A Passion for Pashminas

There’s a gold rush on to buy and sell fashion’s latest status symbol, a silky-soft shawl called a pashmina. But when the dust settles from the stampede, some consumers may find they’ve discovered fool’s gold.

Pashmina, experts agree, is a kind of cashmere that takes its name from the Persian word for wool. But many of the shawls flooding store shelves, Web sites and being sold out of homes and hotel rooms may not be the rare, ultra-high quality item that the marketing hype promises. Worse, similar-looking shawls wrapping the shoulders of the country’s wealthiest women may be derived from the coats of endangered antelope species.

Pashmina shawls, which can cost hundreds of dollars, have become the luxury wrap of the late ‘90s. Celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek and Neve Campbell, along with socialites such as Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece and her sister Alexandra Von Furstenberg, have been wearing them for about two years. High-fashion designers such as Donna Karan, Carolina Herrera and Valentino have offered varieties of the luxe cashmere fabric in their collections as well.

Now the shawls are available in stores as diverse as Bloomingdale’s and a Hare Krishna temple gift shop at prices ranging from $150 to $250.

Los Angeles artist Diana Roque Ellis bought her pashmina shawl from a friend selling them from her home. With the pale blue shawl warming her at a chilly outdoor party, Ellis explained that “all the clothes designed these days are sleeveless. If you have the slightest degree of self-consciousness about your arms, you want to cover up. And it’s politically correct,” she said, adding no animals have to be killed for pashmina.

“It’s become sort of the rage,” said Julie Albert, manager of the Savannah boutique in Santa Monica, which will carry a new line of pricey pashmina shawls and bags designed by actress Ali MacGraw. The gauzy pashmina shawls have even attracted a fair number of male fans, who fold them into mufflers.

The Word ‘Pashmina’ Has Two Meanings

As the shawls grow in popularity, so does confusion about what, exactly, pashmina is. The term “pashmina” has entered the vernacular and has come to mean both the downy undercoat of a goat and the lightweight shawl made from it. In 1999 fashion lingo, a standard pashmina is a lightweight, fringed cashmere-silk blend available in hundreds of colors. Adding to the confusion: Some aren’t labeled in accordance with Federal Trade Commission rules that require disclosures about fiber content and country of origin.

Pashmina marketing often implies that the fiber is more extraordinary than cashmere. With record low prices, cashmere has trickled down to less prestigious stores such as Target and Banana Republic, tarnishing cashmere’s once-exclusive reputation. Enter pashmina. Many pashmina sellers were all too willing to say the fiber is culled from the underbelly of a special goat living in the frosty altitudes above India, Pakistan and Nepal. But textile experts say that pashmina isn’t necessarily rarer or softer than any other kind of cashmere.

In textile dictionaries, the term “cashmere shawl” and “pashmina” are synonymous. The shawl has been made since ancient times and the shawl is presumed to have originated in the Kashmir region of India, said Jelena Andjelkovic, a textile specialist at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise in Los Angeles.

All cashmere, not just from India, is combed from the coat of a domesticated capra hircus goat, which produces only about 4 ounces each season. And pashmina isn’t necessarily rarer or softer than any other cashmere, according to Richard Forte, president of Dawson-Forte Cashmere Co. in Massachusetts, a large cashmere manufacturer. Many of the pashmina shawls are woven with silk to provide sheen and to reinforce what can be a weak yarn, Forte said.

“For many years, pashmina was the name for the cashmere fiber that was produced in India,” said Karl Spilhaus, president of the Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute, a trade association. “The way pashmina is being used now is misleading,” he said. “Some people think it describes a blend of cashmere and silk. That’s not correct. Other people think it is a substitute term for cashmere. Legally, it’s not.”

The FTC requires that all cashmere, no matter the country of origin, be labeled as cashmere. The word “pashmina” by itself does not satisfy the regulations, an FTC source said. Some shawls, however, are appearing in high-end stores with 100% pashmina or pashmina-and-silk labels and hangtags declaring the so-called special features of the fiber.

Socialites Subpoenaed Over Their Shawls

Fashion’s continuing luxury fiber craze is contributing to pashmina lore. Whatever its murky history, pashmina shawls have become the preferred--and legal--substitutes for the truly exotic but banned shahtoosh shawls, allegedly purchased by model Christie Brinkley, mountain climber socialite Sandy Hill Pittman, New York socialites Blaine Trumpand Nan Kempner and other wealthy women. Shahtoosh has been banned under international law since 1975 because endangered Tibetan antelopes called the chiru are slaughtered for their fine hair, reportedly the finest wool in the world. The shawls, which reportedly cost from $1,400 to $15,000, are said to be so thin that they can pass through a man’s ring, hence the moniker, “ring shawls.” According to recent news reports, a federal grand jury in New York this summer subpoenaed the women and ordered them to hand over their contraband shahtoosh shawls.

To help stop the demand for shahtoosh, in 1995 the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, sent letters to about 100 retail outlets asking them not to sell the shawls.

“Apparently you could still find shahtoosh on certain Manhattan store shelves,” said Stephen Sautner, a spokesman for the society. “It was sold openly. It was sold with people saying it was harvested by nomads who plucked it from the bushes when the animals shed it once a year. I think a lot of people bought it because they felt good about it--that they were keeping people employed. But in fact, they were wiping out an antelope population.”

Pashmina became the substitute for shahtoosh, but the confusion didn’t end.

“The terms are used so loosely,” said Dale Gluckman, curator of costumes and textiles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “That’s the problem, what’s pashmina versus cashmere versus shahtoosh.”.

To meet fashion’s pashmina infatuation, Sergio Loro Piana, managing director of Italy’s Loro Piana, the world’s largest cashmere manufacturer, said some of the companies that are selling what they call pashmina are actually buying cashmere and silk yarns from his company and labeling it pashmina in the final product.

“These misconceptions about pashmina are no different than the ones about cashmere,” said Boris Shlomm, president of Amicale Industries, a top New York-based cashmere manufacturer. “Every exotic item gets hyped.

“What is selling the garment is color. They are dyed in a whole gamut of colors that didn’t exist before. That’s what is creating the consumer excitement,” Shlomm said. The shawls are often hand-woven and hand-dyed in small batches, which allows the creators to offer many distinct colors. Indeed, Govinda’s International Imports, a gift shop associated with the Hare Krishna Temple of Los Angeles, offers a variety of shawl sizes in nearly 500 colors, all dyed in India.

The silk and cashmere blend shawls now hitting mainstream stores are a new textile design from India, said Shlomm. They have been a hit because of their lighter weight and distinctive, knotted silk fringe.

Pashmina shawls are arriving in many levels of quality. Consumers may be hard-pressed to judge the worthiness of each shawl unless they know how to detect weave patterns, yarn types, fiber blends and perhaps even dye ingredients. All that’s left for most shoppers is the sense of touch and the warning: Buyer beware.

Are Consumers Paying a Premium for Hype?

Some American cashmere manufacturers say the Indian cashmere can be inferior to the cashmere produced by the world’s largest suppliers, China, Mongolia and Tibet.

“It’s all much ado about nothing,” said Forte, of the Dawson-Forte company. “The way you make a pashmina shawl, you take a cashmere shawl, you double the price and change the label,” said the third-generation cashmere importer. That’s not to say a pashmina shawl is junk. He says consumers may be paying a premium for pashmina’s hype, however.

“It’s not a bad scarf, but it’s not a good value,” he said. (Ironically, cashmere prices are at a historic low but are expected to nearly double next year as demand from Japan and other cashmere consuming countries rises.)

“Pashmina [Indian cashmere] has always been an inferior cashmere. The shawls made out of cashmere and blended with silk are nice articles. And there is a panache to the fact that they are handmade in the Kashmir region,” Forte said. “But there isn’t enough of it to be commercially viable,” he said, noting India’s comparatively small fiber output. “It certainly isn’t supporting this current trend,” Forte said.

The quest for pashmina has welcomed newcomers such as MacGraw and Alia Khan, a former broadcast news reporter who is selling pashmina stoles and shawls wholesale on her Web site, https://www.aliastyle.com.

Khan recalls seeing pashmina shawls in her Pakistani grandmother’s dowry.

“In the Eastern nobility, it was passed down like jewelry. The women would save it for their daughters,” she said. Khan is updating the shawls with Westernized embroidery designs that she calls “Indian fusion.”

MacGraw and her business partner, Veena Advani, created the company Ali MacGraw Milagro to re-create some of the exotic ethnic and antique textiles the actress has collected on her travels, many of which were to India. Their first collection, due in stores in November, features intricate embroidery in pure gold or silver thread on shawls and bags.

The cashmere shawl, however, has often had a controversial place in history. In the early 19th century, fashion adopted skimpy muslin dresses and women wore them with scandalous aplomb.

“The women would spritz themselves with water to make the dresses cling,” explained Gluckman of LACMA, “so they needed a shawl to keep warm.”

Valli Herman-Cohen can be reached by e-mail at valli.herman-cohen@latimes.com.