Vietnamese textiles, woven or printed

Vietnamese textiles reach a visitor in two forms that look alike at arm's length. A weaver makes one on a wooden loom over several days. A factory prints the other on a roll in seconds. Both hang on the same stall in the same market, often at similar prices.

Telling the two apart takes about five seconds once you know where to look, and it is the one skill worth having before buying any of the Vietnamese textiles on a market stall.

What is actually made here?

Four traditions in four places, overlapping less than the souvenir stalls suggest.

The craft villages guide covers where to watch any of this being made, and the short version is that a weekday morning is the only hour that works.

How do you tell woven from printed?

Turn the cloth over. Woven brocade carries the pattern on the reverse too, with floating threads, small slubs and the odd irregularity where the weaver changed shuttle. Printed cloth is pale or white on the back, and its repeat is perfect.

The back of the cloth settles most purchases. Price settles the rest: a hand-woven scarf that took two days cannot cost 80,000 dong, and a stall with twenty identical ones is not selling what the loom in the photograph behind it made.

Where can you watch it happen?

In the northern villages, in houses rather than workshops. Around Sapa and Bac Ha, weaving and indigo dyeing are ordinary household work, and the looms sit under the stilt houses where the light falls.

Mai Chau is the accessible version: a Thai valley 4 hours from Hanoi where almost every homestay keeps a loom in the yard. Most of the cloth on sale there was made within a few hundred metres. The homestay guide covers staying in one.

Van Phuc, on the edge of Hanoi, is the silk village. It is half working looms and half shopfronts, and knowing which half you are standing in is the whole skill.

Is the silk real?

Ask, and expect an honest answer from a serious shop. Shops here sell real silk, silk blends and pure polyester under the same English word, and a rail hides the difference completely.

A tailor will demonstrate the burn test without being asked. Silk singes, smells of burnt hair and turns to ash; polyester melts into a bead. In Hoi An, where the tailoring industry runs on this material, asking what a fabric is before choosing it is normal.

What about indigo?

Indigo is the blue-black of Hmong clothing. Dyers ferment indigo plants in vats and build the colour over repeated dips, often 20 or more. Fresh indigo rubs off onto hands, a white shirt or a hotel pillow, and that is the sign of the real thing rather than a fault.

Anything sold as indigo that leaves nothing on a damp cloth took its colour some other way. Wash a new piece separately, twice, before trusting it near anything pale.

What about the ao dai?

The national dress, and the one garment most visitors end up having made. An ao dai is a long fitted tunic over loose trousers, cut to the body from about a dozen measurements, and a tailor needs two fittings rather than one to get the shoulders right.

Silk is the traditional cloth and a synthetic blend is the common one, which is the same question the rail asks. Expect a few days rather than an afternoon for a good one, and expect the price to track the fabric rather than the labour.

Schoolgirls in white ao dai on a Monday morning are the version you will see most, since many schools still use it as uniform. That is worth knowing before photographing anyone in one.

What is worth carrying home?

A woven panel or scarf bought where it was made, at 150,000 to 600,000 dong, and silk by the metre if you already know what you want made from it. Both travel flat and neither breaks.

The shopping guide makes the wider case for what to carry home. The one thing it puts on the do-not list is the mass-produced version of Vietnamese textiles: printed brocade, identical in every tourist street from Hanoi to the delta.