Virginia Postrel has written an interesting piece that looks at textiles in a way that we, as a population, haven’t really looked at them in many decades: As technology.
Her opening statement asserts her claim rather boldly:
Older than bronze and as new as nanowires, textiles are technology — and they have remade our world time and again
Her article, Losing the Thread, opens in 1939, but stretches back to mankind’s early uses of textiles as a means of exchange and moves forward through time to note the innovations that have come to us through the process of not only creating new fabrics, but also new ways of manufacturing them.
You can read the full article here: Losing the Thread.
