Cultivated silk is bred for perfection; wild silk is gathered from the forest with all its character intact. A study of tussar, the two textures and what each gives a garment.
There is a quiet philosophical divide running through the world of silk, and you can feel it with your fingertips. On one side sits cultivated silk — bred, controlled, perfected across five thousand years toward a single ideal of smoothness. On the other sits wild silk, gathered from moths that live and feed in open forest, carrying the texture of their freedom into the thread. A complete wardrobe wants both, because they ask different things of the body and the light.
Cultivated: the pursuit of perfection
Cultivated silk is almost always Bombyx mori, the domesticated mulberry moth, raised in controlled conditions on a single uniform diet. Because the cocoons are harvested before the moth emerges, the long filament stays unbroken, and because the worms are bred for consistency, the thread is fine, pale, even and intensely lustrous. This is silk engineered toward an ideal: liquid drape, mirror sheen, flawless surface. It is the right cloth for anything that should look like poured light.
Wild: the texture of freedom
Wild silk — tussar (or tussah) is the best known, spun by various Antheraea moths feeding on oak and other forest trees — is gathered, often after the moth has already left the cocoon. The diet is varied and the conditions uncontrolled, so the thread is coarser, shorter, irregular, and naturally tinted in honeyed golds and warm beiges that need no dye. It has slubs, a dry rather than slippery hand, and a deep matte glow instead of a glassy shine. It does not pour; it holds. Where cultivated silk flatters the light, wild silk flatters the texture.
“Cultivated silk is bred to forget where it came from. Wild silk insists on remembering. I love a garment that remembers the forest.”
Yaya, Founder & Creative Director
How to tell them apart by hand
- Surface — cultivated reads smooth and glassy; wild reads textured, with visible slubs and a faint tooth.
- Lustre — cultivated has a high, fluid shine; wild has a soft, deep, almost waxen glow.
- Colour — cultivated takes dye evenly and brilliantly; wild carries a natural ecru or honey base that gives even dyed wild silk a warmer undertone.
- Drape — cultivated falls in fluid ripples; wild falls in firmer, more sculptural folds and holds a structured line.
Which to wear, and when
Reach for cultivated silk when a piece must move like water — a bias gown, a soft slip, anything cut on the diagonal to skim the body. Reach for wild silk when you want silk with backbone — a column dress that stands a little away from the figure, a wide trouser, a jacket that needs to keep its architecture through a long evening. Wild silk also forgives the wearer: its texture hides a wrinkle that would announce itself across a sheet of charmeuse.
The maison cuts from both, and never apologises for either. A cultivated silk slip beneath a wild silk coat is, to my eye, the whole conversation in one outfit — the poured light and the remembered forest, worn at once.
