Reeled together, those filaments make the smoothest, most uniform, most reflective silk in the world. This is the silk of the bias gown and the fluid shirt: long-stapled, even, and obedient to the cut. When a fabric reads as pure luminous liquid, it is almost always mulberry.
Eri: the quiet cousin
Eri silk comes from the Samia ricini moth, raised on castor leaves across northeast India and the hills of mainland Southeast Asia. It is sometimes called peace silk, because the moth is allowed to leave its cocoon before the fibre is harvested. That single fact changes the thread entirely: once the moth chews its way out, the long filament is broken, so eri must be spun from short staple like wool or cotton. The result is matte rather than glossy, with a soft, woolly warmth and a faint thermal quality — it breathes in heat and insulates in cool. Eri drapes with weight and gravity; it does not shimmer. It murmurs.
“Eri taught me that lustre is not the same as luxury. A matte silk, cut well, can be the most expensive-looking thing in a room.”
Yaya, Founder & Creative Director
Muga: the gold one
Muga is the rarest of the three, produced only by Antheraea assamensis in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam. Its thread is naturally golden — not dyed, but born that colour — and it grows more lustrous, not less, with every wash. A muga sari can be handed down for a century and look richer at the end than at the beginning. It is a semi-wild silk, the moth feeding on aromatic som and soalu trees, and it cannot be farmed industrially. Scarcity is built into its biology.
Here is the way to hold the three of them in your hand and in your mind:
- Mulberry — long filament, high lustre, even and fluid. The silk of drape and shine.
- Eri — broken filament spun like wool, matte and warm, with weight and a gentle hand. The silk of quiet.
- Muga — semi-wild, naturally golden, improves with age. The silk of inheritance.
Why the maison uses all three
A wardrobe built on a single silk is a wardrobe with one voice. We reach for mulberry when a piece must move with the body — a bias slip, a softly tied blouse. We reach for eri when we want silk to behave almost like fine flannel, holding a column or a wide trouser without clinging. And we reserve muga for the pieces meant to be kept: a wrap, a panel, an heirloom edge. The moth chooses the character; the atelier only chooses which character the moment requires.
If you remember nothing else, remember this: when a silk shines, ask what it is for. Lustre is mulberry doing what it does best. But matte is not a lesser silk — it is often a more deliberate one.
