Kashmir shawl

Kashmir shawl , circa 1870

Where object was made: Kashmir or Punjab, India or Pakistan

Material/technique: wool; cashmere; embroidering; silk thread; twill tapestry

Dimensions:
Object Length/Width (Length x Width): 210 x 205 cm including fringe
Object Length/Width (Length x Width): 81 x 83 in

Credit line: William Bridges Thayer Memorial

Accession number: 1928.0971

Not on display

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Label texts

Civic Leader and Art Collector: Sallie Casey Thayer and an Art Museum for KU

Visually this shawl presents a well-defined and unified composition.
Technically, however, it is a jigsaw of more than 200 small, oddshaped bits, pieced together into a coherent whole by a rafugar, or skilled needleworker.
This construction method can be traced primarily to European demand for quick responses to continental fashion trends. A single weaver required as much as two years to complete a complex shawl, much too long for a rapidly changing fashion market. Dozens of weavers, however, each producing long, narrow bands of discrete motifs on a plain background, could produce enough patterned material for a large shawl quickly. A rafugar, working from designs supplied by French or Kashmiri designers, cut the motifs from the strips and pieced them together, using a needle to create a complex, coherent design.
This large, square shawl was designed to be worn folded in half and draped about the shoulders to display its intricate swirling buta, or bent-tipped cone motifs and colorful pieced-cloth borders.

Exhibition Label:
“Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art,” Nov-2005, Mary Dusenbury
Visually this shawl presents a well-defined and unified composition. Technically, however, it is a jigsaw of more than two hundred small, odd-shaped bits, pieced together into a coherent whole by a skilled needleworker (rafugar).
This strange and inefficient construction method can be traced primarily to European demand for quick responses to continental fashion trends. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shawls were typically woven in pairs by two weavers working together. With this method, a complex shawl required eighteen months to complete, much too long for a rapidly changing fashion market. Dozens of weavers, however, each producing long, narrow bands of isolated motifs on a plain ground, could produce enough patterned material for a large shawl fairly quickly. A rafugar, working from designs supplied, ultimately, by French or Kashmiri designers, cut the motifs from the strips and pieced them together, using his needle to create a complex, coherent design from a heap of discrete motifs.