Hand-Loomed Kashmiri Tweed Jacket — Chinar Fleck

What hand-loomed Kashmiri tweed actually is

The cloth comes off pit-treadle hand looms in Anantnag, where a weaver lays down about three metres in a working day. It is 100% wool in a 2/2 twill at 480 GSM, and the fleck is not a printed effect or a slub added at the end: the fibre is dyed loose in chinar rust and walnut, then blended and spun, so the colour lives inside the yarn. From across a room it reads as one brown. Held to a window you can count four or five shades in it.

The cloth is milled and decatised at the finisher before anything is cut, which is why it will not move on you later. The jacket is then made up in our own Srinagar workroom, and the front is half-canvassed — a horsehair chest piece pad-stitched to the cloth by hand, with no fusible interlining anywhere in the garment. That is the reason the lapel rolls instead of bubbling after two winters of Srinagar damp, and it is the part of a jacket a customer never sees and always feels.

Shoulders are unstructured, no pad, with a 5 mm sleevehead roll so the sleeve sits rather than stands. Ten centimetres of chest ease over your measurement, two patch pockets and a patch chest pocket, half lining in cupro across the back with the sleeves lined through, and four working horn buttons on each cuff.

How it wears over a season

Expect the twill to bloom in the first month as the weave fills in, and to fuzz a little at the cuff and pocket mouths by the second winter. There is enough lanolin left in the finish to shed ten minutes of drizzle, which is not the same thing as a rain jacket. In the valley it covers October to the end of March; in Delhi and the plains it is a November to February jacket.

• 480 GSM pure wool, 2/2 twill, hand-loomed in Anantnag
• Fleck dyed in the fleece — the colour is in the yarn, not on it
• Half-canvassed front, hand pad-stitched horsehair chest piece, no fusing
• Soft unstructured shoulder, half lining, four working horn buttons per cuff
• Cloth milled and decatised before cutting, so it does not shrink
• Free alterations at our Srinagar shop

More on the cloth in the journal: telling hand-loomed tweed from a blend, and the weavers we buy from.

How to care for a hand-loomed tweed jacket

Brush it down after wearing, hang it on a wide hanger overnight, and dry clean it once at the end of the season. That is the short version; everything below is the long one.

• A stiff clothes brush, used down the cloth after every few wearings, does more for tweed than cleaning does. It lifts the dust out of the twill before the dust starts cutting the fibre.
• Dry clean once at the end of the season and no more often. Solvent strips the lanolin that makes the cloth shed water, and it flattens the nap the finisher raised.
• Hang it overnight on a wide hanger so the shoulder and the chest piece recover their shape. A wire hanger will put a point in the shoulder in one winter.
• Never put it away damp, and never seal it in plastic over summer. A cotton bag with a cedar block is what wool needs; plastic holds moisture against the cloth and moths follow.
• A frayed cuff or a lost horn button is repairable. Send a photograph to our care desk and we will mend it in the Srinagar workroom.

Looked after this way a half-canvassed tweed jacket is a fifteen-winter garment. Most of the ones we see for repair have been handed down rather than replaced.

Shipping and returns for this jacket

Free insured courier, dispatched from Srinagar within 2 to 3 working days, and a 7-day return window from delivery on an unworn jacket with the tags attached. Between December and February the Srinagar–Jammu highway can close for a day or two in snow and add that much to transit.

Once we have altered a sleeve or a seam for you the jacket can no longer be returned, so try the unaltered size first. Full detail lives on the shipping page and the returns page; you can follow a dispatched parcel from order tracking.