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The wearing of shawls in early 19th-century France.

Shawl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The wearing of shawls in early 19th-century France.

A shawl (Persian: شال, Shāl, from Sanskrit: साडी śāṭī[1]) is a simple item of clothing, loosely worn over the shoulders, upper body and arms, and sometimes also over the head. It is usually a rectangular or square piece of cloth, that is often folded to make a triangle but can also be triangular in shape. Other shapes include oblong shawls.

  History

Kashmir Textiles-Shawls, Namdas, Gubbas

Kashmir, India's northern most state was the gateway into India. Kashmir was a pivotal point through which the wealth, knowledge, and products of ancient India passed to the world perhaps the most widely known woven textiles are the famed Kashmir shawls. The Kanikar, for instance, has intricately woven designs that are formalized imitations of Nature. The Chenar leaf (plane tree leaf), apple and cherry blossoms, the rose and tulip, the almond and pear, the nightingale, they are done in deep mellow tones of maroon, dark red, gold yellow and browns. Yet another type of Kashmir shawl is the Jamiavr, which is a brocaded woolen fabric sometimes in pure wool and sometimes with a little cotton added. The floral designing appears like heavy close embroidery-like weave in dull silk or soft pashmina wool, and usually comprises small or large flowers delicately sprayed and combined; some shawls have net-like patterns with floral ensemble motifs in them. Still another type of Kashmir shawl is the Dourukha, a woven shawl that is so done as to produce the same effect on both sides. This is a unique piece of craftsmanship, in which a multi-coloured pattern scheme is woven all over the surface, and after the shawl is completed, the Rafugar or expert embroiderer works the outlines of the motifs in darker shades to bring into relief the beauty of design. This attractive mode of craftsmanship not only produces a shawl, which is reversible because of the perfect workmanship on both sides, but it combines the crafts of both weave and embroidery.
The most expensive shawls, called Shatoosh, are made from the beard hairs of the wild Ibex and are so fine that a whole shawl can be pulled through a small finger ring.
The Persian device, naksha, like the Jacquard loom invented centuries later, enabled Indian weavers to create sinuous floral patterns and creeper designs in brocade to rival any painted by a brush. The Kashmir shawl that evolved from this expertise, in its heyday had greater fame than any other Indian textile. Always a luxury commodity, the intricate, tapestry-woven, fine wool shawl had become a fashionable wrap for the ladies of the English and French elite by the 18th century. The supply fell short of demand and manufacturers pressed to produce more, created convincing embroidered versions of the woven shawls that could be produced in half the time. As early as 1803 Kashmiri needlework production was established to increase and hasten output of these shawls, which had been imitated in England since 1784 and even in France. By 1870, the advent of the Jacquard loom in Europe destroyed the exclusivity of the original Kashmir shawl, which began to be produced in Paisley, England. Even the characteristic Kashmiri motif, the mango-shaped, began to be known simply as the paisley.
The paisley motif is so ubiquitous to Indian fabrics that it is hard to imagine that it is only about 250 years old. It evolved from l7th- century floral and tree-of-life designs that were created in expensive, tapestry-woven Mughal textiles. Early designs depicted single plants with large flowers and thin wavy stems, small leaves and roots. As the designs became denser over time, more flowers and leaves were compacted within the shape of the tree, or issuing from vases or a pair of leaves. By the late 18th century, the archetypal curved point at the top of an elliptical outline had evolved. The elaborate paisley created on Kashmir shawls became the vogue in Europe for over a century, and it was imitations of these shawls woven in factories at Paisley, Scotland, that gave it the name paisley still commonly used in the United States and Europe. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the paisley became an important motif in a wide range of Indian textiles, perhaps because it was associated with the Mughal court. It also caught the attention of poorer and non-Muslim Indians because it resembles a mango. Rural Indians called an aam or mango, a symbol of fertility.



The first shawls, or "shals", were used in Assyrian times, later it went into wide spread in the Middle East. Shawls were also part of the traditional male costume in Kashmir, which was probably introduced via assimilation to Persian culture. They were woven in extremely fine woollen twill, some such as the Orenberg shawl, were even said to be so fine as to fit through a ring. They could be in one colour only, woven in different colours (called tilikar), ornately woven or embroidered (called ameli).

Hesquiat woman wrapped in a shaw

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