Chitral Style

Winters in Chitral are brutal, the landscape is very rugged and infrastructure is poor so people in Chitral tend to dress practically. Traditionally Chitralis wore felted wool garments, a topic which deserves several posts of its own. Today Chitralis still wear a lot of locally made wool, but in the bazaar you can get practically anything (the best I saw was a London Underground hi-vis vest which the seller told me came from Kabul). So de rigueur in Chitral tends to be a fantastic mix of the traditional and the global...

A man of the Wakhi people at the Baroghil polo festival... note his handmade mallet, his maroon cardigan and the matching scarf around his waist. 

Psychedelic cardigan and shell-suit top at the same polo festival. The yak nearly got me.

     NFL team Oakland Raiders jacket as sported by a Guja nomad on his way to the same festival.

Yark, the man who owned more yaks than anyone else at Baroghil. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of Yark, but he did deign to sit for me. Yark being a traditionalist and a man of importance wore tweeds, which are called "tweeds" in the Wakhi language. Some of his buttons were old brass shackle types from British army uniforms. His aviators and turban left me in little doubt as to who was the boss. 

Images to reproduced only with the permission of Hindu Kush Ltd.

North West Pakistan

The idea for Hindu Kush came after many trips to a small, but super spectacular  valley in North West Pakistan called Chitral. I went first as a tourist, then as an anthropologist and film maker and finally as a businessman. I wasn't looking for business opportunities, but the quality of the woolen garments people were wearing out there and the embroidery on them got me really excited. Pretty quickly I found a supplier in Shubinak, a Pakistani company which works with and is partially owned by artisans in Chitral and now I am on the verge of launching a new label: Hindu Kush.

Image to reproduced only with the permission of Hindu Kush Ltd.