Srinagar, March 7 -- The Pheran is not just a garment. It is winter woven into wool, a whisper of the mountains, a thing that holds centuries inside its heavy folds. It belongs to the people of Kashmir like the veins belong to the body. It carries stories, prayers, whispers of lost winters. You walk into an old Kashmiri home, and there it is, draped around a mother warming her hands over the kangri, wrapped around a poet who stares out at the endless white of the valley, held close by a child who grows into it like roots stretch into earth. The Pheran is the past, the present, the unyielding memory of a land that has spent too long being taken, stripped, rewritten.

And yet, in the marketplace of the world-where everything sacred is a com...