The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in art, design, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, business, and related subjects.
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing is by Ms. Sofi Thanhauser, who teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute, New York, the United States of America.
The TU Library collection includes several other books about different aspects of clothing.
This book examines the five main fabrics from which clothing is made: linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool.
The author suggests that there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.
She focuses on historical eras when each fabric was fashionable, and analyzes the political, cultural, and environmental impacts of their production.
For example, she discusses the role of cotton in the history of American slavery, the colonization of India, and the repression of Muslim Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province, as well as its part in the sixfold increase in overall water consumption during the 20th century.
Ms. Thanhauser writes in the book’s introduction:
Not far from the house in which I grew up on the island of Martha’s Vineyard is a place that we locals call the Dumptique. […]
Everything at the Dumptique is free, and every year wealthy summer residents of Martha’s Vineyard leave behind extraordinary garments that end up buried among unwanted craft kits, waiting to be discovered by a sharp eye. I went to the Dumptique every Saturday of my adolescence to scavenge, and in this way garments I would never otherwise have touched, let alone owned, came into my possession.
To wit: A loden coat. A Barbour jacket. A pink silk cocktail dress from the 1950s with a cream-colored taffeta lining. A green Marimekko Design Research dress from the 1970s. Swiss-made camisoles with delicate scalloped edges. Camel hair shirts. Arche boots. […]
In the Dumptique I began to notice that the older clothes were almost invariably better and more durably made than the newer ones. I noticed the same thing when I watched old films. […]
My mother grew up in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in the 1950s and 1960s. When she was in high school, a common joke was “what does she, make her own clothes?” to refer to a nerdy or unpopular girl.
This was really, my mother recalls, a coded way of saying that the girl was poor.
What this points to (beyond the barbarity of American high schoolers) is that in the 1960s it was still cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them in a store.
And no wonder: garment manufacture was union work at which highly skilled workers labored and earned a living wage and health benefits.
At the time, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was one of the largest unions in the U.S.
Today, it is no longer cheaper to make your own clothes than to buy them. A task that once fell within the province of the ordinary household is now an esoteric hobby, requiring skills out of reach to most ordinary Americans.
It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt. […]
If it were possible to travel back in time five hundred years, we would be dazzled by the beauty and diversity of the clothing that people made and wore. We would see huipil woven of handspun cotton dyed with cochineal, silk kimono, shibori dyed using indigo, Hezhe dresses made of salmon skin, Kuba textiles woven from palm leaf fiber, embroidered with complex geometric patterns and stained red with dye from the heartwood of a tropical tree, and Russian peasant shifts made from linen, embroidered with threads dyed a deep mauve using local lichen.
We would see the flora and fauna of thousands of micro-environments transformed into cloth: like the scratchy wool of the Herdwick sheep, which thrive on the rocky terrain of the Cumbrian fells of northern England, perfect for the local tweed. The colors of the clothes were drawn from lichen, shells, bark, indigo, saffron, roots, beetles.
The fabric constructions and patterns themselves were astonishing, containing special regional weaves and knits, number magic, protective prayers, and clan symbols, collectively honed motifs, and individual flourishes.
This localism coexisted with trade.
And a type of small-scale textile manufacturing thrived among every group of agriculturalists across the world.
In our present world, whether we traveled to England or Russia, China or Mexico, Kenya or Uruguay, we would see T-shirts, jeans, jackets, and skirts made predominantly of two materials: cotton and petroleum.
At the same time, the system of production responsible for making all these clothes has everywhere become more extractive, centralized, and concentrated among a few megacorporations.
In 2019, global retail sales of apparel and footwear reached 1.9 trillion U.S. dollars.
That’s more than double that year’s global sales of consumer electronics and four times global arms sales.
Meanwhile, Nike’s market capitalization is more than four times that of the Ford Motor Company.
And what had once been the world ’s most common and widely distributed popular art—making textiles—has almost disappeared from the hands of the artisan.
In the preindustrial period, anthropologists estimate, humans devoted at least as many labor hours to making cloth as they devoted to producing food.
It is almost impossible to overstate how enormous was the change in the daily rhythm when textile work disappeared from everyday life and moved into the factory.
The worlds on either side of this schism differed from one another completely: or at least as much as the two different kinds of cloth.
The contemporary clothing trade may be valuable, but the clothes produced are not.
Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production around the world doubled.
This was possible because clothing had become almost completely disposable. Over the course of this almost fifteen-year period consumers came to buy, on average, 60 percent more clothes than they used to, but kept each garment for half as long.
By 2017, one garbage truck of clothes (5,787 pounds) was burned or sent to landfills every second.
Alarm bells have been ringing about fast fashion’s evils: its toxicity and exploitativeness.
These aren’t new problems. What is new is their scale.
Textile and garment work have been dangerous to laborers since industrialization, but three of the four deadliest garment factory disasters in history occurred during the 2010s.
Textile making has been damaging the environment for centuries, but today the industry produces a full fifth of global wastewater, and emits one tenth of global carbon emissions.
“Fast fashion” didn’t spring from a void in the 1990s, the decade during which this term came into circulation.
It isn’t a thirty-year-old problem, but the newest symptom of a problem that is centuries old.
I wanted to go digging for its roots, and discover how our modern clothing system came to be.
This book is not meant to be the all-encompassing history of fabric and its production and importance in the world.
Rather, I want to tell the story of what I found, of how we went from making fabric for ourselves as part of our everyday work to dressing in clothes that come from a complex, inscrutable system that has divorced us from the creative act, from our land, from our rights as consumers and workers.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)