In a workshop three narrow streets back from the Jhelum river, a shawl takes three months to make. That number hasn’t changed in a generation, even as almost everything around it has.
The wool arrives first, combed by hand from Changthangi goats reared at altitudes most machines can’t reach. It’s spun on a wooden yinder before it ever touches a loom — a step that alone can take two weeks for a single shawl’s worth of yarn.
Why the time never shortens
Ask any weaver here why the process hasn’t been mechanised, and the answer is rarely sentimental. Machine-spun pashmina breaks the fibre’s natural crimp, producing a flatter, less insulating cloth. The slowness isn’t tradition for its own sake — it’s the only method that actually produces the material people are paying for.
What has changed is who the weavers sell to. A generation ago, almost all of this work moved through middlemen who paid a fraction of its retail value. Cooperatives like House of Cashmere, founded in 2011, exist specifically to close that gap — connecting the loom directly to the customer, certificate and all.
