On my way back from a recent trip to Scotland, I stopped in Paisley near Glasgow to visit its Museum which features a permanent exhibition on what the town is most famous for – shawl weaving. The well known Paisley pattern was named after the small town near Glasgow that adopted the tradition of weaving Paisley Pashmina shawls, providing a cheaper version of the shawls being brought from Kashmir by the East India Company and later by soldiers returning from the colony. Manufacturers caught on to the huge popularity in Britain. Paisley was not the first to start weaving these shawls, Norwich was the first to produce the shawls followed…
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Global Textiles – Kashmir and Paisley shawls
The recent exhibition at ULITA (University of Leads International Textile Archive) displayed and documented the Kashmir and Paisley shawls collected by Sir Michael Sadler, who was vice-chancellor at the University of Leeds from 1911 to 1923 and a champion of the Arts. Another Stories of the World exhibition as part of the Cultural Olympiad – At Home with the World, at the Geffyre Museum in London, illustrates and documents the British admiration for objects and artefacts from all over the world. While many museums including the V&A, the Ashmolean and the Whitworth (as I mentioned in my previous post about the Cotton exhibition) have documented objects and textiles of world…