Atelier · Our story
A small house, kept by a few hands.
We are an atelier of Kashmiri textiles, working out of a wooden house in Srinagar and a few smaller workshops across the valley.
Folio i
How the house began
Al Yaqoob is named after a great-grandfather who kept a small shawl-trading shop in the old city of Srinagar. The shop closed in the nineteen-eighties, the way a great many old houses did. We opened the ledger again in 2018 with a single kani weaver and a single sozni embroiderer, on the understanding that we would never grow faster than the craft itself.
Folio ii
How we work
We do not run a factory. We do not own the looms. The artisans we work with own their looms and their time. We commission pieces from them — sometimes specifying a pattern, more often asking them to choose — and we pay against the work, not against an order. A piece takes as long as it takes, and we wait.
We do not believe in “collections” in the fashion sense. We do not release a new season every quarter. The pieces appear in the ledger as they are finished — sometimes in clusters, sometimes one a month, sometimes none for six weeks. The ledger is the calendar.
Folio iii · A short set of principles
What we will and will not do
- 01.
We work only with named hands.
Every piece carries the name of the artisan who finished it, on the ledger entry and on a small linen tag stitched into the corner. We do not anonymise anyone’s labour.
- 02.
We pay artisans before the piece sells.
The artisan’s livelihood does not depend on whether the piece moves quickly. When we accept a piece into the atelier, we have already paid for it.
- 03.
We do not sell anything power-loomed.
Everything in the ledger is hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-finished. The yarn is pashm from Changthang, the dyes are natural, the embroidery is by needle.
- 04.
We do not pretend to be larger than we are.
If we have eight pieces this month, the ledger has eight entries this month. We will not invent stock to fill a page.
- 05.
We will not hurry the work.
A kani shawl takes a year, sometimes two. A sozni jaal can take longer. We have, on occasion, returned a deposit because the piece took an extra six months and we did not wish to apologise for the wait.
Come and see, if you can.
The atelier is at our family home in Srinagar. We are happy to host you by appointment. There is a kani loom set up in the front room, tea on the stove, and several pieces in progress.
ہاتھ کا کام، ہاتھ ہی جانے
“Only the hand knows the hand’s work.”