Oriental Allure - Silk Shantung Dresses

When it comes to luxury fabrics, few have the allure of silk. That shine, that fluid texture as it runs through your hands, the cool feeling of it on your body. It's also a brilliant fabric to cut and work with, being easy to bunch or drape. It's why we create a collection of dresses each season that showcase silk's amazing qualities. Not all silk is made equally however. At Favourbrook, we use Shantung, a type of silk fabric with characteristic irregular ridges known as slubs. Silk aficionados regard Shantung as the gold standard of silks thanks to its light and crisp handle. It's also one of the thinnest silks you'll find, making it wonderful for draping and that ever so slightly slubby finish gives it a wonderful textural quality that you won't find on any other variant. 

It gets its name from the Chinese province it originates from - Shandong. It's unknown quite when Chinese weavers began using it, but there is evidence that Europeans were producing silk Shantung garments as far back as the Renaissance period. For a long time, it was not highly regarded in the West, precisely because of its unique slubby finish. The trend was always for the smoothest silks fabrics, hence Shantung was often overlooked for what many would call 'imperfections', but we absolutely adore these details and think it makes our dresses that much more intriguing and individual.

While synthetic versions of Shantung have become increasingly better quality, nothing quite compares to the natural silk fibres (we use 100% natural silk in all but our Green Paris Shantung dress.) The slub texture is created by weaving together two types of silk yarn - the first is run through a roller so that it is completely smooth, while the second is unrolled to retain the nubs on its surface. Our fabric is woven in Italy at a silk mill we've built a very long-standing relationship with.