Plain Sailing: The Cloth That Turned The Tide of History
Haptic & Hue
A coarse, plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in some of the gaps, but there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about how sails were made and how sail-making changed the communities that undertook this work. Without sailcloth the Greeks could not...
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Flax is Back! The Great Linen Revival
Haptic & Hue
There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it's gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from...
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Elizabeth Wayland Barber & The Age of String
Haptic & Hue
Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they are central to the development of human society, and she said, spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and...
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America’s Cotton Feed Sacks: And How They Changed The World
Haptic & Hue
The American cotton feed sack is the stuff of legend. From the 1850s onwards it was skilfully repurposed by women across America into all kinds of garments and household goods. By the late 1930s when it became highly patterned, it's estimated that more than 3 million Americans were wearing feed sack clothing. Out of necessity, it was made into dresses and shirts, quilts and curtains, sheets, mattress covers, pyjamas, and even undergarments. Today feed sacks are valued by collectors and makers in America, and there is a lively market in them. But these soft cotton sacks...
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Australia’s Convict Quilt: Something to be Proud Of
Haptic & Hue
An extraordinary quilt handstitched by convict women on board ship as they were transported from Britain to Australia in 1841 has just gone on display in a new exhibition at Australia’s National Gallery. Many of those who made the quilt were illiterate and led tough and impoverished lives. And yet these social outcasts and exiles - working in desperate circumstances - created one of the most important cultural artifacts in the colonial history of Australia. The Rajah Quilt – named after the ship the women were transported on - has nearly 3,000 individual pieces. It is one of the...
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The Forgotten Medieval Craft of Cloth Staining
Haptic & Hue
From the grandest palace to the poorest cottage, so-called ‘stained’ cloths brought colour and joy to everyday life in England for hundreds of years. These specially painted and stamped fabrics formed the backdrop to funerals, ceremonies, processions, masques, and tournaments that required banners, flags, pennants or scenery from 1300 onwards. But this world of dazzling medieval colour and pattern has been mostly lost to history because so much of the cloth has perished, and the craft of the stainers has been so little understood. Now Haptic & Hue re-discovers the...
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Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists
Haptic & Hue
Great tapestries have been used to decorate and embellish homes and palaces for centuries, and yet the hands that created these works remain almost completely forgotten. Art institutions treasure their ancient tapestries woven painstakingly over many months, and even years and know almost everything about them, except the names of those who created these extraordinary pieces. Modern artists, like Picasso, Henry Moore and Marc Chagall see their work rendered into a different and exciting form by tapestry weavers, but no-one remembers who the weaver was or is. This episode of Haptic...
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The Garment That Sweeps Through History: The Everlasting Cloak
Haptic & Hue
There’s a piece of clothing that has a good claim to being a universal garment. It is thousands of years old and yet it featured on the catwalks last year. It’s stylish and at the same time the humblest and simplest of garments. It has been worn and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. It has been repurposed and reshaped throughout human history and it has fulfilled many functions. The cloak has kept us good company throughout the centuries, it has marched with armies across plains and deserts, it has been sanctified and worn by saints, and was just as beloved by sinners such as...
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Ukraine's Revolutionary Act of Embroidery: How Identity Survives in Stitches
Haptic & Hue
As the war in the Ukraine brutally shows, few people have had as hard a struggle down the centuries to maintain their identity as Ukrainians. For hundreds of years, they have been occupied and subjugated by one power after another, the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Poland, the Nazis, and Russia again. Through it all Ukrainians have held onto their traditions: one of the strongest of these has been the beautifully and skilfully stitched motifs on plain linen or hemp shirts. The embroidery of Ukraine is one of its secret weapons and an incredible defence against the...
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The Point of The Needle - How the Ancient Craft of Stitching Shapes Us
Haptic & Hue
The needle and thread have been humanity’s constant companions for tens of thousands of years: far longer than the dog, the sword, or the wheel, and much longer than reading and writing. Down the centuries the needle has rendered us incredible service and we have come to depend on it. And yet the activity of stitching has long been ignored in the record of human endeavour. Even the modern trend for embracing making and craft tends to leave out sewing. But a new book just out, comes to try to redress the balance. Haptic & Hue’s Book of the Year for 2023 is Barbara Burman’s The...
info_outlineClothes are a window to our identity – they tell others who we are, what we believe in, and whether we are rich or poor, powerful or powerless. They also tell us a great deal about who someone is, whether they are tall or short, skinny or full-bodied, and what sort of life they lead, one of leisure or one of unremitting hard work. These clues make garments and textiles a wonderful way to understand the people of the past, what their lives were really like, and who they were.
This episode is about the clothes of a community, the community that lived at Mount Vernon in America when it was the home of George Washington and his wife Martha. George is a hero to Americans as the general who commanded the Revolution against the British and went on to become the first president. But what do his clothes tell us about him as a living, breathing person? His estate, Mount Vernon was not just home to him and his family - more than 300 people lived and worked on five farms there. Too often the focus of researchers and historians in the past has been on the textiles and fabrics of the rich and powerful, but clothes can tell us a good deal too about the poor and dispossessed and we can also look at the fabrics and the textiles that were used to dress everyone at Mount Vernon, from the Washingtons themselves to their field workers and labourers.
If you would like to see a full script of the episode or discover links to further information about the topics discussed here you can find all this information at www.hapticandhue.com/listen.