Srinagar, the 15th century. Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin invites Persian weavers into the valley, and a craft takes root that will outlast empires.
A hundred years on, the Mughals take notice — Akbar above all — and the shawl leaves the workshop for the court: gifted between emperors, worn by nobility from Delhi to Isfahan, its motifs slowly absorbing the floral language of Mughal art that still surfaces in Cachemire pieces today.
By the 19th century, those same shawls reach Napoleon's Paris, prized above almost anything else arriving from the East.
One motif travelled furthest of all: the buta — a teardrop shape drawn from the leaves of the Chinar tree, native only to these valleys. Europe gave it another name: paisley, after the Scottish town that mass-produced its imitation, and fashion houses have carried it ever since, often without knowing where it began. It is one of the oldest motifs to come out of these valleys — a leaf that came before the word paisley ever existed.
Five hundred years later, Srinagar remains the only place on earth where this exact combination — fibre, hand-spinning, weaving technique — survives intact. Cachemire works directly with artisans there. No intermediaries. No factories that moved the craft elsewhere in the name of scale.
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