Virginia Postrel

I will never look at textiles the same way again. The author sets the stage with a Preface, then has a chapter for each aspect of fabric production and use: Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, Consumers, and Innovators. She concludes with a brief “Afterward: Why Textiles.” Each chapter starts with the earliest, most basic information then builds on that with the technology used to deal with it. The very end of the book has a glossary, from abacist to woad. This is followed by a 30-page section of end notes detailing whence her information comes, if one wishes to dig deeper. It concludes with an index.

I’ve played with the basics of spinning, weaving, and dyeing various fibers for years, and learned more about the impacts of these on civilization itself, as well as on fabrics, in the later chapters. It is a very readable account, though dense with information. The place of woven cloth, as a commodity, on the foundation of international banking, for instance, was eye-opening. This is not a “how to” book, but rather one that explores the basic technology for each aspect, chronicles its history and the impacts on the world at that time and now. It is also very current – published in 2021.

I recommend this book whole-heartedly to everyone interested in how fabric shaped the world we live in, with a sense of how that technology is shaping the future. Fascinating!

The author is, or at least has been, local. She mentions some places in Los Angeles in the last and the Southern California Handweavers Guild. I apparently bought this paperback at last year’s handweavers convention in Torrance, because my copy is signed by the author, dated last May. I’m so glad I bought it.… (mer)

The book consists of seven chapters with a preface and afterward. Each chapter deals with a particular part of fabric production: Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, Consumers, and Innovators. Each chapter starts in ancient times and ends in modern ones, showing how things have changed over time.

Fabric is one of those things that is so ubiquitous and important for life, and yet is also so ordinary and cheap nowadays that we simply forget about it. The book emphasizes that for most of human history fabric was at the forefront of thought. The amount of time and effort that’s gone into clothing and cloth for other purposes (sails, table coverings, curtains, blankets, etc.) is astronomical.

The book begins with the idea that modern people look at ancient art dealing with women and see a spindle and think, ah, this is a domestic scene. But we forget that the spindle as a means of turning fibres into thread was the start of production, necessary for the home, yes, but also an important industry. Millions of women over the course of history have spun thread and made cloth, whether of flax, cotton, wool, or silk. It was constant work because cloth is always needed. The book also shows how spinning thread was undervalued, partly because it was women’s work, but also because the higher the cost of thread, the higher the cost of cloth. We do the same thing today, keeping the final cost of clothing low so the rich can buy a lot of it, even if that means exploiting the workers who sew the cloth into clothing.

My interests are in ancient and medieval history so I didn’t expect the modern sections to interest me, but they were also fascinating. Learning about how cotton plants were cross bread and a fluke mutation created the cotton plants bred today was neat.

This is an excellent book dealing with a topic that affects everyone, but to which we give entirely too little thought.… (mer)

This was a very interesting account of the ways in which textiles have played a role in the development of civilization. Virginia Postrel looks at all stages of textiles from fiber to thread to cloth and dye, as well as the roles of traders and consumers, from ancient times to the present day. She concludes with innovators who are driving today’s textile industry forward in ways their forebears could never have imagined.

In every chapter of this book I found “aha moments,” and things that sent me off to the internet to learn more. I had never thought about the parallels between weaving and computer programming, but that explains a lot about why I find weaving patterns so interesting. Postrel unpacks a lot of scientific concepts in ways that make them easier for the layperson to understand. Although I admit some of these interested me more than others (I may have skimmed at times), I found this book fascinating on so many levels.… (mer)