Few objects in the V&A's collection are quite as astonishing as the Srinagar Map — a luxurious goats wool shawl embroidered for Queen Victoria in around 1870, chronicling the streets, houses, mosques and waterways of Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, in minute detail across its 250 x 160cm surface. Thought to have taken 30 years to complete, it is considered one of the most valuable textiles in the world.
Lewis & Wood chose this extraordinary object to anchor their 30th anniversary collection. The Srinagar Map reinterprets the shawl in five designs — The Map Maxi and The Map Mini at life-size and quarter-scale respectively, alongside Asha Stripe, Ravi Ribbon and Utopia — each one adding and subtracting visual information to explore different aspects of the original in a range of considered colourways. The result is a collection that carries genuine cultural weight, printed in-house at Lewis & Wood's Gloucestershire mill with the craft and precision the source material deserves.
