For a thousand years, one cloth meant power above all others in Europe: brocade — silk woven with threads of real gold and silver. To wear it was to announce that you were a king.
✨ Fun fact: When Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France met in 1520, their tents, gowns and horses were so heavily draped in gold-woven silk that the meeting place was named the “Field of the Cloth of Gold.”
Brocade is the cloth we weave in Banaras, so the story of how it ruled Europe’s courts is, to us, a familiar one told in another language.
Byzantium and the imperial purple
The story begins in Byzantium. In the imperial workshops of Constantinople, weavers made silks shot with gold so precious that the very richest — the purple-and-gold cloths — were reserved for the emperor alone, and to export them without licence was forbidden. Cloth had become a crown.
Cloth of gold
From this came the medieval idea of cloth of gold: brocade in which gold-wrapped thread was woven into silk until the fabric seemed to be made of light. It was the most expensive textile in Europe, and it clothed the two greatest powers of the age — the crown and the Church. Kings were crowned in it; bishops said Mass in it; the great were buried in it. It is the exact European counterpart of the gold-wrapped kalabatun that runs through a kamkhwab to this day.
The looms of Italy
By the Renaissance, the finest of these cloths came from Italy. The looms of Lucca, Venice, Florence and Genoa wove sumptuous brocades and crimson velvets patterned with pomegranates and crowns — the very cloths you see draped over princes and Madonnas in Renaissance paintings, and which we trace in the crafts of Italy.
The Field of the Cloth of Gold
No moment captured this better than the summit of 1520, when the kings of England and France met near Calais. Each tried to outshine the other in brocade and gold — pavilions, banners, clothing and horse-trappings glittering with it — until the place itself was christened the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is remembered not for a treaty but for its fabric: a fortnight of two monarchs competing, quite literally, in cloth.
Versailles and the silk of Lyon
Later, France took the lead. The court of Versailles set the fashion for all Europe, and its brocades were woven in Lyon, which grew into the silk-weaving capital of the continent — the story we follow in France & the Fashion Houses. Silk on the walls and gold in the cloth was not an eccentricity at Versailles; it was the entire language of the court.
The thread we love
What moves us is how universal this was. While Europe’s kings were robing themselves in cloth of gold, the emperors and nobles of India were doing exactly the same in kamkhwab — the Banarasi brocade we still weave by hand today. The Mughal court had its karkhanas as Byzantium had its imperial workshops; both reserved the richest gold cloth for the ruler; both understood that a length of woven gold was a statement no other object could make.
Explore our handwoven gold-and-silver brocade in the Brocade Fabric collection.
Frequently asked questions
What is cloth of gold?
A luxurious brocade woven from silk and gold-wrapped thread, considered the most precious fabric in medieval and Renaissance Europe, reserved largely for royalty and the Church.
What was the Field of the Cloth of Gold?
A famous 1520 summit near Calais between Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, so lavishly decorated with gold-woven brocade that it gave the event its name.
Why could only royalty wear brocade?
Because cloth of gold was extraordinarily costly, and sumptuary laws across Europe legally restricted the wearing of the richest silks and gold cloth to the monarch and the highest ranks of nobility.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: the Mughal court · France & the fashion houses · kincob · kinkhab & kamkhwab.
