Proudly Not Made in France
We make our clothes in the Indus Valley. People have been weaving cotton there for more than four thousand years.
Nearly eight thousand years ago, where the mountains meet the plains of the Indus Valley, someone was buried with a string of copper beads. Inside one bead, the metal kept a few threads of cotton. The grave is at Mehrgarh, and the threads are the oldest cotton the Old World has found.
A French team led by Christophe Moulherat identified them in 2002. The bead could not tell them who twisted the thread, or whether anyone there was weaving yet. The record starts with a few fibers and no names.
The river gave the region its name. Sindhu is Sanskrit for river. The Persians said Hindu, the Greeks said Indos, and the land around it became India. A whole subcontinent carries the name of one river.
Cloth came later. At Mohenjo-daro, a brick city on the river, excavations led by John Marshall in the 1920s turned up a scrap of cotton cloth. It had lasted thousands of years because it was wrapped around a silver jar.
“Farmers in the Indus valley were the first to spin and weave cotton,” writes the historian Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton. By the fifth century BC, word had reached Greece. Herodotus described trees in India that grew a wool finer than a sheep’s.
Two thousand years ago, an anonymous merchant writing in Greek made a guide to the ports of the Indian Ocean, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. It lists Barbarikon, a port in the Indus delta, shipping cotton cloth west alongside indigo and lapis lazuli. Indigo carries the route in its name. It comes from the Greek indikon, the Indian dye.
The trade ran for centuries. Then British mills took it, and much of the region’s hand weaving collapsed.
The region gave menswear a color, too. In the late 1840s, the Corps of Guides, a frontier regiment raised at Peshawar, dressed not in scarlet but in cloth dyed with mulberry juice to match the ground. They called the color khaki, from the Persian word for dust. Every pair of khakis since owes them the word.
The cotton kept growing, and the hands kept working. Zero Waste Studio works in Karachi, on the coast just west of where the Indus Valley meets the Arabian Sea. Bales come down from the fields upriver. When an order comes in, Danish, the studio’s cutting master, lays the cloth flat and cuts the pieces from a pattern drawn in Paris by Pierre Letz. Nothing is made before someone asks for it.
The route is older in our family than in our company. Our founder, Alexandre Sundberg, was three when he first saw cotton fields in the Indus Valley.
His father was one of the early exporters of garments from the region to Le Sentier, the Paris garment district. His mother was early too, sending the region’s home textiles to France.
The cloth has its own address. The fabric for our swim shorts is woven mostly in Italy and France. Designed in Paris, made in the Indus Valley. We name every address, because a label has one job: to tell you where a thing was made.
In 2020, Esquire put a line about us in a headline, and we have worn it since. Made in France sells, and we understand why. But the Old World’s oldest cotton turned up at the other end of the map.
Made at source. Proudly not made in France.
