The Trees That Silk Made Famous

There were mulberry trees everywhere once.

Along the roads that circled the lake. On the terraced slopes above the water. In the courtyards of houses where women worked in quiet, feeding leaves to creatures smaller than a thumb. The trees were not beautiful in any obvious way: their bark grey, their form unremarkable, their fruit dark and sweet and staining. But they were everywhere. And from them, through the patient labour of the silkworm, came something that crossed the world.

Lake Como, in the fifteenth century, was not yet famous for fashion. Water and light shaped the landscape. The white mulberry, Morus alba, grew there. Under Ludovico Sforza, farmers were encouraged to plant mulberries. An entire landscape reorganised around the appetite of a caterpillar. Around the desire of the silkworm to build, around itself, a chamber of fine unbroken thread.

Alessandro Baricco opens Silk with a date, a man’s age and his trade. In 1861, Hervé Joncour makes his living buying and selling silkworms. The prose strips away everything that isn’t essential until what remains feels inevitable. Baricco understood that silk, as material and as story, already carries enough.

For generations, the mulberry trees helped define the lake’s identity. The silkworm does one thing: it eats, it grows, it wraps itself in silence. Then the silence is unwound, a single fine thread, and from it something is made that has no right to exist: a fabric that feels weightless and warm, ancient and perpetually new.

After the Second World War, the local trade turned increasingly to imported raw silk. The silkworms went quiet. The mulberry trees were cleared, or simply left to age past usefulness. Today they are a rare presence in the landscape, a ghost architecture of an industry that once clothed emperors and cardinals and travellers who never thought to wonder what they were wearing.

But the thread did not break.

Como is still a centre of Italian silk. The weaving and finishing knowledge accumulated over centuries survives, in the hands and machines of mills that have been running for generations. The landscape changed. The knowledge stayed.

Baricco’s protagonist returns to Japan for silkworm eggs. The journey is described in almost the same language each time. The repetition is the point. Silk, Baricco understood, is about return. The season repeats. The worm spins again. The thread is drawn from the same source, year after year, by a creature with no memory and no agenda, only the knowledge of what it must do.

His sentences carry that quality. Short. Declarative. Each one complete, each one pointing somewhere the next one will not quite arrive at. The distance between the sentence and the continent is where the story lives.

When Baricco describes the woman Joncour cannot stop thinking about, what stays with us is her gaze. The fact of having been looked at. Silk writing lives in that same register: in what is perceived rather than what is presented.

And then there is what silk can do when it does not announce itself.

Most people know silk by its sheen, by the way it catches light, the way it moves. But there is another silk. Woven differently, finished differently. Denser, heavier in drape, matte. A silk that holds the body without revealing it. That wraps without reflecting.

This is a quality that draws Silkrest to silk: the way the fabric can belong to a private hour. To the room no one else enters.

A silk with little sheen can still feel cool to the touch, soften with use and move gently against the skin. It is chosen for what happens in the hours between evening and morning, when the body does not need to perform, when the only audience is the weight of the darkness and the quality of the air.

Not silk as statement. Silk as return.

The mulberry trees are still there, if you know where to look. Scattered across the hillsides above the lake, older than most of what surrounds them, unremarkable to anyone who doesn’t know what they once carried. They are not producing anything now. They are simply standing, in the way that old useful things sometimes stand, quietly, without needing to explain themselves.

There is something in that worth keeping.