Kashmir Shawls on View at The Textile Museum

In Kashmir, an area at the foot of the Indian Himalayas, weavers produced a garment of supreme quality – the Kashmir shawl. This fall, The Textile Museum exhibition “A Garden of Shawls: The Buta and Its Seeds” will trace the development of the design vocabulary of Kashmir shawls through the buta, a shape known in the West as a paisley. The exhibition will be on view October 1, 2004 – March 6, 2005. Art historian Eunice Dauterman Maguire, Curator of the Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Collection, is guest curator for the exhibition. All of the objects in “A Garden of Shawls” come from The Textile Museum’s collections.

Originally worn by rich and noble men, Kashmir shawls were made under imperial patronage and often presented to foreign dignitaries. As the shawls came West, they became a woman’s fashion, and 19th-century European textile manufacturers imitated their designs using industrial looms. A center of shawl production in Paisley, Scotland lent its name to the Kashmir shawl pattern. Prompted by the European traders, Kashmiri weavers and embroiderers incorporated European designs into their handmade shawls.

Centuries before the buta design decorated Kashmir shawls, stylized representations of leaves, trees and flowers were exchanged between textiles of Asia and the Mediterranean. Floral representations ador

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