Textile Cloth Quotes

I have learned that each and every piece of cloth embodies the spirit, skill, and personal history of an individual weaver. . . . It ties together with an endless thread the emotional life of my people.

Britain also banned exports from its colonies that competed with its own products, home and abroad. It banned cotton textile imports from India ('calicoes'), which were then superior to the British ones. In 1699 it banned the export of woolen cloth from its colonies to other countries (the Wool Act), destroying the Irish woolen industry and stifling the emergence of woollen manufacture in America.

If you represent the plumbing and heating business, you are the mortal enemy of the textile industry, because warmer homes mean lighter clothes. If you represent the printers, how can you shake hands with the radio equipment man?…

The cultural authenticity of cloth arises not from the purity of its origins but from the ways in which individuals and groups turn textiles to their own purposes. Consumers, not producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles.

Once, in sixth-grade history, we watched a documentary on King Tut. When the archaeologists first opened his tomb, they heard a loud tearing sound, like a knife gashing through cloth. It was the sound of all the textiles inside the tomb, the imperial fabrics, ripping at the sudden exposure to fresh air.

Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.

Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores.

Alternatively, the name may refer to the prized textile dye, ranging in hue from red to dark purple, which was Phoenicia’s prime luxury product. Extracted from sea mollusks’ dead bodies through a secret process, this uniquely beautiful and expensive purple, exported in woven clothing and furnishings, became an international status symbol in antiquity, its use confined to the very rich, chiefly royalty. Down through the early 20th century A.D., the color purple was associated in Europe with kings and emperors.

By the latter part of 1861 the War Department had taken over from the states the responsibility for feeding, clothing, and arming Union soldiers. But this process was marred by inefficiency, profiteering, and corruption. To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called “shoddy.” This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general on items necessary to equip an army of half a million men and to create its support services within a few short months.

<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,” stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended largely on the international demand for cotton as the world entered the age of industrialization, led by the British textile industry. There was an increasing demand for clothing that was cheaper than linen and not as hot and heavy as wool.

When “free trade” was imposed upon the Ottoman Empire in 1838 and British cloth “flooded the market in Izmir,” local cotton workers lost their ability to maintain their old production regime. In coastal southeastern Africa, cotton yarn and cloth imports also began to devastate the local cotton textile industry. In Mexico, European cotton imports had a serious impact on local manufacturing—before tariffs enabled Mexican industrialization, Guadalajara’s industry had been, as one historian found, “virtually eliminated.” In Oaxaca, 450 out of 500 looms ceased operating. In China, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced the opening of markets, and the subsequent influx of European and North American yarn and cloth had a “devastating” effect, especially on China’s hand spinners.22

No one can or will ever replace the love Andy, you, and I shared, but life goes on and we have to flow with it. I completed my postgraduate fashion design at the Royal College of Art, London in 1977; I then worked for Liberty of London for a few years before venturing into designing my own bridal wear collections for several major London department stores. In 1979, the Hong Kong Polytechnic now a university invited me to teach fashion design at their clothing and textile institute. Andy and I separated in 1970. He left for New Zealand to pursue engineering while I stayed in London to complete my fashion studies. Those early years of our separation were extremely difficult for the both of us. As you are well aware, we were very close at boarding school. After your departure to Vienna, Andy and I were inseparable. He asked me to join him permanently in Christchurch, but I was determined to enroll in a London fashion school. We corresponded for a couple of years before mutually deciding that it was best to severe ties and start afresh.

Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.

OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY I don’t know of people who do everything from going to school, learning different skills and basically develop themselves so that they stay at home. It’s ingrained in every kid that they should study hard and excel so that they can get good jobs and live well. With that said, working is what makes us build nations and fulfill some our dreams so it’s important to ensure that the work environment is kept safe and comfortable for workers so that they can remain productive for the longest time. However as long as we are living there will SWMS always be greedy employers who will take short cuts or fail to protect their employees and this is where OSHA(occupational safety and health administration)comes in to rectify these issues. Occupational safety is ensuring that employees work in danger free environment. There are many industries of different nature and hence the possible hazards vary. For example in the textile and clothing industry, employees deal with dyes, chemicals and machines that spin , knit and weave to ensure production. In some countries there have been cases of sweatshops where people make clothes in poorly ventilated places for long hours. The tools of trade in all industries are still the ones that cause hazards e.g. machines can cut people, chemicals emit poisonous fumes or burn the skin and clothes etc. Its therefore the mandate of employers to ensure work places are safe for workers and incase the industry uses chemicals or equipments that may harm the workers in any way, they should provide protective gear. Employers can also seek the services of occupational safety specialists who can inspect their companies to ensure they adhere to the set health and safety standards. These specialists can also help formulate programs that will prevent hazards and injuries. Workers should report employers to OSHA if they fail to comply. As a worker you now know it’s partly your duty to hold your employer accountable so do not agree to work in a hazardous environment.

But what, I ask, was life really like? What hard evidence do we have for what we might want to know about women's lives? No evidence means no real knowledge.

Of course, being perishable, the textiles themselves are not easy to learn about -- just like most of the rest of women's products (such as food and the recipes for preparing it). Therefore, to recover the reality of women's history, we must develop excellent techniques ... using not just the obvious data but learning to ferret out every helpful detail. Practical experiments like reweaving some of the surviving ancient cloths are a case in point. Among the thousands of archaeologists who have written about pottery or architecture, how many have actually tried to to make a pot or build a building? Precious few; but with so much data available for study in these fields, scholars felt flooded with information already, and such radical steps hardly seemed necessary. Our case is different; we must use every discoverable clue.

In 1991, 56.2% of all clothes purchased in the United States were American-made. By 2012, it was down to 2.5%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1990 and 2012, the U.S. textile and garment industry lost 1.2 million jobs. That was more than 3/4s the sectors labor force, said it to Latin America and Asia. Once-vibrant industrial centers down the Eastern Seaboard and across the South faded into ghost towns, as factories sat empty and those who were laid off went on unemployment. In the United Kingdom in the 1980s, one million worked in the UK textile industry; now, only 100,000 do. The same went down across most of Western Europe. All of heroin textile jobs globally nearly doubled, from 34.2 million to 57.8 million.

was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies’ exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather together all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your own autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb, to your deathbed. As if the textile itself has memory, formed as it does out of its intimate closeness with our bodies, a coat or a dress or a pair of trousers is a witness to the fact that once we went for a job interview, or on a hot date. Or that we got married. The dress was there with us, it’s proof of who we once were. The clothes we wear, they comfort and protect us; they allow us to be who we want to be.

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather together all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your own autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb, to your deathbed. As if the textile itself has memory, formed as it does out of its intimate closeness with our bodies, a coat or a dress or a pair of trousers is a witness to the fact that once we went for a job interview, or on a hot date. Or that we got married. The dress was there with us, it’s proof of who we once were. The clothes we wear, they comfort and protect us; they allow us to be who we want to be.

It is hard to find many better examples of values-first leadership than Ventura, California-based outdoor clothing company Patagonia. For more than 30 years, the company has defied conventional wisdom by building its brand as much around environmental responsibility as on quality products and service. How many businesses would run a marketing campaign encouraging customers to not buy new products but repair the old ones instead in order to reduce their environmental footprint? Only companies interested in creating a “lovability economy” would prioritize sustainable growth for themselves and the world and take a long-term perspective. They see themselves as stewards of meaningful relationships and understand that mutually positive interactions and exchanges of value are lasting. Patagonia has even made its supply chain public with an online map showing every farm, textile mill, and factory it uses in sourcing its materials and manufacturing its products. Anyone who wants to can see where their Patagonia products come from and verify that the company is walking the walk — using sustainable materials and producing apparel in facilities that are safe for workers. That is transparency that breeds trust. Founder Yvon Chouinard’s vision has also led to a culture that is not only employee-friendly (the company even encourages employees at its corporate headquarters to quit early when the surf is up) but attracts people whose values align with the company’s. This aggressively anti-profit, pro-values approach has yielded big dividends. The privately-held benefit corporation is tight-lipped about its revenues, but two years after it began its “cause marketing” campaign, sales increased 27 percent, to $575 million in 2013.7

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

For women, cloth also tended to represent the work of their hands, the female branches of family trees, and notions of the feminine ideal. Passing on a textile, then, symbolized women's ability, creativity, and continuance.

1.​Textile production produces an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2e per year, which is more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.47 2.​The average person buys 60 per cent more items of clothing than they did just fifteen years ago, and keeps them for about half as long.48 3.​By 2030, global clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63 per cent, from 62 million tonnes to 102 million tonnes. That’s equivalent to more than 500 billion extra T-shirts.49 4.​By 2050, the equivalent of almost three earths could be required to provide the natural resources it would take to sustain our current lifestyles.50 5.​A polyester shirt has more than double the carbon footprint of a cotton shirt.51 And yet the cotton needed to make a single T-shirt can take 2,700 litres of water to grow – that’s enough drinking water to last a person three years.52 6.​At its current rate, the fashion industry is projected to use 35 per cent more land to grow fibres by 2030. That’s an extra 115 million hectares of land that could otherwise be used to grow food, or left to protect biodiversity.53 7.​Approximately 80 per cent of workers in the global garment industry are women aged 18–35.54 But only 12.5 per cent of clothing companies have a female CEO.55 8.​Among seventy-one leading retailers in the UK, 77 per cent believe there is a likelihood of modern slavery (forced labour) occurring at some stage in their supply chains.56 9.​More than 90 per cent of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility of negotiating their wages and conditions.57 10.​Increasing the price of a garment in the shop by 1 per cent could be enough to pay the workers who made it a living wage.58

Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced. Cloth isn’t just for clothes, after all. “Increasingly complex societies required more and more textiles,” she writes. The Roman army, for instance, was a mass consumer of textiles.… Building a fleet required long term planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce. The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested, and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.

Requiring caretaking and at the same time providing solace, “textiles are often mobilized in the face of trauma, and not just to provide needed garments or coverings but also as a therapeutic means of comfort, a safe outlet for worried hands, a productive channel for the obsessive working through of loss,” explains one art historian.17 Fabric is a special category of thing to people—tender, damageable, weak at its edges, and yet life-sustaining. In these distinctive features, cloth begins to sound like this singular planet we call home. Cloth operates as a “convincing analogue for the regenerative and degenerative processes of life, and as a great connector, binding humans not only to each other but to the ancestors of their past and the progeny of their future,” fiber artist Ann Hamilton has written. “Held by cloth’s hand,” she continues, “we are swaddled at birth, covered in sleep, and shrouded in death. A single thread spins a myth of origin and a tale of adventure and interweaves people and webs of communication.

To put it in somewhat contradictory terms, true tea existed only before the advent of the tea ceremony. After the coming of tea, when deformation came to be consciously sought, common everyday beauty disappeared and unnatural manipulation began. This meant the demise of the beauty of tea. Every country, according to its historical and geographical conditions, has its own peculiar character. India is characterized by intellect, China by ready action and Japan by aesthetic perception - the three splendors of the East. Indians are adept at thinking, Chinese at acting and Japanese at appreciating art. In Europe, France is close to Japan, Judaism to China and Germany to India. In Germany, however, the intellect tends to be philosophical rather than religious. While there may be many intrinsic contradictions, I still think that there is probably no country like Japan whose people live in surroundings composed of specially chosen objects. Behind it all is undoubtedly some sort of educated taste or standard of beauty. In Korea, the number of monochrome pieces in white or black glaze is stupendous. there are no intricate designs featuring a multitude of colors. the same is true for Korean textiles, which are undyed. Everyone wears white clothing.

Clothing industry is not only professionals but also generate huge amount of profit. Many professionals like Sisi Tex World who is actively involved in fabric retailing prefers clothing industry as a fashion trend of a country which represents specialty of a nation.

In “The Writing of the God,” Borges also described that whirling wheel of time as a fabric embroidered with impossible complexity. (The words text and textile are both from the Latin texere, to weave: writing is, perhaps first of all, woven, a fabric of overlapping threads.) His imprisoned priest glimpsed the entire weave at once without any of the comforting lies of narrative, without cutting it down to a single and seductive swathe that, once chosen, negates all other possibilities and obscures the remainder of the cloth from which it’s spun.

Though Shola had found a way to carry home with her—in the hairstyles she wore, the thin twists and box braids and cornrows that clung to her scalp and swung against her back. And even in her clothes—an array of styles created with African textile. Sometimes, she found it was the least she could do to keep home close—maintain this outward appearance, an often exaggerated idea of what it meant to be Nigerian or African in general.

Textile archaeologists have calculated the amount of cloth that would have been required to equip the Ladby ship, a good example of a medium-sized warship found in a burial mound on the island of Fyn in Denmark. Based on a sail size of eighty square metres (probably a conservative estimate), it would have taken two person-years of ten-hour days to make just one mainsail weighing about fifty kilos, and nobody would put to sea without reserve sailcloth that might save their lives. This workload is also something of an ideal figure, so the reality would have been closer to three or even four person-years for one sail. This was not solo work, of course, but the permutations of time for increasingly large teams of textile workers are easy to calculate. Then there were the sea-clothes. As far as we can tell, these were multi-layered assemblies of coarse, thickly lined, insulated fabric able to withstand the weather of the open ocean. The Ladby ship had a crew of thirty-two, judging by the oar positions. Using the same ten-hour-day production pace as for the sails, it would have taken perhaps twenty-four person-years to fit out the crew. And added even to this are rugs, tents, a variety of other clothing (including a change of clothes for wet conditions), plus ropes, cordage, and the like.

Is organic cotton the future of sustainable development? With the increase in climate change and global warming, each step taken by us matters, be it even by transforming our cotton closet into an organic cotton closet. We are living in a time, where each step will either lead to an immense increase in global warming or will lead to the protection of our Mother Earth. So why not make our actions count and take a step by protecting our nature by switching to organic clothing?! As we know, the fashion industry is one of the largest industry of today, in which the cotton textiles lead the line together with the cotton manufacture setting them as the highest-ranked in the fashion industry. These pieces of regular cotton those are constructed into garments leads to 88% more wastage of water from our resources. Whereas Organic Cotton that has been made from natural seeds and handpicked for maintaining the purity of fibres; uses 1,982 fewer gallons of water compared to regular cotton. Gallons of water used by: Regular cotton: 2168 gallons Organic Cotton: 186 gallons Due to increase in market size of the fashion industry every year along with the cotton industry; regular cotton is handpicked by workers to keep up with the increase in demand for the regular cotton and because these crops are handpicked it leads to various damages and crises such as: Damage of fibres: As regular cotton is grown as mono-crop it destroys the soil quality, that exceeds the damage when handpicked by the farmers, leading to also the destruction of fibres because of the speed and time limit ordered. Damage of crops: Regular cotton leads to damage of crops when it is handpicked, as not much attention is paid while plucking it in bulk, due to which all the effort, time and resources used to cultivate the crops drain-out to zero. Water wastage: The amount of clean water being depleted to produce regular cotton is extreme that might lead to a water crisis. The clean water when used for manufacturing turns into toxic water that is disposed into freshwater bodies, causing a hazardous impact on the people deprived of this natural resource. Wastage of resources: When all the above-mentioned factors are ignored by the manufactures and the farmers, it directly leads to the waste of resources, as the number of resources used to produce the regular cotton is way high in number when compared to the results at the end. Regular cotton along with these damages also demands to use chemical dyes for their further process, that is not only harmful to our body but is also very dangerous to the workers exposed to it, as these chemicals lead to many health problems like earring aids, lunch cancer, skin cancer, eczema and many more, other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long Know More about synthetic dyes on ‘Why synthetic dye stands for the immortality done to Nature?’ Organic cotton, when compared to regular cotton, brings a radical positive change to the environment. To manufacture, just one t-shirt, regular cotton uses 16% of the world’s insecticides, 7% pesticides and 2,700 litres of water, when compared to this, organic cotton uses 62% less energy than regular Cotton. Bulk Organic Cotton Fabric Manufacturer: Suvetah is one of the leading bulk organic cotton fabric manufacturer in India. Suvetah is GOTS certified sustainable fabric manufacturer in Organic Cotton Fabric, Linen Fabric and Hemp Fabric. We are also manufacturer of other fabrics like Denim, Kala Cotton Fabric, Ahimsa Silk Fabric, Ethical Recycled Cotton Fabric, Banana Fabric, Orange Fabric, Bamboo Fabric, Rose Fabric, Khadi Fabric etc.

If geography and time are the warp and weft structuring (art) history, perceptual culture is like the pile of a velvet cloth that, without altering the warp or weft of the fabric, reenchants its texture and depth. It treats Islam as the Simurgh, and objects as its feathers. Like the galleries in China full of representations futilely and obsessively trying to reconstruct the bird from its feathers, the museum is a monument to our inability to feel what we are trying to represent. And yet like the three princes seeking the hand of the Chinese princess in the gallery of creation, we can also discover through objects the spirit we can never expect to pin down in our hands. With these hopes tucked in between the warp of evidence and the weft of interpretation, this book would like to quote a certain textile from a very long time ago: I exist for pleasure; Welcome! For pleasure am I; he who beholds me sees joy and well-being. This book offers complex more than simple pleasures: its many questions diverge and converge, offering iridescence to our certainties. It puts forth the pleasure of using thought as steel wool polishing our mental acumen, enabling perception beyond predetermined realities. It may be that a barzakh exists somewhere between the secular and the sacred, a peninsula of understanding in which we enter the cave of our ghurba and become in the world but not of it. If we tread lightly with a pure heart cleansed in the mirror of curiosity and wonder, it may just open its doors a bit and let us explore the glory it holds inside.

What opium provided was the liquidity for Britain to buy American cotton. To reduce the connections to their simplest: British plantations produced opium in India, the opium was shipped and sold in China, the silver that paid for this opium was shipped to the United States to buy raw cotton, which was shipped to England to manufacture cloth, which was shipped to India (where the company had been successful in suppressing the native cotton textile industry), the proceeds of which then bought more opium.

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake—or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many coloured variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist.

Her dream of being a textile artist had actually begun as a fetish for vintage clothing. Not because she loved clothes. She’d never cared about fashion. It was fabric that captivated her, the way it moved and felt and behaved. Watered silks and pebbly knits, crisp organdy, diaphanous lace, nubby tweeds and lamb-soft worsteds, each with a texture and personality all its own. Her first attempt had been crude and unsophisticated, but a passion for creation had already found its way into her blood, driving her to perfect her craft with practice and new techniques. What had started as a fetish had become a quiet obsession, resulting in a series of pieces dubbed the Storm Watch Collection.

There is no such thing as a meaningless job in the Fleet. Everything has a purpose, a recognisable benefit. If you have food on your plate, you thank a farmer. If you have clothing, you thank a textile manufacturer. If you have murals to brighten your day, you thank an artist. Even the most menial of tasks benefits someone, benefits all.

Cotton also enriched Northerners: “Northern ships carried cotton to New York and Europe, northern bankers and merchants financed the cotton crop, northern companies insured it, and northern factories turned cotton into textiles. The ‘free states’ had abolished slavery, but they remained intimately linked to the peculiar institution.”37 Slavery’s tentacles reached across America, where Americans wore clothing made of cotton produced by slaves. Likewise, since slave rebellions impacted the economy, the nation “developed a network of controls in the southern states, backed by laws courts, armed forces, and race prejudice of the nation’s political leaders.

when Alice came home from wherever other girls or women had been gathered, she always hurried to her mother with earnest descriptions of the clothing she had seen. At such times, if Adams was present, he might recognize “organdie,” or “taffeta,” or “chiffon,” as words defining certain textiles, but the rest was too technical for him, and he was like a dismal boy at a sermon, just waiting for it to get itself finished.

Now, it is possible that the ground-loom existed farther north also: to the northeast, in the steppes (where, however, large cloths to this day are by preference made by felting), and to the northwest, where it might conceivably have co-existed with the warp- weighted loom, the two looms having been specialized for different purposes. Yet the warp-weighted loom is so different in its concept that it is hard to believe that it was not independently invented, by people who originally knew nothing of the two-beam ground-loom, although they almost certainly already knew the principle of weaving under tension, as with a backstrap loom, for example (see Chapter 11

The standard fiber of world history, America's traditional crop, hemp, could provide our textiles and paper and be the premier source for cellulose. The war industries—DuPont, Allied Chemical, Monsanto, etc.,—are protected from competition by the marijuana laws. They make war on the natural cycle and the common farmer.

Zandra Rhodes Zandra Rhodes is a British fashion designer who specializes in innovative textile design. Internationally recognized for her glamorous and dramatic style, she was honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997 and made a Commander of the British Empire. Currently in high demand by the rich and famous worldwide, Zandra designed many garments for Diana during the nineties. Princess Diana married very young. She was a perfect, unspoiled flower with a strong, generous inner spirit, which she was probably unaware of when she married Prince Charles. She was thrust unprepared into the position of future queen of England. She had to grow up and mature in front of the public eye. That public eye was hard, judgmental, and unforgiving. Her strong inner spirit guided her to do things that normally someone in her position would not do--it would have been suppressed. Diana acted in a very genuine, caring, and natural way. I was bicycling to work in London along the leafy Bayswater Road in very casual working clothes when a huge official limousine passed me. Against the rear window were two beautiful hats; the car was obviously going to Ascot. The two young girls in the car were waving at me (very enthusiastically), one with golden corn-colored hair and the other one blond. They looked exactly like Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. I thought, “It cannot be them, they would not be so friendly, casual, and outgoing, and anyway, it’s the wrong side of Kensington Palace, and cars going to Ascot do not come along this road.” I pretended I had not seen them and carried on cycling. A few weeks later, I was fitting the Princess in Kensington Palace and she said to me, “Are you still riding your bike?” “Yes,” I replied. It was not until I left and drove my car out of the palace grounds that I realized the route took me exactly to the Bayswater Road, where I had seen the two waving girls! Princess Diana always tried to make me feel at home when I was fitting her. She would talk about the problems of being recognized: how she came out of her gym in Kensington High Street in the pouring rain and bumped into a famous actor. As he entered the street, he hunched his shoulders and put on dark glasses. Princess Diana said to him, “I hope they disguise you more than they do me!

Winter arrived with the month of June, which is the December of the northern zones, and the great business was the making of warm and solid clothing. The musmons in the corral had been stripped of their wool, and this precious textile material was now to be transformed into stuff. Of course Cyrus Harding, having at his disposal neither carders, combers, polishers, stretchers, twisters, mule-jenny, nor self-acting machine to spin the wool, nor loom to weave it, was obliged to proceed in a simpler way, so as to do without spinning and weaving. And indeed he proposed to make use of the property which the filaments of wool possess when subjected to a powerful pressure of mixing together, and of manufacturing by this simple process the material called felt. This felt could then be obtained by a simple operation which, if it diminished the flexibility of the stuff, increased its power of retaining heat in proportion.

The first and the most exciting thing for me as someone who has studied growth across countries from a macro perspective was that there is something truly unique about the Indian development model. I call this the ‘precocious development model’, since a precocious child does things far ahead of its time—in both the good and bad sense. Political scientists have often observed that India is a complete outlier in having sustained democracy at very low levels of income, low levels of literacy, with deep social fissures, and with a highly agrarian economy. Almost no country in the world has managed that under these conditions. I think the only continuous democracies have all been small countries (Costa Rica, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius and Botswana) with higher levels of literacy and fewer social divisions. The second part of the precocious model is that it entails not just precocious politics but also precocious economics. There are many ways of explaining this precocious economics model, but I focus on two. Most countries grow by either specializing in or exploiting their minerals—as in the old model—and in some cases, exploiting their geography. But most of the post-war growth experiences have come about by becoming manufacturing powerhouses, especially starting with low-skill labour and going up the value-added spectrum. Korea, Taiwan and China are classic examples, specializing in textiles and clothing initially and now becoming major exporters of electronics, cars, IT products, etc.

In North Carolina I have visited the textile mills and have watched the giant looms that turn out cloth for the nation. The shuttles move with the speed of lightning, scarcely visible to the naked eye. Job says that his days are “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle.” Life passes so quickly it is almost over before we realize it. The Bible says this is the chronology of eternity. Though you live to be seventy, eighty, or ninety years old, that is but a snap of the finger compared to eternity. Put your hand on your heart and feel it beat. It is saying, “Quick! Quick! Quick!” We have only a few brief years at the most. Let’s live them for the Lord.

Even those who were not professional textile workers spent many of their waking hours spinning thread for their families’ clothing.