THE GOLDEN THREAD
HOW FABRIC CHANGED HISTORY
KASSIA ST CLAIR
John Murray, 352pp, £20
Interviewed on the Quilters’ Guild website, Kassia St Clair said that she had first become interested in cloth when studying 18th-century fashions at university: ‘It was impossible not to become intrigued by the descriptions of bombazines, velvets and silk faille. I was also struck by the depth of vocabulary commonly used by ordinary people. They were a great deal more knowledgeable and more discerning about the fabrics they were wearing than we are, and placed a far greater value on them.’ Giving a clue to the range of themes covered by The Golden Thread, her fascinating study of fabric, St Clair went on: ‘The Viking sail chapter was a revelation, but I also loved researching the spider silk chapter.’
Bee Wilson in the Times was enchanted by a ‘charming and informative history of textiles, which takes us on a journey from the silk roads to sportswear, from ruffs to spacesuits’. She was amazed by how far back in human history the first fabrics emerge: ‘As long as 34,500 years ago, our ancestors started figuring out the immensely tricky task of twisting fibres from plants into yarns, and then weaving these threads into a web of cloth to shield their bodies from the wind, sun or rain.’ Katrina Gulliver in the
Spectator felt it was an area of human industry too often looked down on as ‘women’s work’: ‘“women’s work” being devalued is very much a part of textile history, from the lace-makers of 17th-century Flanders to the Japanese silk factory workers of the 19th century’. The first archaeologists in Egypt simply abandoned the cloth wrappings of mummies to get to the body inside.
The Golden Thread is joyously detailed, and Wilson relished the surprises: ‘One of the themes of this absorbing book is the way that fabric has left traces on our language. I’d never realised before that “text” and “textile” share a common root in the Latin verb texere, to weave. Nor had I noticed how many of our metaphors for writing come from cloth. As St Clair says, a writer might “unpick, fashion, piece together or unravel”.’