The kupas is the festival headdress of Kalasha women in the Chitral valleys: a long black woollen band down the back, encrusted with rows of cowry shells, buttons, brass medallions and grelot bells, topped with a feather and a wool pompom. A girl gets her first at about five.

This system takes the robe as the page. Everything sits on warm village black and is counted, not repeated — orange and yellow braid in fixed-height strips, ivory discs as bullets, bands stacked like the fourteen rows of cowries that record a family's wealth in traded shell.