In the late eighteenth century the traditional British silk industry was in decline as plain, informal clothes of cotton and wool were increasingly worn by people at all levels of society. Spitalfields in London was long-established as the centre for high status, fashionable silks, while industries were developing in Paisley, Manchester and the north Midlands for the production of cheaper silks, handkerchiefs and ribbons. The fashion for richly coloured, luxurious shawls, imported from the 1780s from Kashmir, India, and made from the hair of the pashmina goat, brought a last minute reprieve for the Spitalfields weavers. Inspired by the popularity of Kashmir shawls, they adapted their repertoire of designs for dress fabrics to follow the basic layout of a shawl, providing slightly more accessible, silk alternatives to the costly originals from Kashmir.

This example shows an early stage in the development of the Spitalfields shawl, with its deep end- borders of a simple floral motif, imitating the small repeated ‘buta’ or ‘pines’ found on shawls imported from India. These London-made shawls fell out of fashion by 1820, seen as less desirable than the Indian originals, or the versions more closely imitating the Indian styles made in Norwich, Edinburgh, or Paris.