Silk Dupion Fabric Wholesale: Slub Count and Water Marks

Two winters ago a label in Shahpur Jat sent back a set of twelve jackets, all cut from one piece of dupion, all stitched by the same karigar. The client had accepted nine of them and rejected three. The three were not badly made. They were simply smoother, because they had come off the last few metres of the roll.

Nobody had done anything wrong at any stage. The cloth had changed under them while they cut it, which is a thing dupion does and almost nothing else on a wholesale floor does.

Quick answer: Slubs are the product, not the fault. The fault is uneven slub density along one piece. Count slubs inside a four inch window at the head, the middle then the tail before booking. Also drop water on an offcut, because dupion rings permanently and cannot be steam pressed. Delhi trade rates run roughly Rs 180 to Rs 2,100 per metre.

What a double cocoon actually does to the yarn

Ordinary mulberry silk comes from one worm spinning one cocoon, which reels off as a smooth continuous filament of near-uniform thickness. Dupion comes from the accident where two worms build a cocoon together and their filaments cross and bond. You cannot pull those two threads apart cleanly, so the reeler takes them as one.

What comes off the reel is therefore thick in the places where the two filaments happened to bunch and thin where they ran parallel. Those thick places are the slubs, plus because the bunching is random the yarn thickness varies continuously along its length rather than in any pattern. Woven up, that gives the dry crisp hand and the visible ribbing that people buy dupion for.

The commercial consequence follows directly from that. A reeled batch is not uniform end to end, so the cloth woven from the start of it is not the same cloth as the end of it. Mills know this and grade broadly, but grading is done by eye across a folded piece, which hides a gradual drift very effectively. That is the gap a buyer has to close for themselves.

The three-point slub count, plus the number that decides how you cut

Carry a sheet of paper with a four inch square cut out of the middle. That is the whole apparatus. Ask the counter to run the piece out rather than showing you the top fold, which is the request that separates a real inspection from a polite one.

Lay the window flat on the cloth near the head end and count every slub you can see inside the square. Do it again at roughly the midpoint of the piece, then again near the tail. Write the three numbers down rather than trusting your memory of them, because the difference is usually small enough to talk yourself out of. Then compare the highest to the lowest.

Inside about a third of variation, cut the piece however you like. Beyond that, every panel of a single garment has to come from one section of the piece, which changes your metre requirement because you can no longer cut continuously down the roll. That is a costing decision, so it belongs at booking rather than on the cutting table. Also check across the width at the same time, since a drift from selvedge to selvedge is rarer but far worse, as it puts a visible gradient inside a single panel. Lots in our silk dupion range are counted at three points before the piece is released rather than graded from the top fold.

Water on dupion: one drop, one permanent ring

This is the fault that generates returns, because it happens after delivery and it looks exactly like customer negligence when it very often is not.

Dupion keeps more of its natural sericin than a fully degummed silk does, plus most trade qualities carry a finish that stiffens the hand. Put a drop of water on that surface and it does not simply wet and dry. It dissolves a little of the sericin plus the finish, carries it outward as the drop evaporates, then deposits it in a hard ring at the edge where the drop stopped. You get a visible outline. It does not wash out, because washing the whole piece just makes a larger version of the same problem.

So test it before you book. Put one drop on an offcut, let it dry fully, then look at it in daylight. A well-finished dupion shows a faint mark you have to hunt for. A poorly finished one shows a hard ring from a metre away. Whichever you get, three rules travel with the lot: press dry with no steam ever, tell the customer no water spot cleaning at the point of sale rather than in small print, plus keep the cloth off a floor that has a steam table running nearby. The rest of the silk fabric stock is far more forgiving on this point, which is precisely why floors forget that dupion is not.

Silk dupion qualities plus Delhi trade rates

Watch the first row rather than the last. Poly dupion is sold honestly at its own rate by most counters, but it is also the easiest substitution in the whole silk family, because a photograph cannot tell the two apart at all. The giveaway is that a synthetic slub repeats. Real double-cocoon slub never does, since the bunching was random inside the cocoon. Look down a metre of it: if you can find the same slub pattern twice, you are not looking at silk.

Fraying, crease hold plus what the cutting table needs told

Dupion frays harder than almost anything else a boutique cuts. The filaments are long and smooth, so a cut edge sheds yarn continuously as the panel is handled, so a panel that sat overnight unfinished will have lost a usable amount off every edge by morning. The rule for the floor is simple: overlock as you cut, in the same pass, rather than cutting the full set and finishing them together. It costs nothing to change the habit and it saves a recut on every third or fourth job.

Crease hold cuts both ways on this cloth. Pure dupion takes and keeps a sharp crease, which is exactly why it tailors so well into structured pieces, plus it is why a fold line in storage becomes a permanent line on a garment. It also means the crease hold test is a useful field check against synthetics: pinch a fold hard between finger and thumb for five seconds, then let go. Real dupion keeps the line. Polyester springs back flat almost immediately. Hang the lot rather than shelving it folded, or accept that the fold lines are now part of the design.

What to settle before a silk dupion booking

• Run the three-point slub count on the piece, not the top fold. Head, middle, tail, written down, then compare highest to lowest.
• Drop water on an offcut and let it dry fully. A hard ring means the finish is poor and the returns will follow.
• Look for a repeating slub. A repeat means synthetic, whatever the bill says.
• State no steam on the dispatch docket. Dry press only, every quality, every time.
• Tell the floor to overlock in the same pass as cutting. Dupion sheds off an open edge faster than the shift lasts.
• Take delivery rolled or hung. Dupion holds a fold line the way it holds a tailored crease, permanently.

Silk dupion questions that come up at the counter

Is dupion the same thing as raw silk?

In Delhi trade talk the two words get used interchangeably, which is worth untangling because it affects what you should be paying. Raw silk strictly means silk that has not been degummed, so the sericin is still on the filament, plus it describes a processing state rather than a yarn type. Dupion describes where the yarn came from, namely a double cocoon, plus it can be more or less degummed depending on the finish. So a cloth can be dupion and raw, dupion and degummed, or raw without being dupion at all. What most counters mean when they say raw silk is a crisp slubby silk, which usually is dupion, so the two labels tend to land on the same cloth. The reason it matters at booking is that degumming level drives the hand plus the water marking behaviour. A heavily gummed piece is stiffer, cheaper to produce, spots more readily. Ask directly whether the piece has been degummed instead of arguing about which word is correct.

Can silk dupion be washed at all, or is it dry clean only?

Treat every dupion lot as dry clean only in what you tell a customer, even though a pure dupion can technically survive a careful cold hand wash. The reason is not that the fibre is delicate, since silk is strong. It is that washing removes sericin plus the applied finish unevenly across the cloth, so what comes out is softer, limper, plus usually blotchy where the finish went first. The crispness is the entire point of dupion, so a garment that has lost it has lost its character even though nothing is technically damaged. There is also shrinkage to account for, typically in the range of three to five per cent on a first wet, which is enough to ruin fit on a tailored jacket. If a piece genuinely must be washable, the workable route is to pre-wash the yardage before cutting, accept the softer hand as the finished look, then cut to the post-wash measurements. Doing it in that order is fine. Doing it after stitching is not.

Why do two rolls from the same shade lot look different under shop light?

Because the slub texture changes how light comes off the surface, so two rolls carrying the same dye reading can still read as different shades. A thick slub catches light on its raised face and throws a small shadow behind it, meaning a densely slubbed roll looks fractionally deeper plus more matte than a finely slubbed roll of identical colour. Under a tube light at a counter the effect is mild. Under a spotlight in a shop window, or in daylight at an angle, it becomes obvious. This is why a dye lot number alone is not sufficient assurance on dupion the way it is on a plain silk. Approve the rolls against each other physically, side by side, not against a shade card, plus do it at the angle a customer will actually see the garment from. If a line needs more metres than one roll holds, ask for consecutive rolls off the same beam rather than any two rolls carrying the same lot number.

How much extra should I order to allow for slub matching?

Let the three-point count set the number instead of applying a flat percentage. If your head, middle plus tail counts sit within about a third of each other, order your normal consumption with the usual small cutting allowance, since you can cut continuously down the roll. If the spread is wider, you are effectively cutting from sections rather than from a roll, so the panels of any one garment have to come from the same zone, which strands the lengths between zones. On a jacket or a choli with several matched panels that can add somewhere around ten to fifteen per cent. The practical habit is to do the count at the counter, decide there and then whether you are cutting continuously or by section, then fix the quantity on that basis. Buyers who order first and count later end up buying a second piece from a different lot, which brings back the shade problem in the previous answer.

Booking silk dupion lots at trade rates

If you run a boutique, a label or a reselling line, the working route to trade pricing on silk dupion is the wholesale programme. You get the three-point slub count run on the actual piece and the three numbers stated at quotation rather than a grade name, an offcut released for your own water drop test before the lot is committed, the degumming state confirmed in writing instead of settled by whichever word the counter used, consecutive rolls off one beam allocated where a line needs more than a single roll, dry press with no steam written onto the dispatch docket, plus delivery rolled or hung rather than folded into a bale. See the tiers and register on our bulk buying and registration page to open your first silk dupion order.