Shawl, designed by Deneirouse and Boisglavy

In the textile field, there is a kind of assumption that handmade is better. This shawl was thought to be a hand-woven Indian shawl when it was acquired. It’s woven in a technique called twill tapestry and the shawls that were made in the Kashmir region of India were hand-woven in that technique. It’s a very slow process. The first thing that one notices is the extraordinary size. It’s more than twelve feet long and it’s just about five feet wide. The design of this shawl combines the traditional Indian paisley with these beautifully drawn, naturalistic European garden flowers. There are tulips, roses, carnations, irises, hydrangea, and they form this sort of dense garden that weaves in and out of the paisley shapes. The flowers appear just past their prime; they’re fully open and the petals look like they’re just about to start to fall off. Little details add to a heightened sense of realism. On one of the peony flowers, there is a tiny little insect on one petal, and there are five drops of water. Each end of the shawl is finished with what’s called a harlequin border, where there are rectangles of different colors. The shawl in the nineteenth century was really a very important accessory for fashionable women. And it would have been worn over a woman’s shoulders. The shawl expert who introduced me to the piece started to explain to me who had actually made it. It was indeed not a hand-woven Indian production, it was actually a French, mechanically woven production. And for a moment, I felt a sense of disappointment that this wasn’t actually a hand-woven object. I realized that I was harboring this prejudice, when in fact the technological advances that were required to create this shawl were actually extremely impressive. The whole shawl is really a masterpiece: it’s technologically advanced, it’s beautifully designed, it’s meeting a need in the market. It forced me to revise my assumptions about the relationship between technology and good design.