Cupro fabric

Cupro is a “regenerated cellulose” fibre made from cotton waste. It’s made using the teeny tiny silky cotton fibres, known as linter, that stick out of the cottonseed and are too small to spin. The linter is dissolved into a cuprammonium solution, which is a mixture of copper and ammonium, dropped into caustic soda, then spun into fibre. Much like TENCEL Lyocell and modal, cupro is a plant-based material that is chemically processed to produce the resulting fibre.

Cupro is said to have all the positive qualities of silk: it’s silky-smooth and drapes just like the luxurious material, although unlike silk cupro ignites easily and leaves behind copper-containing residue. First invented in the 1900s in Germany, cupro is now solely manufactured by Asahi Kasei in Japan under the trademark Bemberg. You might also see it called “ammonia silk” and “cuprammonium rayon”.