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Tilla Embroidery: Kashmir's Gold Thread Craft

If you walk around the old part of Srinagar in the weeks leading up to the wedding season, you will hear two different types of embroidery before you see them. Sozni work is almost silent, co...

A Century of Silence: The Death and Rebirth of the Kani Shawl

Crafts die quietly. There is no announcement, no last day; there is simply a year in which, for the first time in centuries, no one weaves. For the Kani shawl of Kashmir, the most elaborate w...

Sixty Colours from a Handful of Plants: The Natural Dyes of Kashmir

Take out a Kashmir shawl woven two and a half centuries ago, in the candlelit workshops of the 1700s, and the first shock is not the design. It is the colour. The roses still glow, the indigo...

Termeh and Kashmir: The Shawl's Only Cousin

In the entire history of world textiles, exactly one tradition bears a family resemblance to the woven Kashmir shawl: the termeh of Iran. Everything else that looks like our craft is an imita...

The Hands Behind the Heirloom: Honouring Kashmir's Weavers

Every account of the Kashmir shawl lists its admirers: emperors, maharajas, empresses. This one is about its makers. The historical record of the shawl's golden century preserves the names of...

Draped in Portraits: The Kashmir Shawl in European Art and Fashion

For about seventy years, roughly from 1800 to 1870, the single most desired accessory of a fashionable European woman was a length of handwoven cloth from a Himalayan valley she would never s...

Caravans, Treaties and a Broken Twig: How Pashm Crossed the Himalaya

Every luxury has a supply chain. Most are dull. The one behind the Kashmiri Pashmina shawl involves royal treaties, a monopoly defended for three centuries, porters carrying fifty kilogram lo...

The Language of Pashmina: A Collector's Glossary from Alwan to Zanjeer

Every old craft develops its own tongue, and Kashmir's shawl tradition, four centuries deep, speaks one of the richest. Knowing even a dozen of its words changes you from a shopper into a col...

Seven Myths About Pashmina, Corrected

No luxury textile in the world trails more legend than the Kashmiri shawl. Some of the stories are charming, some are sales tricks, and some have done real harm. A house that has lived inside...

Kani Weaving and the Talim: The Coded Language of the Kashmir Shawl

Look closely at the back of a true Kani shawl and you will see something no printed or machine made imitation can fake: at every change of colour, a minute ridge where two threads of differen...