The Silk Robe: A Quiet History of Wrapping Yourself in Silk

In a gallery in Seoul, an embroidered silk robe hangs under glass between an AI video and a porcelain sculpture. The exhibition sets out to tackle the past, present and future of the hanbok, Korea's traditional dress, and yet the length of embroidered silk holds its own against the screens. It usually does. The silk robe, it turns out, is one of the oldest ideas we keep having.

We tend to treat a robe as an afterthought, the thing you throw on before you're properly dressed. For most of history it was closer to the opposite: the garment that told the room you had arrived, or were at rest, or were someone who could afford to do either in silk.

What exactly is a hanbok?

The hanbok, a word that simply means "Korean clothing", is the flowing two-piece dress Koreans have worn for well over a thousand years. A woman wears a jeogori, a short wrapped jacket tied with a soft looped bow called a goreum, over a high, full skirt called a chima. A man pairs the jeogori with roomy baji trousers. Over the top, for ceremony or for cold, goes the durumagi, a long outer coat whose name means "closed all around". It first appears on the upper classes of the Goguryeo kingdom, and for those who could afford it, the good durumagi was cut from silk. The basic shapes reach back to the Three Kingdoms period, before 668 CE, painted onto the walls of old tombs. Ramie and hemp did for summer. When the air turned cool, you reached for silk.

The robe the rest of the world kept reinventing

Korea was far from alone. Almost every culture that met silk eventually wrapped itself in some version of the same garment. Silk itself began in China around five thousand years ago, and robes of silk were among its earliest luxuries. Japan refined the idea into the kosode and then the kimono, a robe of astonishing economy cut almost entirely from straight lines. And here is the part that tends to surprise people: the European dressing gown is a direct import. In the mid-1600s the Dutch East India Company shipped a small parcel of Japanese kimono back to Europe, so few each year that their rarity alone marked status. By the 1700s, well-off Europeans were lounging at home in loose silk robes they called banyans. Gentlemen of a scholarly turn liked to be painted in them, pen in hand, silk pooling at the elbow. The dressing gown you pad to the kettle in on a cold morning is their direct descendant.

Why silk, and not wool or cotton?

Because silk does something few other fibres manage: it keeps you warm without ever feeling stuffy. Silk is a protein fibre, and its filaments hold a thin, still layer of air against you, trapping your own warmth close, which is why even a light silk robe feels cosseting rather than heavy. Yet the same fibre breathes and carries moisture away, so it never turns clammy the way a synthetic wrap does once a room heats up. Warm, but never stifling. That balance, what we would now call thermoregulation, is precisely why so many cultures chose silk for the layer worn closest to rest, whether over a hanbok in a Korean autumn or over a nightshirt in a draughty Georgian house. (For more on that, see whether silk really feels cold in winter.)

Which brings us to a New Zealand July

All of which makes the silk robe quietly ideal for a Tāmaki Makaurau winter. Our cold snaps are gentle, but the mornings are damp and the floors are freezing, and there is a real pleasure in the first thing you reach for before the heat pump has caught up. A silk robe warms almost the moment it meets your skin, holds that warmth while the jug boils, and won't leave you clammy once the room finally comes good. It is the same conclusion a Goguryeo noble and a Georgian scholar arrived at, brought to bear on a cold tiled kitchen and a kettle that takes its time.

If you like a good silk story, we have also traced the stories woven into a silk scarf. And if you'd rather feel the difference than read about it, our silk robes and kimonos are cut from 22-momme mulberry silk, the weight that drapes and holds warmth without feeling like a dressing-gown-shaped duvet.

The exhibition in Seoul asks what the hanbok will become next. If the last few thousand years are any guide, the answer will still, somewhere, involve silk against skin on a cold morning. Some ideas don't need improving. They just need wearing.