Reading 21 2

‘mysterious and unchanging East,’“ whatever nineteenth-century year they
were removed from the loom (Irwin 1955, 14). 21 [End Page 41]
From the 1880s until World War I, wealthy European and Euro-American
women learned to drape their Kashmiri shawls over their pianos instead of
their own shoulders. This high period of “Indian style” for British home
decoration was part of late-Victorian eclecticism. Even as the manufacturers
of European machine-made textiles tried to improve their designs, the British
design reform, the Aesthetic, and the Arts and Crafts movements all
emphasized in one way or another differentiating between the machine-made
and the hand-crafted. By the late nineteenth century, the overall influence of
these movements had transformed the political economy of taste in Britain
and the United States. Using Kashmiri shawls as curtains or furniture covers
attracted consumers whose tastes had been educated to appreciate the
aesthetic superiority of artisan-made textiles in contrast to the aesthetic
inferiority of the machine-made (Greenhalgh 1997, 105). It was no coincidence
that the hand embroidery on Kashmiri shawls seemed to have made them
desirable for interior decoration at the same historical moment that machinestitched
embroidery replaced hand embroidery in British textile
manufacturing (Parker 1989, 178).
Thus, Kashmiri shawls could be represented as quite different types of
commodities, from wraps that made women look like princesses to draperies
for the piano, depending upon the fashion of the moment. In the early
nineteenth century, representations of Kashmiri shawls were independent of
their mode of production because European imitative shawls were also handwoven.
Shawls from Kashmir were then valued for their lightweight warmth,
their attractive exoticism, and the exceptional sensual pleasures of wearing
them. European mass-produced textiles were never able to compete
successfully with Kashmiri shawls as far as the sensual characteristics of the
fabric were concerned, and they were far too expensive for all but the very
well off. European-made shawls, however, did come to offer design
distinction through the appropriation and modification of Kashmiri designs
to suit European and Euro-American tastes, and this distinction was available
at middle-range and inexpensive prices. Asian commodities like Kashmiri
shawls became key objects for late-nineteenth-century aesthetic
pronouncements by “taste professionals” who then preferred hand-crafted
[End Page 42] textiles and other handicrafts in contrast to machine-made
products of all kinds (see Auslander 1996 a for “taste professionals” in France
and Greenhalgh 1997). Tracing the European development of an aesthetic
taste for the hand-crafted instead of the machine-made requires separate
treatment and can only be suggested here.
Used by permission for Bridging World History, 12
The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004