My daughter pressed this book into my hand saying she had a spare copy. Fascinating from the outset. I wanted to rush out and beat flax. Kassia St Clair weaves her tale by stepping the reader through fabric's historical important with some memorable moments

Outfitting an ordinary Viking cargo ship and its crew, including sailcloth, sailors' clothing and bedding is estimated to have required 200 kilograms of wool, and the equivalent of 10 years' labour... By some estimates, the sailcloth of the Norwegian Viking-era fleet would have required wool from up to 2 million sheep. (p.114)

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The part I've most quoted concerns how the NASA space suit contract was won by Playtex (bras and girdles) and the difficulty NASA engineers had working with the highly skilled seamstresses who had the skill to layer the suits so accurately.

...each suit came with its own stack of onionskin paper a foot high covered with technical drawings and engineering jargon lovingly describing every layer and stitch, which was entirely separate from - and never used by - the women actually making them. (p. 236)

This is an enthralling book that gets more and more interesting.
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want to read/buy

An easy read that uses as it’s basic frame any facts of interest associated with fabric. Lots of fascinating trivia and interesting history. ( )

The Golden Thread How Fabric Changed History
Karisa St. Clair John Murray Pub. 2018

The threads that create fabric have profoundly shaped our history. This book tells engaging tales about them.

Roughly organized around fibers - bast, linen, silk, wool and cotton - with subsequent chapters covering arctic/everest, competitive sport, space, synthetic and spider silk fabrics, I’m amazed at the amount of fascinating information she’s managed to pack into this medium size book. Factual data is footnoted - this isn’t just one woman’s opinion.

An introductory chapter presents women-centered themes with anecdotes. They include: reasons why textile work has been undervalued in recorded history; cotton created and sustained the industrial revolution; and incredibly, Sigmund Freud preached that women wove because of (seriously) a “genital deficiency”.

St. Clair then embarks on a fascinating tour of the male-dominated archaeology of early humans. Much textile evidence was discarded as irrelevant to the history of our species. What fragments remain show that the earliest weavers of bast fibers worked between 32,000 and 19,000 years ago. They wove with 8 colors including pink and blue-violet. Weirdly, the genetics of head lice have shown that we first wore cloth between 72,000 and 42,000 years ago. Indian subcontinent finds show that one pound of cotton was spun into thread 200 miles long during that time. And we call these folks “primitive”.

Then on to Egypt, linen and mummies. King Tut was swathed in 16 layers of linen, most of which were discarded by the discoverers. Other mummies had 28 pounds of linen wrappings; one had 50 meters of inscribed bandages. The author demonstrates how linen was essential to preservation of the bodies.

China and silk. I can’t begin to summarize the 5,000 year history she reviews in 40 pages. Some factoids: one thread from a cocoon is 30 microns wide, half the width of a human hair; silk fabric was used as currency for thousands of years; the Silk Road was perhaps the biggest transmitter of culture the world has known; King John of England had 185 silk shirts in 1216, all carried across the Silk Road; in classical Rome, prostitutes were the early adopters of silk fabric and noble women eventually adopted it, whereupon the philosophers condemned it as immoral and indecent, and passed laws forbidding men from wearing it; a silkworm goddess was worshiped through the 19th century in Shanghai textile factories. And that’s just the historical background.

Vikings had wool. Lots and lots of wool. It took around 200 kilos (440 lbs.) of wool and the equivalent of 10 years labor to outfit one Viking ship. One sheep yielded 500 grams of wool suitable for sails, so roughly 400 sheep equaled one ship’s fitting out. Some historians think that a major reason for the Vikings’ raids on England was that England had even more sheep.

Thanks to all those sheep, England became the wool fabric producer of the western world. Their craftspeople became extremely skilled in breeding white and high quality fleece animals, which led to a thriving export business. The fabric was made using warp-weighted and later harness looms in cottages - as we know, a slow process. As cotton became available, imported from the colonies, the flying shuttle and then the spinning jenny were invented and the industrial revolution began.

The chapter on cotton focuses initially on its effect on slavery. St. Clair delves deeply into the uses of fabric in the control and rebellion of slaves over the history of the US south. Using advertisements which searched for escaped slaves in contemporary newspapers, she analyzes the clothing that they wore and took with them. The results are fascinating.

Remaining chapters deal with a kaleidoscope of fabrics. She discusses the fur and skins that polar, antarctic and Everest expeditions wore (and froze in) along with cyclical fashions in underwear fabrics - wool/synthetics/wool. Rayon and its lethal carbon disulphide problem show up along with nylon and the frenzy to get “nylons” (remember those horrible things?). Space suit fabrics, heated controversies about innovative swimsuits, sports bras (duct tape was featured) and spider silk end the book. A really fascinating read.

Reviewed by Pat Zimmerman

I really had a difficult time getting interested in the book. After the first couple/few chapters, it became more interesting, but still had a lot more detail than I wanted. I stopped reading it about half way through. ( )