A buyer in Toronto once mailed us a "pure silk" saree she had sourced elsewhere, asking us to settle a dispute with her customer. We pulled a thread from the pallu and burned it. Paper smell, soft grey ash, and the thread kept glowing after the flame left. That is not silk. That is viscose, sold to her with a confident straight face. The silk trade is full of honest fabric wearing dishonest labels, so let us fix the vocabulary first.
The Four Silks That Matter in Trade
Silk splits by moth, not by marketing category, and four of them cover almost everything you will be offered.
Mulberry is farmed silk, the domesticated bombyx mori worm fed on mulberry leaves. It gives the long, unbroken, pale filament behind nearly every smooth, lustrous fabric people picture when they say silk. This is what Kanjivarams, Banarasi katans, crepe de chine and charmeuse are made from. South India is the heart of it, with Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu producing most of the country's mulberry.
Tasar (you will also see it written tussah) is a wild silk, coarser, with a natural copper-to-tan colour and a dry, textured hand. Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal weave it into sarees and furnishing fabric. It dyes beautifully but never fully loses that amber cast, because the fibre itself is pigmented.
Muga is the golden silk of Assam, GI-protected, and genuinely rare. It cannot be bleached or dyed into other shades. The natural gold deepens with washing and age instead of fading, which is the whole point of owning it. A word of honesty from our desk: muga is a collector's and heirloom fabric. We do not push it into daily retail programmes because the price behaves like a collector's market too.
Eri is the one nobody expects. The moth leaves the cocoon before harvest, which is why it is called peace silk. Because the cocoon is broken, the fibre cannot be reeled as one long filament. It is spun like cotton, and the resulting fabric is matte, soft, woolly, and nothing like the shine people associate with silk. Assam produces it, and it deserves a place in premium sustainable ranges.
Momme, the Unit Silk Actually Trades In
Ask a mill about GSM on a woven silk and you will often get a pause. Silk is graded in momme, a Japanese weight unit that stuck because it worked. One momme is roughly 4.3 grams per square metre, so a 16 momme crepe de chine is around 69 GSM, and an 8 momme habotai is roughly 34.
Some reference points our buyers keep in their notes:
- 5–8 momme: habotai, the light lining and scarf silk
- 8–12 momme: silk chiffon and georgette territory, sheer and floaty
- 16–19 momme: crepe de chine and dress-weight charmeuse
- 19 momme and up: charmeuse for bridal, dupion, and heavy furnishings
- Above that, you are in Banarasi and Kanjivaram construction weights, where trade quotes grams per saree, not momme at all
That last line is worth remembering. A serious silk saree is quoted as a 400-gram or 600-gram piece, because the zari and the weaving density carry as much weight as the fabric body.
Dupion, Matka, Shantung and Noil: The Texture Family
Half the confusion in silk buying comes from fabrics that are deliberately imperfect.
Dupion comes from double cocoons, two worms that spun one cocoon together. Reeling that tangled filament produces irregular slubs across the fabric, crisp body, and a lustrous, slightly ribbed look. Bridal and occasion wear loves it because it holds structure without interfacing. Shantung is its calmer cousin, the same character with finer, sparser slubs, usually in a lighter weight.
Matka is spun from broken mulberry waste, so it looks like a cross between dupion and a handspun linen: heavier, matte, with chunky irregular slubs. Bhagalpur in Bihar is the classic weaving centre for it. Noil is the softest of the family, spun from the shortest silk waste, matte and cottony with little specks of cocoon. It is honest, inexpensive, and wears casually. None of these four is a defect grade. They are fabrics built from what the industry would otherwise throw away, and they sell on their own terms.
Art Silk and the Words That Do Not Mean Silk
This is where the Toronto story started, so let us be blunt about it.
Art silk means artificial silk, and it is viscose rayon. It is a legitimate fabric with a lovely drape and deep dye uptake, and there is nothing wrong with selling it. The problem is the word silk in the name, and the number of people who stop reading right there. Alongside it you will meet Banglori silk (a polyester or viscose satin), china silk (lightweight plain habotai-style cloth, sometimes polyester), and any number of "silk finish" or "silk touch" labels, which describe a finish, not a fibre.
The burn test settles all of them in seconds. Real silk burns slowly with the smell of burnt hair or feathers, and leaves a crisp black bead that crushes to powder between your fingers. Viscose and cotton burn fast, smell like burning paper, leave a soft grey ash, and keep glowing after the flame is removed. Polyester and nylon melt, drip, and leave a hard plastic bead. Do it on a single pulled thread, away from the fabric, and do it before you pay, not after.
One more honest note from the Surat side of the desk. Our city runs the art-silk, satin and blend end of the business at massive scale, and we supply it proudly. The great mulberry weaving clusters are Banaras, Kanchipuram, Dharmavaram and Mysore, and we work with them for the real-silk saree programmes. Any trader in Surat claiming to weave Kanchipurams in-house is telling you a story.
Documentation Worth Asking For
For pieces marketed as pure silk, ask whether Silk Mark labelling is available. It is a genuine Indian certification system for pure silk, run with the Central Silk Board, and its tag on a saree is a meaningful signal. For zari work, ask which grade of zari was used, because pure zari (real silver on a silk core), tested zari (silver-plated copper) and imitation zari (metallised film) are three very different cost structures. We unpack the zari grading fully in our jacquard and brocade guide, and it is worth five minutes of any serious buyer's time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between mulberry silk and wild silk?
Mulberry is farmed from domesticated worms on a controlled diet, giving a long, uniform, pale filament and smooth lustrous fabric. Wild silks like tasar, muga and eri come from moths raised in the open, so the fibre is coarser, naturally pigmented, and characterful rather than glossy.
Is art silk real silk?
No. Art silk is viscose rayon, a wood-pulp fibre that imitates silk's drape. It is a fine fabric in its own right, but it is not silk, and the burn test shows the difference immediately.
How can I test silk fabric at the counter?
Pull a single thread and burn it with a lighter. Silk smells like burnt hair and leaves a crushable black bead. Cellulosics smell like paper and glow after the flame. Synthetics melt into a hard bead. Thirty seconds, no lab.
What does momme mean in silk fabric?
Momme is the traditional weight unit for woven silk, where one momme is about 4.3 grams per square metre. Higher momme means heavier, more durable and usually more expensive silk. A 16 momme crepe de chine is a standard dressweight; 8 momme is scarf-light.
Which silk is best for sarees at wholesale?
Mulberry dominates for lustrous occasion sarees, tasar and matka for textured handloom lines, and eri for premium casual and sustainable ranges. For bridal volume, dupion and Banarasi-style katans move fastest. Mix the stories rather than betting on one.
Is dupion silk good for bridal wear?
Yes, and it is a workhorse precisely because of its flaws. The slubbed surface hides creasing and seam puckering, and the crisp body holds structured silhouettes without heavy interfacing. It is less suited to fluid, bias-cut designs where you want drape instead of architecture.
Tell us what your saree or gown programme needs to say to its customer, and we will tell you which silk, at what weight, with which zari grade, actually fits the story and the margin. We send swatch sets of both real-silk and art-silk bases to serious buyers, burned and labelled, so your counter staff can learn the difference with their own hands. Raise an enquiry or message us on WhatsApp to begin.
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