Material world
Kassia St Clair reveals the history of fabric, from the Paleolithic era to modern times
If you take your eyes off this page and look down, you will see that your body is encased in cloth. (I am assuming here, dear Reader, that you are not naked.) Perhaps you are sitting on the cushioned seat of a railway or metro carriage, or in the bosom of a plump sofa. You may be enrobed in a fluffy towel, confined within the colourful enclosure of a tent or enfolded in bedsheets. All are made of cloth, whether woven, felted or knitted.
Fabrics – both man-made and natural – have changed, defined, advanced and shaped the world we live in. For much of recorded history, the four principal sources of natural fibres – cotton, silk, linen and wool – have borne much of the strain of human ingenuity. They have been pressed into service to give warmth and protection, demarcate status, confer personal decoration and identity, and provide an outlet for creative talent.
We live surrounded by cloth. We are swaddled in it at birth and shrouds are drawn over our faces in death. We sleep enclosed by layer upon layer of it – like the pea that woke the princess in the fairy tale – and, when we wake, we clothe ourselves in yet more of it to face the world and let it know who we shall be that day.
Clothing and home furnishings are the most obvious use for textiles, but threads and fabrics reside in many places we do not expect them. When I look beyond the cushions and curtains in my living room, I see that my boots are laced with jaunty braided strands of red cotton, and, as I type this, my wrists occasionally bump against a suede-like material called Alcantara that covers my laptop keyboard and is more usually found in high-end cars.
Indeed, the designers of consumer electronics increasingly incorporate fabric, aiming to soften technology. If you own a Google Home, for example, you may have noticed that portions of it are bound in a comforting blend of polyester and nylon. Tech devices are now so much a part of our daily lives, it no longer makes sense for them to look hard-edged and futuristic. Instead, their makers want them to effortlessly blend into our homes, another ➤
cuddly component of our domestic landscapes. But the idea of ‘softening’ tech products using textiles is inherently odd when you realise that cloth is the original technology, older than pottery or metallurgy, perhaps even than agriculture and stock breeding.
Textiles of all kinds are vital to our lives, and the way we wear and surround our home lives with cloth is central to the future development of our cultures and civilisations. The fabrics we choose and where we get them from still have butterfly-effect consequences on the lives of the people who make them and on the world around us. Perhaps it is time to stop being like early Egyptologists, eagerly tearing through mummies’ linen coverings to grab at the treasures they might contain, and instead aspire to care for, pay attention to and generally admire the materials and the craft of creating cloth itself. We have, after all, been spinning fibres into threads for well over 30,000 years, and then weaving, knitting and knotting those threads into all manner of marvellous objects. A little more attention to all that detail shouldn’t be too much to ask. ‘The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History’ by Kassia St Clair, on sale now (£20, John Murray)
FABRICS OF ALL KINDS HAVE CHANGED, DEFINED, ADVANCED AND SHAPED THE WORLD WE LIVE IN