The Changthangi goat lives on the Changthang plateau in what is now the Ladakh region of northern India and the adjacent parts of Tibet, at altitudes above 4,000 metres. At that height, winter temperatures routinely drop below minus thirty degrees Celsius. The goat survives by growing two coats: a coarse outer guard hair and, beneath it, an extraordinarily fine undercoat — with individual fibres averaging around fourteen to sixteen microns in diameter, compared to roughly seventy for a typical sheep’s wool. This undercoat is combed out each spring. Spun and woven, it produces a fabric of remarkable softness, warmth, and lightness.
The craft of working this fibre has been centred in the Kashmir Valley, a few hundred kilometres south of the plateau, for at least five hundred years. Kashmiri weavers developed techniques of extraordinary refinement, particularly for the characteristic patterned shawls — known as kani shawls, after the small wooden bobbins used to carry the coloured threads — which were woven rather than embroidered and could take a skilled weaver more than a year to complete. These shawls were luxury goods in the most literal sense: objects whose value was inseparable from the time, skill, and rarity of material required to make them.
Napoleon’s Shawl
Kashmiri shawls entered European consciousness through an unlikely route: military conquest. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798 brought quantities of Eastern textiles back to Paris as trophies and trade goods. The Empress Joséphine became an early and enthusiastic collector of Kashmiri shawls, wearing them draped over the high-waisted, thin-fabric dresses that were fashionable at the time — a practical solution to the problem of Neoclassical fashion in a Parisian winter, as well as a statement of exotic wealth. She is said to have owned hundreds.
The resulting European craze for Kashmiri shawls quickly ran into the usual obstacle: the originals were expensive beyond most purses, and demand outpaced supply. Weavers in Edinburgh, Paisley, and Norwich began producing imitations in local wool, eventually developing the distinctively curved teardrop or pine-cone motif — the buta or boteh pattern — into the decorative vocabulary now universally known as ‘paisley’, after the Scottish town that became most associated with its production. The Paisley pattern is, in origin, a Scottish industrial interpretation of a Kashmiri design derived from Mughal court aesthetic. Textiles have always travelled further than the people who made them.
Modern Cashmere
The 20th century democratised cashmere considerably. Increased production from Mongolia and China — where different breeds of the same goat species are raised at vast scale — brought the price of cashmere fibre down substantially. A cashmere jumper that would once have represented a serious luxury purchase can now be found in high-street chainstore sales. This is not an unqualified good: lower prices have been achieved partly by using shorter, coarser fibres (within the cashmere grade threshold) and partly through environmental pressure on the Mongolian steppe, where overgrazing by cashmere goats has contributed to desertification.
The original Kashmiri craft, meanwhile, persists at the luxury end of the market, its products priced to reflect the skill and time they require. A handwoven kani shawl, made to order by a master weaver in Srinagar, might take eighteen months to complete and cost more than a small car. It represents one end of a very long spectrum that now runs from that plateau pasture through the global supply chain to a discount rail in a suburban shopping centre. Both ends of the spectrum are, in their different ways, dealing in the same fibre. What has changed is everything else around it.