Dress and textiles

Kinnauri topiMen, and increasingly women

A flat-crowned woollen cap of natural grey or off-white with a broad coloured velvet band running round the front. The band is usually green, with maroon the common alternative, and the two colours have since been taken up as party symbols in Himachal — the cap itself is considerably older than the parties, and outside an election it is simply what a man wears.

Worn for: Daily and ceremonial

DohruWomen

A heavy woollen wrap draped over an inner tunic, pinned at both shoulders with large silver pins joined by a chain, and belted at the waist with a woven sash. It is one uncut rectangle of handwoven cloth, which is why it fits any body and outlasts any fashion.

Worn for: Daily and festival

Pattu and chaddarWomen across the wider Pahari hills

The wrap-and-pin garment of the Himachali hills generally, of which the Kinnauri dohru is the local and heaviest form. Wearing it in the middle hills and in Kinnaur is the clearest single sign that the two belong to the same clothing tradition despite speaking different language families.

Worn for: Daily

Chhuba and gonchaMen and women in Spiti and upper Kinnaur

The long cross-over woollen robe of the Tibetan cultural world, belted at the waist so the upper fold becomes a pocket large enough for a bowl, a flask and a day's tsampa. Its cut is identical in Spiti, Ladakh and Tibet.

Worn for: Daily in winter, and formal

Woollen leg wrappings and grass shoesHerders

Wool bound around the calf and, historically, a shoe with a woven grass or yak-hair sole for grip on frozen scree. Rubber has replaced the sole almost everywhere, and the technique is close to gone.

Worn for: Working dress at altitude

Kinnauri shawlGI tagKinnaur

Handwoven wool with a dense geometric border in extra-weft, worked in a limited palette of red, black, yellow, green and white against a natural ground. The border patterns are named, the sequence in which they appear is fixed, and a weaver can place a shawl by its border. Registered as a geographical indication.

Kinnauri pattu and dohru clothKinnaur

The heavy plain-woven body cloth from which the wrap garments are made, produced on narrow pit and frame looms in strips that are then joined. Undyed sheep wool in grey, brown and cream does most of the work.

ThigmaSpiti and upper Kinnaur

Tie-resist dyeing on woollen cloth — the fabric is bound tightly at points before dyeing so undyed rings and dots emerge, usually in concentric arrangements on a maroon or ochre ground. The technique belongs to the Ladakh–Spiti Tibetan textile world rather than to the Pahari one, and is another place where the region's boundary shows in a material.

Yak-hair and goat-hair weavingSpiti

Coarse black cloth, ropes, sacks and tent panels woven from the outer hair, with the soft undercoat kept back for finer work. It is the utility end of the same pastoral economy that produces the shawl.