A Scottish mill town gave its name to a Kashmiri teardrop design
The curling teardrop known across the Western world as Paisley originated in Kashmir and was woven in several European countries. Yet Paisley, a weaving town just west of Glasgow, turned out so many imitation cashmere shawls that its name stuck to the motif. A young Queen Victoria wearing one helped make the fashion.
Paisley grew around religion before industry. The Irish monk Saint Mirin is said to have founded a chapel beside a waterfall on the White Cart Water, and a priory set up in 1163 was raised to an abbey in 1245. King Robert III was buried there, and the tomb of Princess Marjorie Bruce, ancestor of the Stewarts, is among the few Scottish royal monuments to have survived the Reformation.
Textiles transformed it in the late 18th century. Silk work gave way around 1790 to shawls, and under Thomas Coats the town became the world centre of thread making. Its weavers were literate, skilled and restless, joining the failed Radical War that ended in 1820 and prompting Benjamin Disraeli's warning to keep an eye on the place. Sma' Shot Day, begun in 1856 and held on the first Saturday of July, commemorates a pay dispute over a fine hidden thread that held cloth together. Hardship came in waves: in the crisis of 1841 to 1843, 67 of 112 mill owners went bankrupt, and Prime Minister Robert Peel persuaded the queen to wear local products to revive demand. The American Civil War later choked cotton supplies. By 1993 every mill had closed.
The origins of the pattern itself are tangled. Researcher Monique Levi-Strauss noted that one shawl attributed to Paisley around 1850 closely resembles work by Antony Berrus, a French designer whose Paris studio employed 200 draughtsmen and sold drawings as far as Kashmir. She argued that British, Austrian and German shawl makers followed France, never the reverse.
Paisley also changed the law. In 1928 a woman in a local cafe claimed to have found a dead snail in her ginger beer and fell ill. Her lawsuit, Donoghue v Stevenson, established that manufacturers owe a duty of care even without a contract, laying the foundation of modern negligence law.
Source: Paisley, Renfrewshire
