An Angami shawl is woven in three narrow strips on a backstrap loom and seamed into one dense indigo-black cloth — about ten hours of work for every twenty-five inches of strip. Broad red and green bands sit near the borders of the men's Lohe; the women's Loramhoushü carries handpicked black motifs between black and red stripes.

Nothing about that arrangement is free. Band width and stripe count encode age, marital status and elder standing, and only a man who has earned it may wear the undyed white centre strip painted in black with mithun, tiger, elephant, spear and human heads. The design system inherits that rule: a plain field, rare marks, and every stripe meaning something.