Anita Dongre’s latest collection turns the spotlight on Bemberg™, a cupro fibre most Indian shoppers have worn without knowing its name.
Bemberg™ is the proprietary brand name for cupro, a regenerated cellulose fibre made and sold exclusively by Japan’s Asahi Kasei Corporation, which has produced it since 1931 and remains the world’s only manufacturer of the fibre today. Its raw material is cotton linter, the short downy fibre attached to cottonseeds, obtained as a pre-consumer by-product of cottonseed oil production. The linter is dissolved using a cuprammonium process, then extruded into a fine, continuous filament.
Asahi Kasei runs this through a closed-loop production system that recovers and reuses the copper and ammonia involved in manufacturing, which is what allows the fibre to be marketed as biodegradable and compostable.
On performance, Bemberg™ is prized for a soft, smooth hand achieved through a chemical scouring process, alongside strong moisture absorption and release, a silk-like drape, and good colour uptake; properties that explain its long popularity in warm, humid climates. In India specifically, the fibre has a four-decade-plus track record as it has been used for more than 40 years in traditional garments such as saris and dupattas, prized for its lustre and smooth glide. Globally, it shows up in a wider range of applications, from linings to outerwear, innerwear, sportswear and bedding.
Bemberg™’s biggest legacy market is actually tailoring linings. It is used by leading suit and coat manufacturers including Hugo Boss, Armani and Zegna, though it remains a genuinely niche fibre with only about 0.02% of all fabrics produced globally are Bemberg.
In India, Bemberg™ has steadily gained traction across leading fashion labels. Designer Hemang Agrawal showcased his Bemberg™-based Tattva collection at Lakmé Fashion Week’s Sustainable Fashion Day in 2020, followed by Payal Pratap, whose Java collection debuted at FDCI x Lakmé Fashion Week in 2022. BODICE presented a Bemberg™ runway collection for Spring/Summer 2025 in New Delhi, while modern craft label Nicobar continues to incorporate the fibre into styles such as the Green Printed Salem Dress and Orange & Ice Blue Printed Dot Dupatta.
More recently, Anita Dongre has collaborated with Asahi Kasei on its Azure edit, highlighting Bemberg™ yarn’s rich colour saturation, fluid drape, skin-friendly feel, and marine and soil biodegradability.
Asahi Kasei has also backed the fibre’s visibility through academic partnerships with NID, NIFT Mumbai, NIFT Bengaluru and DKTE, training the next generation of Indian designers on the material.
Bemberg™ gives Indian labels a sustainability story that doesn’t require reinventing craft; it slots into existing saree, dupatta and drape-heavy vocabularies the industry already knows how to work with, while adding a certified circular-sourcing narrative that export buyers increasingly ask for.
