The Finest Cloth in the World

For nearly two thousand years, the finest cotton cloth produced anywhere on Earth was woven in what is now Bangladesh. The Bengali muslin known as mulmul — the Mughals called it abrawan, "running water," or shabnam, "evening dew" — was hand-spun so fine that a sari twenty feet long could be drawn through a finger ring. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, complained that Rome's annual silver expenditure on Bengali cotton and Indian silk was draining the imperial treasury. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, described the Dhaka muslin trade at scale. When Napoleon's Empress Josephine was painted by Gérard in 1801 in a diaphanous white gown, she was wearing Dhaka abrawan.

What happened to this industry is the darkest chapter of the colonial textile economy. Between 1757 (the Battle of Plassey) and 1800, the East India Company systematically dismantled the Bengal handloom sector in order to eliminate competition with the emerging mechanised mills of Lancashire. Contemporary accounts describe catastrophic impoverishment among the weaver castes; in its most extreme forms, some nineteenth-century Indian and British writers recorded weavers having their thumbs cut off to prevent them from returning to the loom. Whether or not the thumb-cutting was widespread (contemporary scholarship debates the claim), what is beyond dispute is that within a generation the Bengal muslin industry, which had existed at scale for a thousand years, was economically destroyed. By 1900, the abrawan tradition was almost extinct.

Jamdani and the Long Survival

What did survive, in diminished form, was the related craft of jamdani — a figured muslin in which coloured weft threads are introduced by hand on the loom to produce geometric or floral motifs. Jamdani is not an embroidery; the pattern is built into the weave itself, each thread inserted by the weaver's fingers as the shuttle passes. A single high-quality jamdani sari requires between one and six months of two weavers working together. No mechanical loom in existence can reproduce the technique. It is, in the strict technical sense, the most labour-intensive textile in continuous production on Earth.

The jamdani villages — Rupganj, Sonargaon, Demra — are located in a small cluster around Dhaka. Approximately one thousand families still practice the craft. The 1971 government of newly independent Bangladesh, recognising the tradition's cultural importance, established a protective framework; in 2013, UNESCO recognised jamdani weaving as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The craft is, for the moment, secure.

Aarong and the Cooperative Model

The institution that has done most to connect Bangladeshi craft to the modern fashion economy is Aarong, founded in 1978 by BRAC — the world's largest non-governmental development organisation — as a rural-urban retail bridge. Aarong aggregates the work of approximately 65,000 Bangladeshi artisans across the country's craft villages and retails it through twenty-plus stores in Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, and the diaspora. The Aarong model — cooperative procurement, fair-wage pricing, urban retail at middle-class price points — has been adopted or adapted by similar organisations across South Asia, and it is the largest domestic fashion business in Bangladesh today.

The Named Designers

The modern Bangladeshi fashion designer is, perhaps inevitably, positioned as a bridge between the craft economy and international fashion. Bibi Russell, born in Chittagong in 1950 and trained at the London College of Fashion, opened her Dhaka studio in 1994 and built her reputation by working exclusively with Bangladeshi hand-woven textile. She showed at the UNESCO General Conference in 1996, was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1999, and remains the most internationally recognised Bangladeshi designer of her generation.

The contemporary generation — Sabyasachi Karmakar (Bangladeshi-born, not to be confused with the Indian Sabyasachi Mukherjee), Mahin Khan, Tenzing Chakma, Ayesha Dipty, Saad Kashem (Kāmizōn) — operates between the craft-based model of Aarong and the ready-to-wear calendar of Dhaka Fashion Week. The country has not yet produced a Sabyasachi or a Sabyasachi Karmakar of global couture scale. What it has produced, over fifty years, is a functioning defence of the oldest continuous hand-woven textile tradition on the planet.

The Garment-Industry Counterpart

Any account of Bangladeshi fashion must also address the country's role as the world's second-largest garment exporter (after China). Bangladesh produces approximately 7% of all ready-made garments manufactured globally; the sector employs approximately 4 million workers, eighty per cent of whom are women. The industry's reputation is dominated by the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in which 1,134 workers died — one of the worst industrial accidents in modern manufacturing history. Post-Rana Plaza reforms (the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, the Bangladesh Worker Rights Consortium) have measurably improved factory conditions, though the industry remains structurally low-wage.

The paradox of Bangladeshi fashion is the simultaneity of these two economies: the most labour-intensive luxury textile in the world (jamdani) and the largest low-wage garment factory industry in Asia, operating within the same country and — in the Dhaka metropolitan area — within the same twenty-kilometre radius. No other fashion country contains both at this scale.