The Name Is Scottish. The Design Isn’t.
Have you seen a paisley design around your surroundings? In India we call it buta or boteh . What if I told you that pattern was from Persia (modern-day Iran) and India. So how did it get named after a Scottish town?
In ancient times, the motif was called (boteh or buta) the Persian word for shrub or cluster of leaves: It symbolises sometimes life, eternity and fertility in the Zoroastrian region.
During the rule of Mughal Empire in the late 16th century, the Persian aesthetics were at their peak and somehow they integrated into India. Indian craftsmen and artisans redefined the motif and in Kashmir craftsmen started embedding the motif into the beautiful, luxurious handmade woven Kashmiri shawls which got popularized by the Mughal Emperor Akbar and his royal courts, and eventually gave the shawls as a gift to rulers and court officials.
Get Wordrobe’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And in the meantime this motif design got attention from the European countries in the 1700s, British East India Company traders brought Kashmiri shawls to Europe.
At that time these pieces were very expensive so the weavers began copying in parts of Britain and Edinburgh, and later production of these shawls moved to Paisley near Glasgow where the Jacquard handlooms made these complex designs easier to weave and due to its mass production of shawls at a lower cost that motif design got named after that town, called Paisley.
In India some very talented artists adapted these designs locally and gave them the shape of unripe mango which is often called the kairi, ambi or kalka.
Nowadays we see this motif design very often during fast fashion trends: we find it on TikTok and other social media accounts but back then during Mughal Empire these designs were the symbols of luxury, royal status, talent, warmth and dignity made very patiently by human hands.
So who gets to name a design the people who made it first, or the people who sold the most copies?
