In 1994, Ayman Nassar, an Egyptian-American who grew up in California, briefly abandoned his studies at the University of Colorado and followed his older brother to Egypt. “There were so many opportunities,” Nassar told me. The Nassars come from a family of Egyptian industrialists. They had owned a leather tannery in Alexandria which was nationalized by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the sweeping socialist reforms of the nineteen-sixties—an event that precipitated the Nassar family’s departure to the U.S. Now Egypt had relaxed many of its socialist policies, reducing subsidies, loosening price controls, and privatizing much of its public sector. With the help of a grandfather who had remained in the country, the Nassar brothers tried their hand at various industries before building a name for themselves in cotton. They started by trading in raw cotton, and eventually opened their own spinning and weaving factories.

The fame of Egyptian cotton is much like that of Italian olive oil or French wine, where provenance has become a shortcut for quality. A quick search on Amazon returns seven thousand results for “Egyptian cotton” in bedding and sheets alone. Several are appended with the word “luxury.” Cotton is the only commodity for which the adjective “Egyptian” adds grandeur, the way “German” does for cars and “French” does for most things. “People still, whether rightfully or not, place a value on Egyptian cotton,” Rami Helali, a co-founder of Kotn, a clothing company that primarily uses Egyptian cotton, told me. “I think they see the name and they think ‘luxury’ and ‘expensive.’ ” Egypt is one of a handful of countries—along with the United States, Israel, and Turkmenistan—that grow a particularly lustrous type of cotton called extra-long-staple cotton, known in the U.S. as Pima cotton. Extra-long-staple varieties make up three per cent of the world’s cotton production. “I have seen it,” Helali told me, of one such variety that grows in Egypt. “It is a shocking, shocking thing. It looks like silk.”
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