14 September 2013

"The intimate relationship between textiles and society can also be seen in the fundamental role it played in the rise of the capitalist system, as the first large-scale capitalist industry (the production and export of wool in medieval Flanders); in the industrial revolution (the mechanisation of cotton spinning and weaving in eighteenth-century England); in architecture, as the object of the first multi-storied iron frame building (Bage’s flax mill in Shrewsbury, England in 1796); as the subject of the first workingclass history (Henson’s history of the framework-knitters in 1831); or as the subject of the first semiotic text (Roland Barthes, La Mode, Paris, 1963); not to mention that the French word for loom is the same as the general word for profession or trade (métier), and the German word for textiles is the same as the general word for material or matter (Stoffe), which is also the case for the Dutch word stof, as well as in English, with the word ‘material’" - Seth Siegelaub



The Stuff That Matters: Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT
at RavenRow, 2012
/ Center for Social Research on Old Textiles

Headresses


Forbidden Fabrics and the Church


image via MousseMagazine

via RavenRow

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