Handmade silk comes with a rather striking claim. In fact, a mouth-watering claim that any fabric maker would give his right arm for. It is this: each piece is unique.

It is a given that any silk cloth will look sophisticated and yet by totally comfortable to wear. Not only does the wonderful evening dress, or the silk shirt draw attention to the garment and the person lucky enough to be wearing it, it is also light and soft and drapes across the body with ease. Silk is wonderful to wear.

OK. That is what we expect from silk. Even the fabric that comes off the huge machine looms in the noisy Bangkok factories which mass produce silk cloth.

But with handmade silk you get an absolutely unique piece of fabric. You can be 100 percent certain that the hands which wove the cloth on a simple, traditional loom and the artist who then dyed it and laid in the colors, have never done anything like it before or since. Handmade silk is always a one-off.

Even if the traditional workers wanted to, they could not re-create the beauty and feel of the silk they made, say, last week. Making silk cloth by hand is an art and each time a section of fabric is woven on the loom, and then colored, it is a finished performance that no-one will ever be able to replicate.

Two things follow from this.

First, when you set out to buy silk fabric women by hand make sure you are buying the real thing. There is always a premium on the price of genuine traditionally made silk fabric, and the temptation of pass off cheaply woven machine-made silk as the real thing is powerful. Unscrupulous dealers will quickly offer silk woven on machines as handmade silk. It's clearly commercial deceit, but this practice can go unchecked in the tourist areas of big Asian cities where local law-enforcement is not always rigorous. So be careful you are buying the real thing.

But second, when you buy handmade you're getting quality and elegance that can't be matched by the silk that spews our of thundering machines in the factories of dense, thronged Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. The small price difference between two fabrics is well worth it, for the unique, sophisticated product your handmade silk purchase brings you.