The year is 1908 and on a canvas by the American artist John Singer Sargent, a most un-American article of clothing makes a surprising appearance. The painting, titled Cashmere, shows Sargent’s then 11-year-old niece in seven different poses, but draped, in all of them, in the same distinct shawl. The shawl becomes a recurrent feature in his paintings of his niece, and decades later, leads his great-niece and textile historian Jenny Housego to Kashmir. There, along with her local Kashmiri partner Asaf Ali, Housego founds Kashmir Loom, a brand that, in contemporising pashmina textile traditions, hopes to ‘preserve heritage while fostering its progress’. “I think Kashmir Loom and Jenny’s intervention inspired many Kashmiri artisans into doing things in a much more professional way,” Ali says, adding, “And it showed them that when you sincerely invest in quality and innovation, while staying true to the aesthetics, you get better craftsmanship, and are then able to present it to a global audience.”

Now, 25 years since its founding, Kashmir Loom has made real progress towards sustaining the survival and continuance of this handicraft industry. “It’s why we chose to work with them,” says Pavitra Rajaram, design director at Nilaya Anthology. “We wanted to work with makers who were not only creating a stunning product, but were also very committed to Srinagar and Kashmir,” she adds.

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Source Material

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Though pashmina wool is believed to have also been discovered at Bronze age archaeological sites, the art that is its weaving reached its apex in the Mughal era, particularly under the arts-loving Akbar. The Mughal emperor’s patronage of this fabric solidified its status as an item of luxury and high artistry, and its limited availability made it highly sought after by kings, nobles, and foreign aristocrats alike.

But pashmina as a fabric exists only because of a concatenation of the most fortuitous circumstances. The region’s surrounding high mountains are the grazing ground of the Changthangi goats. Its plunging winter temperatures are what cause this goat to grow a fine, highly insulating undercoat, the fibres of which have a diameter between 12.5-14 microns. Because of its fineness, the fibres are combed, cleaned, and spun by hand into yarn. The starkness of these mountains makes for little arable land, and come summer, the nomadic herders of the Changthangi goats come down to the valley and trade the yarn hanks for grain. Pashmina is the product of an entire ecosystem, and if even one of these factors were out of place, it would cease to exist.

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Weaving Magic

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For the Kashmiri artisans who work with this wool, the feather-light fabrics they create carry not just colour and pattern, but entire cultural legacies. “The people who traditionally entered these lines of work came from a very spiritual culture,” Ali says. “For them, the work was prayer.” Ali grew up in Zadibal, Srinagar, which back then was home to many artisans’ workshops, and he remembers the reverence with which their workplaces were treated. “The craftsmen would perform wazu [ritual ablutions] before entering. They would then clean the spaces and burn isband [a fragrant Kashmiri incense, believed to be auspicious and antiseptic] before they started work for the day.” He also remembers hearing, as he walked past the workshops, snatches of Kashmiri sufi songs, Quranic verses being recited, and the chanting of the talim (instruction codes) that told the weavers which threads to pass across the fabric to create a flower, a leaf, a moon, a star. 

For Nilaya Anthology, Kashmir Loom focused on two main pashmina traditions: one centred on a specialised weaving technique, and two on embroidery. The weaving technique, known as kani, is one of the oldest, and most complex methods of hand-weaving in the world. It gets its name both from the village where it is believed to have originated—Kanihama—as well as the slim wooden bobbins, locally known as kani, used to guide the coloured weft threads through the yarns on the loom. It takes lifetimes of learning to coax magic out of ordinary materials, and kani weaving, the knowledge of which is handed down from generation to generation, is an embodiment of this magic.  “It's not simply weaving fabric,” Ali says, adding, “These are extraordinary people, who use this labour intensive process to create artistic expressions in fabric.”

The embroidery techniques Kashmir Loom focused on for Nilaya Anthology are sozni, and aari. Sozni, the word and the technique, were both brought over to the Subcontinent from Persia, where the word sozan refers to the humble needle. Aari is a type of crewel embroidery that uses a chain stitch and a crochet hook, locally known as an aari. What is common to both techniques though, is that through these fine tools, for generations now, Kashmiri artisans have told the stories of their land. “ When you do this kind of embroidery, you pour yourself into its creation, and it becomes a form of meditation in itself,” Ali says.

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Crafting the Present

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Rajaram points out how, because pashmina fabrics were traditionally created for clothing, the motifs and patterns have been rescaled for home products. But because this fabric captures both history and the fleeting wonders of nature into a tangible present, in running your fingers over pashmina, you are in effect, reaching across place and time. At your fingertips is the ancient silver thread of the Jhelum River interwoven with the warmth of hands that themselves reach back centuries. Hands, that over generations, have gently carded wool from fleece; spun it into gossamer; worked ancestral wooden looms to weave it into fabric; and, with strands of coloured silk thread, embroidered entire histories onto it.

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At its most basic, pashmina is warmth; at its best, it is an invitation to marvel at the beauty humans can create when the act of creation is itself considered prayer.

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