The Stories Behind the Silk Scarf: Paris, Bangkok and Seoul

In 1937, the year a Paris harness maker turned 100, it brought out a square of silk printed with a betting game about horse-drawn buses.

It sounds like a private joke, and it may have been. It's also where the printed silk scarf, as most of us picture it, gets going. The stories on either side of that date are stranger still: a regiment, a war, an American who walked into the jungle and a Korean palace.

When did people start wearing silk scarves?

Nobody can point to the first one, but the word cravat gives us a good early date: the 1660s. Silk itself is far older, first made in China thousands of years ago. The knotted neck scarf as a fashion is usually traced to Croat soldiers serving France, a regiment of whom reached the country in 1660. Parisians admired the way they tied their neckcloths, and "Croat" wore down into "cravat." Officers' cravats were muslin or silk.

What was the first Hermès silk scarf?

It was Jeu des Omnibus et Dames Blanches, issued in 1937, a century after the house was founded as a Paris harness workshop. Sotheby's credits Robert Dumas with the design, worked up from a woodblock engraving.

The picture is the good part. The game was created in 1827 and published in 1832, and although it looks like a race, it was closer to roulette: players bet on numbered omnibuses, and wooden balls drawn from a bag decided who collected. It was named for two Paris bus companies founded in 1828, and its rules end with the advice that a good player never gets angry.

The V&A counts more than 2,000 scarf designs from the house between 1937 and 1995. Today the edges are still rolled and stitched by hand, typically in Lyon. (If you've ever wondered what that hem does, hand-rolled vs machine hem explains it.) Queen Elizabeth II wore them from the 1940s, often in the country and at horse events, and by Sotheby's account Princess Grace of Monaco once used hers as an arm sling, which is more than most accessories are asked to do.

Why did World War II flyers carry silk?

Because a map printed on silk could be unfolded silently, wouldn't fall apart when wet and held up along its creases. In Britain's MI9, the escape and evasion service, Christopher Clayton Hutton is credited with reviving the idea. His early attempts blurred until pectin was added to the ink. The cartographer Barbara Bond estimated that almost two million maps went out to Allied servicemen, and the game maker Waddington's, which printed some of them, also hid them inside Monopoly sets for prisoners of war.

The Americans took the idea up and made it their own. By one map dealer's account, the Army Map Service was printing as many as 250,000 a month at its peak, nearly all on acetate rayon, though everybody went on calling them silk maps (some words are hard to shake). The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds a woman's button-front blouse sewn from Army Air Forces escape maps of western Europe.

Who was Jim Thompson, and what happened to him?

Jim Thompson was an American from Delaware who built Thai silk into an international business, then vanished in Malaysia's Cameron Highlands on March 26, 1967. A Princeton graduate and wartime intelligence officer with the OSS, he reached Bangkok shortly after V-J Day in 1945, stayed on and co-founded the Thai Silk Company in 1948. In 1951 the designer Irene Sharaff used Thai silk for the costumes of The King and I on Broadway, which put the cloth in front of American audiences.

Time credited him in 1958 with almost singlehandedly rescuing Thailand's silk industry. Later accounts are cooler. The cloth he sold, they point out, had little in common with what the country had produced before, and through the 1950s its buyers were mainly American tourists. What he built was still real, and hand-woven Thai silk became known around the world.

The ending is the part everyone remembers. On Easter Sunday he went out for a walk from a cottage where he was staying with friends and didn't come back. He'd left his cigarettes and his gallstone pills behind. The search, according to a Penn Museum account, took in 325 Malaysian police and 30 aboriginal trackers. Theories have ranged from Communist kidnappers to a CIA mission to a tiger, and he has never been found.

What is dancheong, and why is it on a scarf?

Dancheong is the painted colorwork on Korea's traditional wooden buildings. The paint protects the timber from weather and insects, and it was kept mainly for important buildings such as palaces and temples. It's built on five cardinal colors: blue, red, yellow, white and black. Seoul's Gyeongbokgung Palace has some of the best-known examples.

Designers have carried that palette onto silk squares, and in 2026 a scarf built on the royal colors and seasonal motifs of Gyeongbokgung won a design award. It makes a good journey for a pattern: made to be read from across a palace courtyard, now folded small enough for a coat pocket.

Why does silk keep getting chosen for this?

Partly for how it looks, and partly for what it can do. A degummed silk filament has a rounded triangular cross-section, a little like a prism, which refracts and diffuses light and gives silk its soft glow. It also holds a fine printed line once the ink is right, as the map makers found, and it folds down to almost nothing. If you want to keep a picture close, those are useful qualities in a cloth.

If you have a picture of your own, whether a painting, a logo or a place, the LS Silk Custom Studio can make it into a scarf: a single finished sample, a small run of 2 to 20, or a production run of 30 to 100 per design. The guide to ordering custom silk scarves walks through it.

Put your own story on silk in the LS Silk Custom Studio →

The omnibus companies are long gone, and nobody places bets on Jenny, Pauline or Clarisse anymore, the names painted on the game's little buses. The square of silk they ended up on has outlasted them all. A good player, presumably, would not be angry about that.

Frequently asked questions

When was the silk scarf invented?

It has no single invention date. Knotted neckcloths in muslin or silk were fashionable in France by the 1660s, and that's where the word cravat comes from. The printed silk square most people picture is usually dated to 1937.

What was the first Hermès scarf?

Jeu des Omnibus et Dames Blanches, from 1937. It reproduces a Paris betting game, published in 1832 and named for two horse-drawn omnibus companies. Sotheby's credits Robert Dumas with the design, though some sources also mention Hugo Grygkar.

Were WWII escape maps really printed on silk?

British ones often were, because silk unfolds quietly, survives getting wet and holds up along its creases. Nearly all the American versions, though still called silk maps, were printed on acetate rayon, according to one map dealer's history of them.

What happened to Jim Thompson?

Nobody knows. The American silk businessman went for a walk in Malaysia's Cameron Highlands on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, and was never found despite a large search. Theories have included kidnapping, a CIA mission and a tiger.

What does dancheong mean?

Dancheong is the traditional painted decoration on Korean wooden buildings such as palaces and temples. It uses five cardinal colors, protects the timber from weather and insects, and was used mainly on important buildings.

Related reading: How to Wear a Silk Scarf · The Silk Robe: A Short History · LS Silk scarves