Lampas weave: EP2: A weave that travelled across civilisations

Lampas: A Weave that Travelled Across Civilisations

When we began exploring lampas on an eight shaft loom, one question kept resurfacing.

How does a weave survive for a thousand years?

Many weave structures appear, flourish for a time and gradually fade from use. Lampas seems to have done the opposite. It travelled.

The structure is believed to have originated in Central Asia around the tenth century. From there it moved across regions, carried by trade, migration, patronage and the exchange of ideas between weaving cultures.

In Persia, silk weaving flourished under royal patronage. Cities such as Isfahan, Yazd and Kashan became centres for richly patterned textiles. Many lampas fabrics from this period carried motifs drawn from gardens, poetry and courtly life.

Further west, the structure appeared in the Ottoman Empire, where lampas fabrics were known as kemha. Woven in royal workshops, they often featured large floral motifs created by court designers.

The journey did not stop there.

In India, lampas appeared in the remarkable Vrindavani Vastra, a narrative textile woven in Assam that depicted scenes from the life of Krishna. Only fragments of these textiles survive today in museums.

China developed its own traditions as well. In centres such as Suzhou, patterned silk fabrics incorporating lampas structures were woven for imperial use.

Eventually the structure reached Europe, where it became widely used in luxury furnishings and ceremonial clothing.

The motifs changed. The colours changed. The fibres changed.

Yet the underlying idea remained recognisable.

There is something intriguing about that. A structural concept devised centuries ago continued to find new expressions across cultures that otherwise shared very little.

Before attempting to understand what lampas does on the loom, it is worth pausing to appreciate that journey.

A weave structure travelling across centuries and civilisations is, perhaps, already telling us that there is something worth paying attention to.

In the next article we move closer to the loom and look at what makes lampas structurally different from many other weave structures.

This article is part of a series based on the publication Notes from the Loom: Lampas on an Eight-Shaft Loom, available through the Shuttles & Needles studio.