The Kashmir shawl as status symbol is one such example. In its heyday, ‘the average woman was stirred to such emotional depths by her desire for a Cashmere example that today the feeling can be comprehended only if it be compared with the agitation which fills certain feminine bosoms at the sight of a good mink coat’. Many aspects of the Kashmir shawl were explored and scrutinised during Dickens’ past residency – how the shawls were manufactured, designs and motifs, their emulation and absorption into European culture and their use in literature as symbols of aspiration, social acceptance, and important heirlooms.
The novels of Honoré de Balzac, in particular, Charlotte Brontë, Alexander Dumas, Gustave Flaubert and Henry James use the Kashmir shawl as a device to symbolize social mobility, as a bargaining chip, and as a status symbol. Dickens explored this notion of the inanimate object playing a somewhat animated role and so form, character and expression, they became key in developing her Kashmir Shawl series of works.
Image:
Pip Dickens, Some Travel Alone, 2011, oil on canvas, H1820 mm x W1820 mm, in the collection of Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery. Purchased with the assistance of the Friends of University of Leeds Art & Music.
Courtesy and ©Pip Dickens and Renée Pfister Art & Gallery Consultancy, 2021.
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