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The Changpa: Guardians of the Pashmina Goat

Walk through any serious collection of Kashmiri textiles, or through the Veave Lore catalogue, and you will meet a family of recurring names: doshala, rumal, jamawar, khat-rast, chand-dar. Th...

Doshala, Rumal, Jamawar: A Guide to the Classic Forms of the Kashmiri Shawl

Walk through any serious collection of Kashmiri textiles, or through the Veave Lore catalogue, and you will meet a family of recurring names: doshala, rumal, jamawar, khat-rast, chand-dar. Th...

Do-Rukha: The Shawl With No Wrong Side

Every woven or embroidered textile on earth has a wrong side. Flip a brocade and you find floating threads; flip a print and you find a ghost; flip most embroidery and you find the workings. ...

A Shawl for Emperors: The Kashmiri Pashmina in World History

Few things have been desired by so many important people at once. The Kashmiri Pashmina shawl is one of them. For over three centuries, Royal Pashmina shawls traveled along caravan trails and...

Sozni Embroidery: The Needle That Learned to Paint

There was a time in the middle of the century when a Kashmiri needleworker had an idea that changed his craft forever. His job was repair. He was a rafugar, one of the darners who joined the ...

Difference Between Pashmina and Cashmere

Here is a piece of history that explains a century and a half of confusion. In the nineteenth century, Western buyers knew the fine goat fibre of high Asia only through one object: the shawl ...

What Is Pashmina? The Fibre from the Roof of the World

The winters are harsh in the high Changthang plateau in Ladakh when temperatures drop to as low as forty and even fifty degrees below zero. No sheep's wool would be enough to protect the anim...

The Buta: How a Kashmiri Flower Became the World's Paisley

Ask the world what a paisley is and you get a teardrop, a mango, a Persian pickle, a swirl on a necktie. The true answer is that the paisley is Kashmiri, and its story is one of the most rema...

From Goat to Loom: How a Kashmiri Pashmina Shawl Is Made

Raw pashm, arriving in Srinagar from the high pastures of Ladakh, does not look like luxury. It arrives as a dusty, rough clump of fine down mingled with the coarse guard hairs of the goat’s oute...