̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - textiles

Cheaper method for making woven displays and smart fabrics – of any size or shape

sc604 — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 17:37:37 +0000

Researchers have developed next-generation smart textiles – incorporating LEDs, sensors, energy harvesting, and storage – that can be produced inexpensively, in any shape or size, using the same machines used to make the clothing we wear every day.

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

tdk25 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:50:40 +0000

Later, an eyewitness recalled that officials thought the Duchess had fainted at the sight of blood trickling from her husband’s mouth. Only the Archduke himself seemed to realise that she, too, had been hit. “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Franz Ferdinand pleaded. Then, “he seemed to sag down himself,” the witness remembered. “His plumed general’s hat… fell off; many of its green feathers were found all over the car floor.”

̽��ֱ��assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, had such seismic repercussions in precipitating the First World War that it is easy to disregard the curious little detail of feathers on the floor. In such context, they seem trivial. Rewind a few moments more, to the famous final photograph of the couple leaving Sarajevo town hall, and the plumage sprouting from the Archduke’s hat looks positively absurd; as if amid all the other mortal perils of that day – the bomb that narrowly missed his car, the bullets from a semi-automatic – he somehow also sustained a direct hit from a large bird.

Today, we generally associate feathers with women’s fashion, and a peculiarly ostentatious brand at that, reserved for Royal Ascot, high-society weddings and hen parties. Among men, wearing feathers is typically seen as provocatively effete – the domain of drag queens, or ageing, eyelinered devotees of the Manic Street Preachers.

Yet a cursory glance at military history shows that Franz Ferdinand was far from alone in his penchant for plumage. ̽��ֱ��Bersaglieri of the Italian Army, for example, still wear capercaillie feathers in their hats, while British fusiliers have a clipped plume called a hackle. Cavaliers in the English Civil War adorned their hats with ostrich feathers.

“Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men,” observes Cambridge historian Professor Ulinka Rublack. “Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.”

Rublack is beginning to study the use of featherwork in early modern fashion as part of a project called ‘Materialized Identities’, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Basel and Bern, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

To the outsider, its preoccupations (her co-researchers are studying gold, glass and veils) might seem surprising. Yet such materials are not just mute artefacts; they sustained significant economies, craft expertise and, she says, “entered into rich dialogue with the humans who processed and used them”. Critically, they elicited emotions, moods and attitudes for both the wearer and the viewer. In this sense, they belonged to the ‘symbolic universe’ of communities long since dead. If we can understand such resonances, we come closer to knowing more about how it felt to be a part of that world.

Rublack has spotted that something unusual started to happen with feathers during the 16th century. In 1500, they were barely worn at all; 100 years later they had become an indispensable accessory for the Renaissance hipster set on achieving a ‘gallant’ look.

In prosperous trading centres, the locals started sporting hats bedecked with feathers from parrots, cranes and swallows. Headgear was manufactured so that feathers could be inserted more easily. By 1573, Plantin’s Flemish–French dictionary was even obliged to offer words to describe people who chose not to wear them, recommending such verbiage as: ‘the featherless’ and ‘unfeathered’.

Featherworking became big business. From Prague and Nuremberg to Paris and Madrid, people started to make a living from decorating feathers for clothing. Impressive efforts went into dyeing them. A 1548 recipe recommends using ashes, lead monoxide and river water to create a ‘very beautiful’ black, for example.

Why this happened will become clearer as the project develops. One crucial driver, however, was exploration – the discovery of new lands, especially in South America. Compared with many of the other species that early European colonists encountered, exotic birds could be captured, transported and kept with relative ease. Europe experienced a sudden ‘bird-craze’, as birds such as parrots became a relatively common sight on the continent’s largest markets.

Given the link with new territories and conquest, ruling elites wore feathers partly to express their power and reach. But there were also more complex reasons. In 1599, for example, Duke Frederick of Württemberg held a display at his court at which he personally appeared as ‘Lady America’, wearing a costume covered in exotic feathers. This was not just a symbol of power, but of cultural connectedness, Rublack suggests: “ ̽��ֱ��message seems to be that he was embracing the global in a duchy that was quite insular and territorial.”

Nor were feathers worn by the powerful alone. In 1530, a legislative assembly at Augsburg imposed restrictions on peasants and burghers adopting what it clearly felt should be an elite fashion. ̽��ֱ��measure did not last, perhaps because health manuals of the era recommended feathers as protecting the wearer from ‘bad’ air – cold, miasma, damp or excessive heat – all of which were regarded as hazardous. During the 1550s, Eleanor of Toledo had hats made from peacock feathers to protect her from the rain.

Gradually, feathers came to indicate that the wearer was healthy, civilised and cultured. Artists and musicians took to wearing them as a mark of subtlety and style. “They have a certain tactility that was seen to signal an artistic nature,” Rublack says.

Like most fads, this enthusiasm eventually wore off. By the mid-17th century, feathers were out of style, with one striking exception. Within the armies of Europe what was now becoming a ‘feminine’ fashion choice elsewhere remained an essential part of military costume.

Rublack thinks that there may have been several reasons for this strange contradiction. “It’s associated with the notion of graceful warfaring,” she says. “This was a period when there were no standing armies and it was hard to draft soldiers. One solution was to aestheticise the military, to make it seem graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” Feathers became associated with the idea of an art of warfare.

They were also already a part of military garb among both native American peoples and those living in lands ruled by the Ottomans. Rublack believes that just as some of these cultures treated birds as gods, and therefore saw feathers as having a protective quality, European soldiers saw them as imparting noble passions, bravery and valiance.

In time, her research may therefore reveal a tension about the ongoing use of feathers in this unlikely context. “It has to do with a notion of masculinity achieved both through brutal killing, and the proper conduct of war as art,” she says. But, as she also notes, she is perhaps the first historian to have spotted the curious emotional resonance of feathers in military fashion at all. All this shows a sea-change in methodologies: historians now chart the ways in which our identities are shaped through deep connections with ‘stuff’. Further work is needed to understand how far these notions persisted by 1914 when, in his final moments, Franz Ferdinand left feathers scattered across the car floor.

Inset image: Hendrick Goltzius, soldier, c. 1580; credit: ̽��ֱ��Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam.

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even courage in battle. This unlikely material is now part of a project that promises to tell us more not only about what happened in the past, but also about how it felt to be there.

Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men. Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.

Ulinka Rublack

Achille Beltrame

Assassination of the feather-hatted Archduke Franz Ferdinand

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Fancy pants: skirmishes with the fashion police in 16th-century Italy

amb206 — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 12:00:00 +0000

On 15 September 1595, a Genoese man-about-town called Salvagio de Aste was spotted breaking the law. ̽��ֱ��record in Genoa's state archives describes with remarkable precision what Salvagio was wearing that autumn day as he strolled through the square of San Siro. He must have cut a dashing figure. He sported “an embroidered cap, a silk doublet of many colours with gold buttons on the sleeves, two rings with white stones on his fingers, a jerkin and embroidered hose in black silk”.

̽��ֱ��detail with which Salvagio’s attire was noted is no accident: his showy and costly clothing was his crime. His colourful and lavishly embellished costume had fallen foul of Genoa’s Magistrato delle Pompe, whose role it was to enforce the sumptuary laws that regulated what men and women could wear. Patrolling the streets and squares of the bustling city as arbiters of the level of ostentation that was deemed appropriate, the sumptuary magistrates were quite simply the Fashion Police.

̽��ֱ��role of these magistrates, and their (largely unsuccessful) attempts to moderate excessive spending, is one strand of research into clothing in early modern Genoa by Giulia Galastro, a PhD candidate in the History Faculty at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. In particular, she is interested in the ways in which the materiality of fabric is interwoven with the fabric of society in Genoa – a centre of the Italian silk trade and a city famous for its production of sumptuous velvets and other luxurious textiles.

Sumptuary laws restricted the use of precisely these textiles, along with expensive decoration such as embroidery with gold and silver thread. It also covered jewellery and ostentatious modes of transport, such as the lady in a litter seen in this image taken from a travelogue (owned by Strahov Monastery) of a Bohemian nobleman, who visited Genoa at the beginning of the 17th century.

Italy wasn’t alone in having sumptuary laws – the obsession with legislating against costly clothes spread across Europe during the Middle Ages. In England, James VI and I abolished sumptuary laws in 1604 but continued to control dress by other means. “ ̽��ֱ��purpose of the laws is a matter of some debate. Their wording suggests concern that luxury goods could damage the morals of those who consumed them. Fashion itself was seen as immoral: its transitory nature stoked an acquisitive lust for new goods,” said Galastro.

Financial considerations were also at play. A 15th-century Genoese law bemoaned "a great quantity of money which is kept dead and wrapped up in clothing and jewels, [and] if converted into trade might bring great return and profits". Some scholars, such as the historian Jane Bridgeman, have argued that the laws were an indirect tax on wealth, working on the tacit assumption that the rich would be prepared to pay to get around them.

“Part of the problem is that not much evidence for how the laws were enforced has been preserved, so it’s difficult to know how – and whether – they worked in practice. That’s what makes the Genoese sumptuary records so special. ̽��ֱ��rare survival of notes kept by the sumptuary magistrates gives us a glimpse of the laws in action, and of clothes in use. We can begin to build up a picture of who was wearing what, when and where,” said Galastro.

̽��ֱ��records suggest that residents of Genoa routinely ignored the sumptuary laws. In the four years from 1594 to 1598, the magistrates recorded more than 560 contraventions of the regulations. ̽��ֱ��foppish Salvagio was among the repeat offenders. Three days after being admonished on 15 September 1595 he was back in San Siro, wearing exactly the same outfit. On 5 November he was there again, wearing a leather jerkin impregnated with musk.

̽��ֱ��sumptuary magistrates were caught up in a game of catch-me-if-you-can as Genoa’s dandies defied and subverted the rules. ̽��ֱ��feckless Salvagio broke the law at least a further four times, suggesting that whatever fine was imposed was no deterrent to a man determined to strut his stuff.

“It is likely that any fines imposed were modest in comparison with the cost of the offending garments. A whole outfit in silk velvet, embroidered with precious metal threads, could come close to the price of a sports car today: if you could afford to buy the clothes, you could afford to pay the fine – or the bribe,’ said Galastro.

In analysing the records of the Genoese sumptuary laws, Galastro made a startling discovery. She said: “Contrary to widely held beliefs, male offenders outnumber females. In terms of overall sumptuary offences, there are 289 men to 242 women. If we focus on offences concerning dress, however, the disparity is more striking: 269 men to 99 women. In other words, there were almost three times as many men breaking the law on clothing as women.”

Historians have often presumed that, where sumptuary laws mention men at all, it is for dressing too femininely, but Galastro’s research suggests something different.

“It’s interesting that the majority of the offences relate to an outfit of black silk - taffeta, satin or velvet - ornamented with some sort of precious metal stitching or with lace. Just such an outfit appears in a portrait of an anonymous Genoese nobleman by the artist van Dyck which, to modern eyes, looks relatively sober. But black was a clear status symbol in Renaissance culture. Black dye was one of the most difficult to fix effectively, so we should be careful how we interpret these apparently ‘plain’ portraits,” said Galastro.

Anthony van Dyck worked in Genoa for six years from 1621 and painted a series of exquisite portraits of the local aristocracy. These show the city’s elite wearing luxurious garments. He moved to London in 1632 where his portraits such as ‘Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart’, circa 1638, show men wearing much more colourful and flamboyant clothing.

Clothes are made to be worn and the wearing of them is a form of performance – seldom more so than on the streets of a fashionable Mediterranean city humming with life. “If you pair the sumptuary records with literary sources, it seems that what was disquieting to the sumptuary magistrates in Genoa was a particular form of vaunting, flaunting masculine dress,” said Galastro.

In his 1620 commentary on the Characters of Theophrastus, the Genoese writer Ansaldo Ceba describes the effrontery of the young man who will “when he is wearing breeches alla Spagnola, or an embroidered doublet, circulate around the city so sedulously that you can’t help bumping into him in church, in the square, or on the corner… You needn’t think of leaving until you have admired him from head to toe. Indeed he will compel you to do so, now by opening his cloak, now by planting himself in front of you like a bulwark”.

Infringements of the sumptuary laws weren’t confined to the elite: artisans too were under scrutiny. Some were caught by the sumptuary magistrates while making luxury clothes. On 20 May 1595, the wife of Gioannetino the cheese-maker was spotted sitting on her doorstep sewing a man’s silk shirt, dyed in costly crimson, with gold and silver braids three fingers’ thick. Later in the summer three tailors were also caught working on luxury items.

These artisans were caught in a dilemma: their livelihoods depended on making luxury goods. “It is estimated that some 60% of the Genoese population was involved in the production of textiles and clothing – from the women employed to unwind silk filament from cocoons through the dyers and weavers in their workshops to the hundreds of tailors and seamstresses,” said Galastro.

It was an era when people had a hands-on relationship with textiles, choosing and purchasing fabrics in consultation with their tailors with the arrival of new textiles and trimmings eagerly awaited. ̽��ֱ��vocabulary of fabrics and fashion was fabulously diverse – colours such as ‘incarnadine’ (the red of raw flesh) – most of these words lost to us today.

“What you wore, and how you wore it, was a matter of deep significance,” said Galastro.

Inset images: detail of equestrian portrait of Giancarlo Doria by Rubens, 1606 (Wikimedia); detail of litter from Bedrich z Donin travelogue (by kind permission of Strahov Monastery); Salvago de Este infringes the sumptuary laws on 15 September, 1595 (Archivo di Stato di Genova; detail of portrait of a gentleman by Van Dyck, 1624 (WikiArt) detail of painting of 16th-century Genoa (Biblioteca Nacional de Espana); the cheese-makers wife is spotted making luxury goods on 17 April, 1598 (Archivo di Stato di Genova).

With the autumn 2014 fashion shows in full swing, all eyes are on the top designers. In 16th-century Italy, the latest looks didn't always go down well with the authorities. Historian Giulia Galastro is researching the sumptuary laws regulating the level of opulence that could be paraded in public – and how the dandies of the day neatly side-stepped the rules.

̽��ֱ��purpose of the laws is a matter of debate. Their wording suggests that luxury goods could damage the morals of those who consumed them. Fashion was seen as immoral: its transitory nature stoked an acquisitive lust for new goods.

Giulia Galastro

National Gallery

Portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart by Anthony Van Dyck, c1638

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

Making the cloth that binds us: spinning, weaving and island identity

amb206 — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 08:00:47 +0000

There’s a theory in the fashion world that a period of austerity or recession heralds a return to the comfort and familiarity of tried-and-tested classics. In this way, we seek solace in what we think of as our heritage. Certainly, many of the collections in the shops for this winter feature designs that have their roots in the craft-based industries of the rugged islands in the north Atlantic that gave their names to some of the styles most closely associated with traditional British clothing – Harris, Shetland, Fair Isle. Today these iconic styles are widely copied by mass market producers while the craft industries which developed them struggle to remain viable, the weaving of tweed on the islands of Lewis and Harris being a notable exception. However, they continue to define the way the places and people of the isles are thought of. For the practitioners too, making plays an important social role in how they see themselves.

For thousands of years, the process of becoming an adult was for most people rooted in what they did, in craft-based activities, learning through making. Craft brought people together. Traditionally this crafting was especially important in the rural communities of the north, where seasonal demands meant that people spent a large amount of time working on their own. It was often joked, for example, that husbands and wives were only seen together in some of these tasks such as the rooing (plucking the wool) of sheep, or carding (untangling) the wool. Centres of making became centres of meeting. For young people growing up in these societies, the environment itself was their classroom and the community their teacher as they absorbed the practical skills needed to enable them to making a living from the resources around them.

Ben Cartwright is a member of the ̽��ֱ��Material Culture Lab in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Archaeology. ̽��ֱ��Material Culture Lab is a small group of researchers dedicated to the social study of things from the past. He is interested in the ways in which cloth production was linked to social identity for the island populations of Atlantic Scotland between 600 AD and 1200 AD. This was a period of considerable social change. It begins with the birth of the Viking Age, the creation of various chiefdoms in the Northern and Western Isles who interfered with political events of the age, notably through the creation of the Earldom of Orkney which acted like a firebrand across the skies of the early Viking world. Historically, the sagas record Earls raiding and taking possession of territory as far down as the Isle of Man. Earlier Irish sources record the activities of war bands of mixed Scandinavian and Hebridean descent as ‘foreign Gaels’.

̽��ֱ��ebb and flux of these piratical Chiefdoms end in what in Atlantic Scotland might be called the early middle ages, when the Isles functioned as colonial possessions of the Kings of Norway, who subjugated their troublesome neighbours across the sea. Modern sailing yachts make the crossing in the annual race from Bergen, Norway, to Lerwick, Shetland, in less than 24 hours; in the Viking Age the same voyage would have taken at least two days and nights on the open water and involved far greater danger. Modern crews rely on all manner of engineered man-made fabrics for canvas, rope and notably sailcloth, as well as their protective clothing; in the past all of these items were made by hand from natural materials.

Cartwright’s research explores the ways in which the crafts of spinning and weaving, as ‘learnt bodily histories’ (performing the task requires the learning of certain repetitive body movements and behaviours), contribute to community and individual identity. He is interested in how these crafts shape the means by which people behave and present themselves to themselves and others - not least in the clothes they wore.

“My work looks not just at the ways in which skills and traditions were passed down across the generations but also the central role that crafts played in terms of how people created a community – something that you might describe as ‘islandness’. Craft brings people together, creating a social space where ideas are swapped and made sense of, quite literally with the hands. As apprentices learnt new techniques, which, especially at the loom, could be painful and body altering, it also changed their minds, the way they thought and saw the world around them. They took on and participated in re-making community narratives, the stories, gossip and opinions that made sense of their place in the world. Bringing the past into the present,” said Cartwright.

“To study these communities of makers, and how their ideas changed over time, I look at the objects from the period, such as loom weights and spindle whorls. Lumps of stone, that are so often ignored, can be measured to show the qualities of what they were used to produce, yarn and cloth, and how techniques of making differed over time. A history of learnt body techniques provides a different way of looking at how social ideas shifted or remained. New clothes, styles and sails needed new ways of making, and reasons or motivation to make them. We need new clothes because we want to look like x or y, usually a social ideal or a fashion. We learn to move our fingers in new ways because we want new clothes. These changes were made sense of in relation to their own social histories and the events in the world around them.”

Survival in northern climates depended on the fabrication of materials that protected from wind, rain and cold. Craftsmen looked to the landscape to provide materials for the looms, stones to use as loom weights, fibre to spin into yarn, vegetable matter to use in dyes. ̽��ֱ��demands from the loom would have sent people out into different parts of the environment at different times of the year, creating a rhythm of interaction. “Anyone who has spent time in the Isles will tell you how animate a presence the wind and weather can be. To fulfil these tasks people needed the right clothing, and other items from sacking all the way through to sails,” said Cartwright.

“Cloth is much more than functional: it is imbued with the spirit of those who make it and those who wear it, use it, or sleep beneath it. There’s evidence in the Viking Age that the processes of spinning and weaving were tied into the spirituality and belief systems of the time. We know many myths and ideas, sometimes carved onto spindle whorls, gave religious and historical importance to the activity. And it is very likely that the spinners and weavers would have known and ‘re-spun’ these ideas, giving significance to what they were doing. They were re-weaving the spiritual world for their families and communities, clothing them in meaning.”

̽��ֱ��transformation of a greasy fleece or flax stems into a garment was an intensive practice often involving thousands of hours of labour. ̽��ֱ��skills required to do this involved a sensory engagement with materials in terms of what it is possible to do with them, how they behave and how to manipulate them, processing raw materials into items of desire, twisting colours together in a way that mirrors the subtle beauty of the landscape. “Many of these ideas would have been passed down, from generation to generation. Body techniques full of meaning, superstitions and practices acted as a social skill set. How these changed - or didn’t - is key to understanding how the islanders created a sense of ‘us’ in this period of social upheaval,” said Cartwright.

Clothing is one of the ways in which people, or groups of people, make themselves distinctive. This is likely to have been as true a thousand or so years ago as it is today. When people take on different roles, new clothes give them new ways of behaving. ̽��ֱ��tailoring, material, and weave of the cloth restrict or emphasise certain movements that made up a social system of manners. Ways of being structured the social relations central to a creating sense of home, and an ‘us’.

Cartwright summed up: “You could even say that the clothing wears the body, gives it certain habits. And just as fashion trends change today as the results of influences both within and beyond communities, so they would have done so in the past. Though seemingly remote to our modern road-based way of thinking, and sometimes cut off from surrounding places by storms, the islands of Atlantic Scotland were in the middle of one of the busiest shipping, and therefore of all transport, routes of the age– and this interconnectedness reveals itself in some of the material choices of the Islanders. Not least at the loom.

"It was this ability to participate in the historic changes of the age, that re-forged the political maps of Britain and Ireland, as well as maintain a distinctive localised identity, a ‘heritage’ bound up in cloth, that makes the islanders of the time so fascinating.”

Ben Cartwright, a member of Cambridge’s Material Culture Lab, is an archaeologist whose research focuses on the ways in which the crafts of spinning and weaving are embedded into the historic culture of the islands of the North Atlantic and remain an important part of island identity.

Craft brings people together, creating a social space where ideas are swapped and made sense of, quite literally with the hands.

Ben Cartwright

Shetland Museum and Archives, Lerwick, Scotland

From fleece to the fibre of local identity: the man in the foreground wears a traditional Fair Isle jumper for working with sheep

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

̽��ֱ��needle and the pen

amb206 — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:46:45 +0000

In August 1992, the writer WG Sebald set off on the walking tour of Suffolk that he later immortalised in ̽��ֱ��Rings of Saturn. His journey took him through innumerable scenes of decline and decay—fading seaside towns, silted-up rivers, abandoned pleasure palaces, whole towns lost beneath the waves—and in the book those scenes prompt a series of meditations on human failure and folly.

Sebald’s melancholy East Anglian odyssey ends in Norwich, where he turns to consider the many silk-weaving workshops that once kept that city lit up until late into the night. Looking at the surviving 18th-century pattern books, lined with ‘marvellous strips of colour, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols’, he finds in them ‘an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty’. These pages , copies of which once travelled the trade-routes of Europe, ‘seem to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival’. In concluding his patchwork travelogue with this celebration of a silk sample-book, Sebald makes a connection that has deep roots in human cultures, between the textual and the textile.

Next week, an ambitious interdisciplinary conference in Cambridge will unravel the fascinating interplay between words and fabrics. Run by the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Material Texts, the two-day conference is the latest in a series on ‘the material text in material culture’; last year’s meeting considered the interplay between reading, writing and eating. “After ‘Eating Words’, there was a certain inevitability about “Texts and Textiles’,” says the Centre’s director, Jason Scott-Warren. “You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.”

̽��ֱ��connection between texts and textiles begins in shared etymology; both words find their origins in the Latin verb texere, ‘to weave’. And that analogy between words and fabric continues to proliferate in our own everyday speech. We all know what it means to spin a yarn, or to lose the thread of a story. Every good plot needs a dénouement, an untying or unknotting, and from Ariosto to ̽��ֱ��Archers, narratives have benefited from entrelacement, the interlacing of several strands which can be left hanging at moments of crisis.

̽��ֱ��textile metaphor has been picked up by literary theorists such as Roland Barthes, who in ̽��ֱ��Death of the Author insists that we should not attempt to decipher texts but should instead disentangle them: ‘the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath’.

̽��ֱ��textile arts not only allow us to think about how literature works; they are also involved in the very stuff from which books are fashioned—whether we think of the rags that make paper, the sewing together of pages, or the various materials employed in bookbinding. Textiles (and the women who have made them) are also the subject of many stories, whether we are talking about Homer’s Penelope, Ovid’s Philomela, or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

And of course, the threads also run the other way. Samplers are only one of the many forms of fabric that have carried verbal messages, many of them moralising or improving. ̽��ֱ��recent exhibition of Quilts 1700-2010 at the Victoria and Albert Museum was subtitled ‘Hidden Histories, Untold Stories’. As well as displaying numerous quilts that had textual sources for their visual designs, or that had messages embroidered onto them, the V&A’s show also exposed the printed and handwritten texts that had been cut up to serve as templates or backing in the making of the patchwork. ̽��ֱ��patches on one 19th-century coverlet, celebrating a marriage, were rumoured to have been ‘pieced-in’ with the couple’s love-letters.

Tracy Emin’s infamous tent, ‘Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995’, which bore appliquéd names of her bedfellows from birth, offers a less romantic demonstration of the power of the stitched word. Meanwhile, even wordless textiles have a tantalising relationship with verbal culture, tempting us to ponder the ‘grammar of ornament’ or to decode the language of their decorative schemes. Of all fabrics, those used in clothing are perhaps the most legible. ̽��ֱ��‘newspaper outfits’ used in the Olympics‘ closing ceremony may have been intended to celebrate the freedom of the British press but they also suggest the eloquence of what we wear, whether or not it boasts a designer label.

From artists’ books to knitting blogs, from ancient Greek lyric to the language of modern colorectal surgery, ‘Texts and Textiles’ will explore a huge range of perspectives on its theme, hearing not only from academics but also from practitioners who make their living from the warp and weft of words. ̽��ֱ��keynote speaker is the anthropologist Tim Ingold from the ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen, whose work has reflected in fascinating ways on writing, stitching, storytelling and journeying. Doubtless the conference will leave many loose ends, but it promises to be an enthralling tapestry.

Texts and Textiles, a conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts, will take place on 11 and 12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge. For further information, contact the organisers, Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) or Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk).

A conference at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� will explore the ways in which words and fabrics are stitched together in language and literature – and celebrate the means by which textiles carry hidden narratives in their warp and weft.

You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.

Jason Scott-Warren

Sara Impey

Quilt by Sara Impey titled Context, made in silk

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Yes

Rage against the machine

ns480 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:58:24 +0000

New research marking the bicentenary of Luddism – a workers’ uprising which swept through parts of England in 1812 – has thrown into question whether it really was the moment at which working class Britain found its political voice.

April 11 will mark the 200^th anniversary of what was arguably the high-point of the Luddite rebellion; an assault by some 150 armed labourers on a Huddersfield mill, in which soldiers opened fire on the mob to stop them breaking into the premises, fatally wounding two attackers.

It was, perhaps, the most dramatic in a series of protests which had begun the year before in Nottinghamshire, then spread to Yorkshire, Lancashire and other regions. ̽��ֱ��Luddites were angered by new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry in place of the skilled work of artisans, threatening their livelihoods as a result.

Invoking a mythical leader, “Ned Ludd”, the insurgents broke into factories and wrecked the offending equipment. At its most incendiary, the rebellion saw exchange of fire between soldiers and workers as well as the notorious murder of a Yorkshire mill-owner, William Horsfall. It also led to the use of the word “Luddite” to describe technophobes.

For historians, the revolt has traditionally been seen as a watershed moment in which the industrial working classes made their presence felt as a political force for the first time. This supposedly laid the ground for later reform movements, such as Chartism, as well as the Trade Unions.

̽��ֱ��great social historian, EP Thompson, even saw Luddism as something close to the workers’ equivalent of the peasants’ revolt. His definitive study, ̽��ֱ��Making Of ̽��ֱ��English Working Class, linked the insurrection to the birth of a left-wing working class movement in Britain.

Now a study by Richard Jones, a research student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, suggests that Luddism may be celebrated for the wrong reasons. He argues that it was not a movement which represented the concerns of the working classes at all – rather those of privileged professionals with disparate, local concerns. In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.

“For historians, the Luddites have traditionally been seen as a phenomenon of social history,” Jones said. “They are viewed as workers dispossessed by economic advances, frozen out of existing structures and doing whatever they could to make their voices heard. But these were not downtrodden working class labourers – the Luddites were elite craftspeople.”

Focusing in particular on Yorkshire, Jones has examined oral testimonies, trial documents, Parliamentary papers and Home Office reports to establish who the Luddites were, how they operated, and what their chief motivation was.

His findings, some of which will be published in History Today next week, suggest that for a movement representing the birth-pains of a politicised working class, the numbers were peculiarly low. While as many as 150 may have stormed Rawfolds Mill in Huddersfield on April 11, 1812, most of the machine-breaking acts involved groups of four to 10.

Jones believes that this smallness of scale reflects the fact that Luddism was far from a genuinely pan-working class movement. Instead, Luddites were skilled workers – a relatively “elite” group, whose role had traditionally been protected by legislation regulating the supply and conduct of labour.

This centuries-old body of laws had also laid down rules for access to certain professional roles, such as the “croppers”, or cloth dressers, who led the rebellion in Yorkshire. These skilled workers had to spend seven years in apprenticeships before they could take up their chosen profession. At the end of it, they tended to feel that they were owed a living.

New machinery in the textile sector was starting to deny them this. For the real working classes, however, that was an old story – many unskilled jobs had long-since been displaced by technological advances and there was little reason for these groups to get involved in an uprising in 1811/12.

Critically, Jones also challenges the idea that the Luddites were organised into any sort of national movement – in fact, the form of rebellion varies considerably from place to place. In Nottinghamshire, for example, there was less violence, with workers simply removing the jack-wires from new knitting frames so that they collapsed. In Lancashire, however, handloom weavers plugged into radical movements in the densely-populated industrial areas around Manchester, leading to full-blown riots.

̽��ֱ��study of Yorkshire reveals that local grievances lay at the heart of the attack on William Cartwright’s Rawfold’s Mill, and the assassination of William Horsfall, near Huddersfield, on April 28^th. Both had made themselves deeply unpopular with the local workforce already, and the assaults appear to have been linked to this reputation.

Similarly, there is little indication that Yorkshire Luddism, in spite of its explosive high-points, was part of a hierarchical or organised criminal fringe linking up on a national scale. Its leaders met in local pubs, and their grievances similarly represented community concerns.

In spite of this, Luddism succeeded in becoming a cause célèbre in the region, not least because it was picked up in 19^th-Century fiction which presented it as the precursor to later, nationalised reform movements like the Chartists.

“Luddism remains an important aspect of local identity in the regions where it was most active,” Jones added. “ ̽��ֱ��problem with this is that sometimes a fictional interpretation of events can slip into the historical analysis. We can only understand the lessons of history if we look at it properly. Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.”

Two articles by Richard Jones based on his current research on Luddism will be published in the next few weeks: “At War With ̽��ֱ��Future” (History Today, May 2012) and “Where History Happened: Luddites” (BBC History Magazine, May 2012).

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high-water mark of the Luddite rebellion – but new research suggests that the movement may be celebrated for the wrong reasons.

Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.

Richard Jones

Ned Ludd, the mythical Luddite leader, in an 1812 depiction at the height of the rebellion.

Ned Ludd

In brief...

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high point of the Luddite uprising. Two hundred years ago this month, two of the most notorious incidents in the rebellion occurred - the attack on Rawfold's Mill and the assassination of William Horsfall, a local mill-owner. Both happened near Huddersfield in Yorkshire.
̽��ֱ��Luddites were machine breakers, opposed to new automated looms that could be operated by unskilled workers, which meant that many of the skilled craftspeople who had done that work lost their jobs.
̽��ֱ��rebellion started in the Midlands in 1811, but spread to other counties - Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular.
Although they have been remembered as the first in a series of industrial working-class movements, the Luddites were probably just a handful of skilled workers with very specific concerns. It seems unlikely that they had a wider political agenda.
̽��ֱ��notion that the uprising was organised on a national scale is also probably misplaced. ̽��ֱ��concerns of Luddites in specific counties seem to be highly localised and the closest they got to uniting was on a community scale, by meeting in local pubs.

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Well dressed?

tdk25 — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As clothes become cheaper and fashion becomes 'faster', how are we to balance our consumption with environmental, economic and social sustainability?

Growing out of the ‘green’ movement of the 1960s, concerns over the environment began to turn towards ‘sustainability’ in the 1990s. Today, interest is also sharply focused on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions, and consumers in developed economies have become increasingly aware of the environmental impact of the products they buy and the social conditions of those who make them.

There are signs that this awareness is beginning to influence the way people shop. Last year, Marks and Spencer (M&S) decided, at some risk, to convert all of its coffee and tea sales to products made under the ‘Fairtrade’ agreement (which helps disadvantaged producers in the developing world). Sales grew 12% immediately and, after a year, remain 6% higher than previously.

These environmental and social concerns are no less true for the clothing industry. Dr Julian Allwood and researchers at the Institute for Manufacturing in the Department of Engineering have been exploring the environmental, social and economic sustainability of a wide range of future scenarios for the supply of clothing and textiles to the UK. ̽��ֱ��project involved five person-years of effort and led to a major report entitled Well Dressed? published in December 2006.

̽��ֱ��price of fast fashion

̽��ֱ��environmental consequences of our textile consumption are complex and occur at different stages of a garment’s life: from the cultivation of cotton, through garment manufacture, laundering and disposal at the end of its life.

Specific effects on the environment include the use of toxic chemicals in cotton agriculture and manufacture; the high water consumption, particularly for cotton crop cultivation; the contribution to climate change through energy use during manufacture and by laundering clothes; and the solid waste created from the manufacture and disposal of clothing.

These environmental concerns go hand-in-hand with social concerns about the employment of low-paid workers in developing countries, particularly their working hours and safety, and the use of child labour. There are recognised needs for a realistic minimum living wage that would allow workers to escape a cycle of poverty and the rights of workers to form unions.

̽��ֱ��solution? Buy less, keep it longer

̽��ֱ��main conclusion of the analysis is that the impacts of the sector are largely driven by the volume of material passing through it – so the greatest beneficial change would occur if we purchased less clothing and kept it for longer. Although this appears economically negative, it need not be – it could be achieved if we spent twice as much on half the number of (higher quality) garments.

Separately from reducing the flow of material, improvements can be achieved by increasing the efficiency of each process applied to the material. ̽��ֱ��most important process at present is that of laundering – washing clothes at lower temperatures and hang-drying to avoid use of a tumble dryer would approximately halve the total life-cycle energy used by cotton garments. Also, moving from conventional to organic cotton would eliminate the use of toxic chemicals. And increasing the re-use of materials (particularly of man-made materials such as polyester) would save the high energy requirement of new material production.

Weaving the threads of change

An understanding that emerged from this study is that any change that will result in environmental and social benefits in the textile industry will be driven by consumers. How would an ‘ideal’ consumer act? They would buy fewer, longer-lasting garments, choosing those with the least ‘carbon footprint’ made by workers in reasonable working conditions; buy more second-hand clothing; wash clothes less often at a lower temperature using eco-detergents; and recycle those clothes that had reached the end of their lives.

If consumers change their behaviour, companies will follow very quickly, and politicians may follow also. ̽��ֱ��experience of M&S with Fairtrade tea and coffee shows how companies can begin to take a lead in supporting such change – but however willing the company, they can only move with their customers. Consumer education is the key to supporting a move towards beneficial change. ̽��ֱ��very positive media reaction to Well Dressed? has shown that there is growing public interest in responding to concerns about ‘sustainability’ and it is hoped that some of the outcomes will also translate to other sectors.

A world trade

̽��ֱ��clothing and textile industry is a significant part of the world’s economy: In 2000, approximately $1trillion was spent on clothes by consumers worldwide, a third of this in western Europe and a third in North America.

̽��ֱ��industry directly employs at least 26 million people and accounts for around 7% of total world exports.
More than a quarter of the world’s production of clothing and textiles is in China, with Pakistan, Bangladesh and India also making a significant contribution. Trade in clothing and textiles accounts for more than 70% of the exports of Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
̽��ֱ��European Union and Mediterranean region retain a strong clothing and textiles industry – with over 4 million people employed, including around 200,000 in the UK.
In the UK, we spent an estimated £625 per head on clothing in 2004. Increased spending between 2001 and 2005 coincided with dropping prices largely due to the rise of ‘fast fashion’ – with sales at supermarkets and chains such as H&M and Zara providing a faster turnover of styles than previously.
Today, we are purchasing and disposing of around 35 kg of clothing and textiles per person each year, of which around 13% is collected for re-use, 13% is incinerated, and the remainder – 26 kg per person – is buried in landfill.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Julian Allwood (jma42@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Engineering. This research was funded by the UK’s landfill tax credit scheme through Biffa and a contribution from M&S. ̽��ֱ��full report Well Dressed? ̽��ֱ��Present and Future Sustainability of Clothing and Textiles in the UK can be downloaded from https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/resources/sustainability/well-dressed/.

As clothes become cheaper and fashion becomes 'faster', how are we to balance our consumption with environmental, economic and social sustainability?

Any change that will result in environmental and social benefits in the textile industry will be driven by consumers

Dr Julian Allwood

plemeljr from Flickr

Stacks of Clothes

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