News

The Jaal Shawl Covers a Field the Way a Border Never Could

Kashmir's embroiderers have always had a choice to make on every shawl: to decorate the edges and leave the body plain, or let the pattern spread across the entire field. A jaal pashmina shaw...

Dressing the Groom in Jamawar This Wedding Season

Most of the attention on a wedding day goes to the bride's outfit but a groom's shawl does more quiet work than it usually gets credit for. Draped over a sherwani or a bandhgala a jamawar sha...

The Pashmina Towel Is a Quiet Luxury Nobody Asks For

Nobody sets out looking for a pashmina towel. It is not a category anyone grows up wanting, the way a shawl or a scarf is, because a towel has never needed to be luxurious to do its job. That...

The Oversized Pashmina Shawl Is a Blanket You Can Wear

A typical shawl is about two metres by one metre. An oversized pashmina shawl goes well beyond that size, being more like a light blanket than a wrap, and this extra amount of material alters...

The Kani Pashmina Saree Brings Kashmir's Weave to the Six Yards

At its essence, a shawl and a saree are the same idea applied to different lengths: both are a single piece of cloth worn without being cut or stitched into shape, and in both cases the quali...

Kalamkari Finds Its Way Onto a Pashmina Shawl

Kalamkari and the needlework of Kashmir developed thousands of miles apart, the former in the temple towns of Andhra Pradesh and the latter in the workshops of Srinagar, and for most of their...

The GI Tag and the Fight Against Fake Pashmina

There is a small mark on a genuine Kashmir Pashmina label that most buyers pass over without noticing: a Geographical Indication tag. It looks unimpressive, a few printed words and a registra...

Pashmina in Fashion: From Empress to Runway

An earlier chapter of this journal left the Kashmir shawl at the end of its first great romance with the West, set aside by around 1870 as skirts changed shape and fashion moved on to other t...

The Trousseau Shawl: Pashmina in Kashmir Weddings

In a Kashmiri household preparing for a wedding, the shawls are often packed before the jewellery. Among the silk and gold sits a stack of Pashmina, sometimes plain, sometimes worked in Sozni...

How Pashmina Is Graded: Micron Count Explained

A Pashmina shawl carries no printed number for the fineness of its fibre, yet this one invisible factor determines almost everything about how the shawl will feel, drape and age. The grading ...