I recently read "The Golden Thread - How fabric changed history" by Kassia St Clair (Published 2018). One of the most riveting reads of the year for me. I quite enjoyed my time with the book and the journeys it took me on, both on its pages, and down the memory lanes.
I enjoy reading history. The new perspectives are fodder to my imagination. History does not repeat itself they say. But it does widen the possible. It opens up more territory, unlocks a lot more of the landscape and let your view roll over a wider place. May be not for the repeat value, but just to understand how narratives evolve. How stuff has evolved over times, come to take on different meanings and different contexts.
The book looks at history from the perspective of fabric, rather than empires or countries, or gold or other metals or famous people. The history as well as the economics. Of linen and flax and Egypt. Of silk and the China which made that silk, and the silk roads. Of wool and the role it played in Viking expansion and history. Of Spider silk, and man-made fibres. An interesting perspective given that it is one of the less documented aspects of history but which has captured the time, imagination and underpaid labors of most of the women of those times, if not many men. At times, the book can seem like a record of lots of facts, but more often than not, the narrative structure takes over and recreates the world of bygone times.
For most of history, clothing was not easily and cheaply accessible as the current times of fast fashion and weekly drops. The time and effort that went in making a woolen sail, or fine silk, made these textiles as valuable in certain cases as I would think real estate is to people in current times. Then, lives were limited, things were limited, a good outer layer/ cape was as valuable as renting an apartment for several years in modern times, when people valued everything that they had because they had only so much and everything came with extreme effort, not from a sale at the local mall. Talk about mindful minimalism and clutter free living. (To get a sense of the mindless consumption age we live in, watch this video from the Economist). The business of fashion is big business. Somewhere in the book it mentions that the number of new clothing manufactured globally is equivalent to everyone on earth getting 20 new items!
The book took me back to my roots as well. I have grown up in India, in a town where the main industry is textiles. Everyone I knew had something to do with textiles or fabric. Making them, trading in them or working for firms that were doing that. Yarn, weaving, spinning, processing, fabric - mainly synthetics. I learnt about warp and weft when I was quite little, and saw looms in action churning out fabrics. I saw spinning mills full of spindles and rotors, and got reminded of the presence of fabric processing units through the chemical stench when one crossed them on the highway. In the town, there was even a devoted college teaching the engineering that goes in making modern textiles. That was part of our school outing: a trip to the textile college. The way kids are taken to Canberra here in Australia.
Then summer holidays at grandparents. They lived in their mill compound. The mill was cottonseed mill. Part of the facility was ginning, taking out the seeds from cotton before it was wrapped up in some really big bags to be sent to yarn factories and part of the mill was devoted to making cotton-seed oil and cakes (for animal feed?). Most of my long, hot summer days were spent on big cotton mounds with my cousins, imagining ourselves as skiers on cool, snow covered mountains, or inventing new games to be played on the fluffy mounds (these white mounds in a dusty compound - such non routine, random thing in a routine existence), stray sounds of the mill workers (mostly women) talking over the sound of the ginning machines, shouting to get themselves heard over the racket; sounds wafting to us with lint wafts. To the chagrin of the parents, we roamed around with lint covered clothes, and often sticky thorns from raw cotton sticking to everything.
As a girl growing up in a conservative Indian provincial town, I learnt what was usual for kids to learn, what one would call, a lot of 'craft' with fabric, tie and dye and crocheting and a bit of sewing which I couldn't catch on to, and embroidery (which I enjoyed), and painting on fabrics (which I loved) and weaving woolen scarves (found it monotonous) and batik/block printing, and all such ‘crafts’ associated with fabric. It is a way to get the creativity channeled and the process and the output, both can be satisfying. Even now, a trip through villages in India will bring one face to face with crafts and methods of working which can easily link one to ages gone long, long ago. Fast vanishing, but still there.
The book took me to all those places, and more (modern textiles, and my recent work was about investing in that space, about the business of fashion). Perhaps I never associated much to those lint-like wafting memories of textiles, but come to think of it, it doesn't take long for things to vanish. It sounds so far removed even to my child. What kind of fluffy cotton mountains will he keep in his childhood memories? In need of explaining things to him, I bought a bit of crocheting yarn, and set up some paper clip covered cardboard to try to recreate a bit of loom at home. The warp and weft resulting more in a net than fabric!
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The reading was joyful and the time spent was as pleasing and delectable as a good novel. I read some sections to my son too: the fascinating facts about silk worms and about flax fibres and found him as riveted. We then looked up videos to see how linen is made, and that is how we are connecting with the stuff around us right now.
I enjoyed the book. Enjoyed where it took my thoughts, and the new terrain it opened up. Between history and science, the joys of reading are in trying to find answers to the most visceral or fundamental questions - that what is all this? This world, this universe, all of us. And how we perceive our lives and our realities, and the measure of our lives or the way we define a good life. What and how? How it changes through history. How our eyes are just always trained on the immediate. How generations before have come and gone. And how they’ll do in the future.These books, in their own way channel one's thoughts on that direction, bringing in a lot of wonder and thinking - a lot of personal meditation. And for that reason, reading such books leaves me content, satiated.
Recommended to anyone who enjoys reading history.
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Also, a small note on the typesetting: Loved the way the notes were presented - the formatting, the spacing. Made me want to read the notes in detail. Beautiful stuff.