Shawl
Workshop director Emile-Frédéric Hébert French, active 1851–1867
Early nineteenth-century European fashionable ladies belatedly joined a global appreciation of Kashmiri shawls, for centuries already exported from the Indian Subcontinent to Persia, China, Egypt and Russia.
By the 1810s, Scottish weavers in Paisley– near Glasgow– and Edinburgh competed with their English counterparts in Norwich to develop more affordable wool-silk blends for the U.S. and domestic markets imitating the incredible softness of the Kashmiri originals' Himalayan mountain goats' hair. From the 1820s, the French developed Jacquard looms to enable ever-more-detailed patterns emulating the richness of Asian design. This splendid example, conspicuously signed with the Hébert family's "H Cachemire Pur" mark, made at the zenith of such shawls' popularity, is over 11 feet long, large enough to wear, elaborately folded, over the bulky expanse of a Victorian crinoline skirt.
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