Before going to a friend’s wedding in Bangladesh I had never encountered the need to wear a sari.

A Bengali wedding is all about celebration, tradition, lots of people, wonderful textiles, a riot of colour and opulence, food, flowers, fabric and big, big smiles. During the course of the multi-day event, the bride and their guests are likely to wear many, many different outfits. Enter the sari – 6-9m of hand woven fabric that can be folded and tucked and draped into the most elegant outfit.

I knew Bangladesh was renowned for its traditional textiles and weaving. Alongside the wedding, learning more about traditional woven textiles, crafts and trades was high on my list. A local textile company organised a ten day private off the beaten track textile tour. Travelling by car, bus, train, rickshaw, punt, boat, motorbike trailer and foot we travelled learning about the process of fabric making – most of which was for saris.

We met craftspeople designing and drawing fabric patterns, hand making parts for weaving machinery, making punch hole cards for looms, spinning textiles, setting up the hundreds of fine warp strands, decorating fabrics with tiny repetitive stitching and weavers, so many weavers. We were also introduced to the other parts of village life – the functional ceramics, the bamboo basket and mat weaving, the cooks, jewellers, organic farmers, seed collectors the markets and the farming. We were welcomed into homes and villages, schools and sewing circles. We were fed delicious food around family tables, at roadside eateries, on a boat trip to spot tigers we juggled a picnic on our knees. For a very brief moment, we were immersed in an unfamiliar world and culture. It was a different kind of mesmerising delight.

Between the wedding and exploring, I began to wonder if you can get sore eyes from too much colour and fatigue from smiling too much? And another question arose - How many (highly skilled professional) people does it take to make a sari?

Make the loom, from timber and bamboo, fibre and metal.
Design the fabric pattern.
Make the pattern cards.
Grow the raw material (silkworms or cotton).
Collect the material and process.
Make the dye.
Colour the raw material.
Untangle and assemble the dyed threads.
Weave the thread into fabric.
Decorate the fabric.
Transport the fabric.
Sell the fabric.
Tailor make the custom matching top.
Wrap the wearer into the sari.
Wear the sari!

2012 - Places visited include Dhaka, Ubinig, Sundarbans, Naira, Mirpur Baranassi and the Burigonga River. Shahid Hussain Shamim organised our tour and our fabulous guide was Khandakar Anisur.

Image credit: © 2020 Loredana Ducco