At House of Gatz, the story always comes first. An era, an icon, a place worth remembering that’s where every collection begins. But a story has to be made into something real, and where that happens matters as much as the design itself. Every piece we make begins as a length of silk, and is brought to life by the people who know silk best. For both, there has only ever been one true home.
So when people ask why we source and make our silk in China, the honest answer is the simplest one: because that is where silk comes from, and where it has been made best for longer than almost anything else humans still make by hand.
The original luxury
Silk is China’s gift to the world. For nearly five thousand years, the secret of how it was made: the mulberry leaf, the silkworm, the single unbroken thread unwound from a cocoon was kept inside China’s borders, so closely guarded that for centuries the rest of the world wore the cloth without ever knowing how it came to be. Rome paid for it in gold. Emperors gave it as tribute. The great route that carried it west was so completely defined by this one fabric that, thousands of years later, we still call it the Silk Road.
That knowledge never left. The same country that invented silk still spins it, weaves it and works it better than anywhere else, not as a recovered art, but as one that has simply never been put down.
Where the finest silk still comes from
There’s a lazy shorthand that hears “made in China” and reads compromise. With silk, the opposite is true. The thread that began it all still runs through the towns of the Jiangnan region, south of the Yangtze — Suzhou and Hangzhou, silk cities for a thousand years, where mulberry groves and weaving houses have handed the craft down through generations who never once let it lapse.
This is mulberry silk: the long, fine, luminous fibre that takes colour the way nothing else does and falls against the skin like water. It’s the reason a Gatz scarf has the particular weight and sheen that it does, why the print sits so deep and the edge moves so softly. We don’t choose China to spend less. We choose it because, after fifty centuries of practice, no one in the world does this better.
Made in China isn’t the shortcut. For silk, it’s the source.
Made by the people who know silk best
We don’t only buy our silk in China, we make our pieces there too, and we’re proud of it. It’s a deliberate choice, not a cost-cutting one. A scarf is grown on mulberry leaves, drawn from the cocoon by people who can feel when a thread is true, then printed, cut, hemmed and rolled by hands that have done it ten thousand times. In the old silk regions this is still a living craft rather than a line on a spreadsheet, knowledge passed from one generation to the next, the kind that can’t be bought in a hurry or stood up overnight somewhere cheaper.
To us, that’s the whole point. The country that has spent five thousand years perfecting silk is exactly the country that should turn it into something you’ll want to wear for years. Sourcing and making in the same place, close to the loom, is how the quality stays in the cloth.
One object, two histories
That’s the quiet idea behind everything we sell. A Gatz piece is a modern object made in the spirit of a time worth remembering and it lives on a fabric, and is shaped by a craft, that carry a memory of their own: woven and made where silk was born and never stopped being made well.
We bring the story. China brings five thousand years of knowing exactly how to tell it in silk.