Word: wool
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...Brustein: My first job, aside from working for father in the shipping room of a wool yarn business, was playing clarinet and tenor sax with a swing band at a high school junior prom...
...opinion it's better to keep the block as it is in its museum [and not investigate its contents], because if we try to take it apart and then find some pounds of wool and two or three mammoth bones, all the journalists will be very sad," Tikhonov said...
...good. Nan Kempner, one of the most esteemed members of that coterie, sent out invitations to a charity sale that offered more than the evanescent pleasure of a $10,000 lunch. It gave guests the opportunity to buy a shahtoosh, a shawl that justifies its name, "King of Wool," by reputedly being both light enough to pass through a wedding ring and warm enough to hatch a pigeon's egg. "Shahtooshes are so utterly tightly woven of this wonderful, thin wool," enthuses Kempner. "We started wearing them when people were harassed about wearing...
...just wretchedly expensive; they're also illegal. "I was told that the hair came from the chin of the ibex goat," says Kempner. "That [the goats] rubbed it into the rocks and villagers picked it up and wove it into shawls." That is a quaint--and popular--delusion. The wool of a goat is combed and woven into pashminas. But the superior wool of shahtooshes is harvested from dead chirus, an endangered antelope that resides on the Tibetan plateau. An estimated three to five chirus are killed for each shawl...
...wool is smuggled to and woven in Kashmir, an Indian state that does not abide by the U.N. treaty. Shahtooshes have been the raiment of the elite there for centuries, presented to brides-to-be in wealthy Indian families. And in France, Napoleon is said to have given one to Josephine, who was so enthralled that she bought 400 more. The West didn't fully embrace shahtooshes until the 1980s, when fur went out and designers began dying the shawls in appealing colors. Before long, Park Avenue hostesses were selling them and Donna Karan was confiding to British Vogue that...