The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History

The Background Character

Imagine you’re watching a movie, and there’s this one character that keeps appearing in the background in several important scenes. This character has a couple of throwaway lines, but she doesn’t have any major dialogue, and nothing happens to indicate that she will affect the story in any significant way. The movie’s plot resolves satisfactorily, and the credits roll without this character ever having been explained.

But you know she’s got to be important. In fact, you might think: if this background figure is the only character in the entire movie to appear in every major scene; maybe if you did a Glass Onion-style flashback to show what she was really up to the whole time, that would be the truthiest version of the movie’s story.

This is kind of how I feel about fabric and history.

When you learn history in elementary school, high school, and in a lot of undergraduate courses, people and places and institutions and things they did are the main characters. But these stories are littered with fabric. The silk road. How the Southern states rebelled in 1861, and England almost supported them, because of cotton. From your first grade social studies picture book to everything else, fabric keeps showing up, uttering few lines but ever present among Vasco da Gama and Mohenjo-Daro and Timbuktu. Part cameo, part MacGuffin, a catalyst of political economy, kings, camels, and war. So when I first saw Kassia St. Clair’s The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History (2018) on a holiday book list a few years ago, the title beckoned.

Not that I critique keeping track of the names, laws and battles, or even that it’s necessarily weird that the first draft of history that we all learn and that most of us don't advance beyond should focus on them. But St. Clair’s book hinted at a deeper mystery solved, a common thread, if you will, pulling through elements of civilization’s unfolding, revealing a deeper or newer level of truth. I was excited for a Glass Onion flashback to world history.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't really tell a single cohesive story about fabric. It doesn’t tie together common ways that different societies or time periods have been affected by fabric. There is unfortunately little speculation, even, about fabric’s broad strokes impact on politics or economics in any single context, let alone across time. There aren’t much in the way of reflections on fabric as a common essential element of the human experience with resonance across history's traditional domains. History's main characters from grade school social studies are still the main characters. St. Clair seems to be making the point that, simply, fabric was there.

What we're left with instead is a series of unconnected anecdotes and snippets of data about fabric in different recognizable sections of historical time. The first 40 percent of the book is about ancient and early medieval civilizations. These were not uninteresting. Learning the basics about how, where, and when weaving started was a thrill, a really meaningful, concrete reference point in the story of human life and behavior that had been missing from my mental chart. And from there, Egyptian mummification, the Silk Road, and Vikings all live with enough vibrancy in my imagination to enjoy hearing about fabric’s detail in their scenes.

But even in the book’s most effective chapters, the few in the middle that rush through the high medieval, early modern, modern, and industrial periods gently describe fabric as a kind of passive witness, or set dressing, to larger historical machinations. With a few exceptions, they don’t report the extent to which fabric was surely driving the political economy and social culture of these periods. We learn about how sought after lace was, and how much of it decorated Queen Elizabeth I’s collar; but when St. Clair mentions that Parliament convened a hearing to inquire into the Crown’s lace spending, it's only as a scene setting device at the beginning of the chapter. I was curious to know more about this. The Elizabethan era feels early for Parliamentary action on the historical scene; what was Commons’ relationship with Crown at that time, that they could be auditing her shopping bill? How much was she spending on the lace, anyway, and how did it stack up against other things the British state spent money on? These are the kinds of analysis that could illustrate fabric's power, but St. Clair doesn't seem interested in them.

Then in the last four chapters, St. Clair moves away from historical narrative and writes about different dimensions of modern endeavor in which fabric plays a major role. These chapters tend to relate stories about non-fabric subjects better told elsewhere, and then matter of factly describe the clothing involved, almost as an appendix, in case the reader is really curious. I've read other tellings about British expeditions to the South Pole, for example, or about ill-fated climber George Mallory's death on the high slopes of Everest in the 1920s. It wasn't that enlightening to revisit those stories in abbreviated form, and with a little bit of extra commentary on what they were wearing. I could imagine the history of space exploration being written in a way in which availability or craft of clothing was in some way decisive, but that's not what this is. Which then begs the question: was fabric really that important across all of the subjects written about here? Or is the book functioning as a holding outline for esoteric fabric facts?

Despite its subtitle, the book doesn't explain how fabric changed history. Charitably, perhaps the author is making the radical claim that fabric is history, and that stories about such a penetrating consumer good should supplant those of philosophers and edicts. But she doesn't say it outright, or try to argue it. This is a missed opportunity: her research makes clear that fabric is a common essential element of the human experience, worthy of her reflection on its resonance through history’s traditional domains. In the words ahead I’ll use her work to offer a few of my own such reflections on fabric’s place in humanity’s past and future.

The First Threads

The oldest threads ever discovered were left on the floor of a cave in Georgia. They were bast, the kind of thread used to make linen, which the childhood usage of the terms “linen closet” and “bed linen” made me think was just another word for smooth bed-appropriate fabrics, but apparently denotes a whole category of fabric on its own like cotton or wool, and was just used a lot historically for sheets and that kind of thing. Bast is made from the inner fibers of a particular kind of flax plant indigenous to Iraq and other familiar cradle-of-civilization geographies.

Bast is intricately difficult thread to make, requiring an “series of elaborate steps, each of which with its time-worn terminology.” First you've got to find enough flax plants growing wild in the landscape. In what must have led to many moments of cruel frustration, the plants must be of exactly the right age. And you can’t cut them to harvest; only uprooting will do. Back in the cave, you've got to strip the leaves and bark off the plant, then leave them to rot just a little bit so that it's easy to split open the wood encasement holding the precious fibers inside. The prize acquired, you must wait for them to dry (from your intentional rotting), before meticulously combing through each bunch to straighten them out and make sure there aren't any pebbles or dead bugs or whatever inside them.

Then once you've done all that, finally, you have the raw material you need to engage in the task of spinning, and act simultaneously requiring such infinite confidence and infinitesimal precision that I think it’s on par with throwing a slider in the major leagues. To be able to engage in pulling and twisting at the same time, with the exactly correct degree of arc and force, over and over, that it coaxes a mess of extremely delicate plant fibers into a string sturdy enough to safely tie together an axe head to its handle.

And all of that is before we get to where you nestle thousands of these tiny strings together, laying them on top of each other securely so that there are no gaps between them as to prevent air from getting through.

As best we know, starting in that cave in the Caucasus, humans have been doing this for at least 34,000 years.

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egyptians had nine words for mummy fabrics, and three words for how they could be applied to an embalmed corpse. St. Clair incorporates this fact into her argument that these pieces of linen themselves, rather than the golden treasures that have since dominated archaeology and imagination, were the most sacred dimension of high-status burials of the time. In her view, which comes across as a meaningfully curious and plausible shift in perspective rather than a conclusively supported assertion, to be wrapped tightly in fabric of such linguistic nuance was to the Ancient Egyptians at least as much a sign of care and specialness as the body's preservation itself, or the abundance of accompanying shiny trinkets in the tomb (most of which were likewise found linen-wrapped).

Han China

Based on how St. Clair describes the relationship between the Han Dynasty and the Xiongnu tribes to their north, I feel like silk may have been more important to defending China from the steppe tribes than any wall. A regular menace to the Han, the Xiongnu extracted tribute in the form of bolts of silk. Being from some of the world's most windswept landscapes made the Xiongnu fairly rough people, I would imagine, and their leaders couldn't get enough of the feeling of silk on their skin.

This made them much less likely to burn and pillage the Chinese, who were the only people capable of the extraordinarily complex and intricate process of raising and harvesting silkworms known as sericulture. But silk also cost the Xiongnu military strength. They were excellent horse breeders, which made them fearsome raiders of farms and cities. But they had nothing else to trade. Soon, these erstwhile warlike clans were giving away all their best war horses to pay for undergarments that didn’t scratch. The Xiongnu fully never fully disappeared as a threat to the Han, but effective management of silk trade and tribute kept China relatively free of raids at a time when there wasn’t an effective tactical military response to waves of men on horseback attacking settled peoples.

Demand for silk on the harsh steppe would last for millennia, and bolts of the stuff came to function as an effective currency, effectively monetizing Asia's interior and facilitating the famous trade routes that underpinned a cascading series of splendid civilizations.

Medieval England

Wool was at the very core of English economic history. Going as far back as Charlemagne, people in the Cotswolds and Lincoln and around Sherwood Forest were really, really good at making wool that every shivering member Europe’s nobility wanted wrapped around their body. This fueled nearly all of English wealth throughout king and castle times. Its regulation and taxation were the source of much of the period’s political confrontations, including some in the 13th century that contributed to the long-term rise of Parliament.

English wool enters the main stage of Western history as the input source for Florence’s famous weaving industry. This implicates English wool directly in sparking the Renaissance, for all that the Medicis were able to do in banking, trade, and art patronage with profits from soft, fancy Italian cloth. The Royal Navy and cotton mills get top billing when it comes to the story of Britain’s economic relevance, but when you think of England, think wool, too.

Not Your Grandma’s Lace

Lace was a big fucking deal in the 17th century, a little bit Louis Vuitton bags, a little bit semiconductors. These so painstakingly crafted linen designs were THE foremost symbol of pure aristocratic status. Royals would wear acres of the stuff to show how much more they were then everyone else–think King James’s ruffle collars, or the enormous, diorama-like displays backgrounding Elizabeth I’s head in her ceremonial dress. Three dimensions of lace culture at the time have clear echoes in the present, albeit in different forms.

The first is the role of the fashion icon: the larger-than-life cultural figure whose ostentatious displays deem what's acceptable and desirable for everyone else. In our time, that's occupied by actors, or musicians, or people who do literally just that professionally, AKA models. This is a bit reductive, but in the 17th century, all these functions were effectively concentrated in Louis XIV, the Sun King, who ruled with absolute authority over France, then by far Europe’s dominant political and cultural power, and whose dress and affectations nobles across the continent tripped over themselves to emulate. It would be a little like if Miranda Priestley were dictator for life today: we’re probably a better society to not have all political and aesthetic power centered on one person, but they don't call it absolutism for nothing, do they?

The second aspect of 17th century lace culture that resonates today is invective against it as a sign of unacceptable vanity. Reading St. Clair quote contemporaries lambast the moral turpitude of lace, I'm reminded of when I was a kid, adults would show visible revulsion at rappers’ baggy clothing and large jewelry. It must be an emergent property of every culture for some parts of it to be ashamed by the most visible and loud expressions of itself. But maybe our descendants will sit on couches with LV patterning, like my grandmother had lace doilies covering the armrests of her sofa.

The third is how much lace was the subject of great power politics, with policy actions taken akin to what the US government has been doing on chips in the last year. Initially, Venice produced the finest lace. Then the French finance minister – under Louis XIV – undertook an industrial policy of subsidies, espionage, and tariffs to build a domestic supply of his boss’s favorite accoutrement. He even offered citizenship to skill the Italian lacemakers in a kind of proto-H1B program. St. Clair’s concluding anecdote in this section, which describes how the expulsion of French Protestants decimated France’s lacemaking workforce, offers a cautionary note: no matter how much they care about fine things, leaders won’t hesitate to crush an industry for the sake of a culture war.

Queen Cotton

It's well known that the international cotton trade was huge in the mid-19th century, fueling both America's slave economy and the United Kingdom's rise as a dominant industrial power. But I don't think it's well known exactly how enormous cotton was in the early-mid Victorian period in today’s terms. In 1862, St. Clair reports, the proportion of the British population involved in the cotton industry was, astonishingly, between 20 and 25 percent, with cotton yarn or cloth constituting an absurd 50 percent of UK exports. And it wasn't just the British: St. Clair tells us that one out of every 65 people living on the planet in 1862, from Alabama to India, “were involved in the cotton trade, either growing or transforming it into cloth.”

Try and visualize (or use whatever brain center you best cognate with) how different culture and politics would be in a country where the entire economy is focused on such a small number of preoccupations. Imagine how popular media, class consciousness, or any other dimension of communal identity would feel like, with so many people being able to directly relate to the experiences of so many others. Or how government and policy would be, with a so much narrower sense of what the national interest is, and how to promote it. It was probably simpler. Politics and culture have always been complicated, but sometimes it feels like they are especially mindfucking today. Maybe that’s actually true, insofar as the variable interests and experiences of our mass culture relative to when John Stuart Mill was writing mean there are just so many more material preferences to fulfill, and emotional perspectives to recognize.

It's also well-known that Britain’s mid-19th century textile productivity boom was enabled by new steam powered technologies for spinning and weaving. But I never knew that, as St. Clair reports, between 1739 and 1779, one-third of Manchester’s cotton exports were bound for Africa, much higher than I had assumed. Apparently, demand for cotton from African consumers was very strong in the 18th and 19th centuries – just as demand for humans in bondage to labor on Britain’s extremely prized sugar colonies in the Caribbean was becoming insatiable. As such, cotton cloth became the primary medium of exchange in the slave trade. St. Clair suggests that this use of cotton in the slave trade was what drove innovators in and around Manchester to deploy the flying shuttle, power loom, and other technologies that made the price of textiles plummet and changed the world economy forever.

However much African consumers drove these crucial stages of the steam power’s adoption relative to domestic/in-empire demand, I had always mostly thought of the Industrial Revolution as having arisen mostly within Europe’s geographic boundaries. It’s interesting to consider the complex pressures of the 18th and 19th century political economy that drove the rise of the cheap goods, mass markets, and the societies we recognize today.

Tough Gear

In the last hundred years, innovation and clothing has gone from making it cheap enough for it to be abundantly available to as many people as possible, to enabling new achievements in physical reality. St. Clair describes how this has taken place in the realms of mountaineering and polar exploration, competitive swimming, and trips into outer space.

I had always known about denim's roots as the choice garb of cowboys and workmen in the 1920s, before their subversive rebellion in the 1950s, and eventual haute couture triumph in the 1970s and 80s. I was more shocked to learn though that when Robert Falcon Scott and his entire expedition perished in Antarctica in 1902 after coming in second in the race to the South Pole, they succumbed in part because of insufficiently warm or breathable outfits provided by Burberry. Burberry is a luxury fashion brand today; one of the most enduring images I associate with that brand is Emma Watson on billboards in 2010. But apparently they were the early 20th century’s premier outfitters for rugged conditions. Perish the thought that today's nanopuff-clad Hayes Valley inhabitants might presage a future for Patagonia on the Fashion Week catwalk in 2075, but it seems very plausible.

George Mallory and companions froze to death in the 1920s attempting to summit Everest in natural fibers alone. In the 1950s, Norgay and Hillary's success was not without horror stories of frozen sweat and thawing boots, but new synthetic fabrics helped negotiate a good enough balance between insulation and evaporation for lukewarm, soggy bodies to keep them alive to the top and back.

A series of swimsuits from around 2008 loosely defined as “tech suits” became so good at gliding through water and compressing swimmers’ bodies that they became the most determinative factors in who won races, and were subsequently banned. And while heroic engineering from NASA's seamstresses on loan from bra manufacturer Playtex gave the first astronauts the suits they would need to survive in space, fabric underscores just how incongruous being off planet is with being a human. Apparently, on the International Space Station, there is no good underwear solution. Astronauts wear out a pair over three or four ungodly days, and without a way to do laundry, dirties are packaged and catapulted back into the atmosphere, a gross meteor that mercifully incinerates far above the surface.

It's with clothing that our physical limitations are reinforced or expanded, allowing previously unimaginable, frankly God-tier achievements while letting us know where we have to stop. In that sense, clothes, more than anything but our bodies, are a part of who humans really are.

What You’re Wearing Right Now

When I think about how lots of these synthetic fabrics get made, like with many modern technologies my brain assumes some kind of incomprehensible magic is taking place. In the case of synthetic fabric, and probably many others, the answer is actually brutally intuitive: you simply take a common physical substance, in this case wood pulp, and immerse it in the correct sequence of vats of sulphuric acid and other equally caustic liquids, until only the silky-smooth chemical elements remain, to be extruded into your magic thread.

Rayon, for which another word is Modal, of MeUndies fame, was one of the first in a series of manufactured fabrics that you probably feel on your body right now, including nylon and polyester, and it mightily excited Western industrialists 100 years ago that they wouldn't have to rely on China for smooth, adaptable silk anymore. As you might imagine, this excitement didn't carry over to the details of the well-being of the workers actually taking the wood pulp through this fairly occult sounding chemistry process, such as making sure the acid didn't get onto their skin, or that they didn't breathe the fumes coming off of them. This resulted in a lot of difficult to read about consequences—from sticky wounds that slowly burned down to the bone; to epileptic fits; to permanent nonfunctional psychosis, and blindness paired with “streaming eyes and nose, followed by stabbing pains in the eyes, a splitting headache, and excruciating pains in the back of the neck.”

St. Clair’s narrative focuses especially on reports from a rayon factory that doubled as a Nazi work camp, so I assume not every rayon production line was like this, and hope conditions have improved in the years since regardless. But it does reinforce that for all of the fabulous modern abundance we enjoy, the raw complexity of making fabric has not gone anywhere. The pain and difficulty associated with taking stuff lying around in the physical world and turning it into smooth fibers, and mashing them together into an unbroken plane, can still rebound onto people in vicious ways. Such possibility should probably command a higher price than what's charged today by Target and Ross Dress for Less.

American Power, the Bomb, and Life in Outer Space

All of these stories about fabric across the past and present of human civilization give rise to a three speculations about the future of said civilization.

First, content is the new silk. By content I mean media that reflects some degree of national culture, like film and television. And by silk I mean an exportable good that could confer on America a structural advantage similar to what the secrets of sericulture gave China for thousands of years: an absorptive, shape shifting, indestructible quality of power.

Like Chinese silk, American film and television has been an irreplicable trade piece, earning America premium buying power for whatever competitive goods the rest of the world has to offer. Also like Chinese silk, American content can make people in other cultures a little more like Americans. I don’t have data on the exact method or scale of this. But over generations, Humphrey Bogart pictures, hammy Elvis singalongs, Friends reruns on Star World and the MCU have achieved unparalleled levels of global ubiquity. These products put on very warm display mannerisms and worldviews that reflect a recognizably American approach to social culture and relationships, and the broader systems and worldviews they engender. It seems plausible that this has rubbed off on audiences in other countries, causing, to some degree, a cycle of emulation and goodwill not unlike that which was undergone by the Xiongnu and other steppe tribes in premodern China. The endurance of America’s global alliance network despite sporadic stretches of horrendous leadership reflects this.

This means that should another global hegemon emerge, like with the Mongols or Manchus, its elites will probably be friendly to American tastes and sensibilities. America probably wouldn’t need to be too afraid of severe repression under any hypothetical future global order. Likewise, in the still unlikely but not unthinkable event of the disintegration of political order in the United States, our global cultural resonance will create space for American power to reassemble and reemerge.

Silk and other relatively refined dimensions of its culture were China’s master advantage, allowing it to absorb and subsume aggressive energies of others for thousands of years. It's possible that digital media will become so fragmented that there will be no global culture to dominate, and the last fifty years of American cultural power will dissipate as people stop going to movie theaters and lose the attention span for prestige TV. But it’s also possible that the 20th century was just the beginning of China’s old advantage alighting upon the United States for a long time to come.

The second speculation is that it is extremely unlikely that humanity will manage to proceed forever without once again using nuclear weapons. Perhaps I’ve been partaking in a naive liberal fantasy, that we can restrain from ever dropping another, and eventually fully disarm. But the sheer difficulty of ever having made thread and fabric in the first place reveals a very strong tendency, emergent across generations, for humans to make maximum possible use of everything in their reach.

Consider the raw amount of stumbling upon plants and pulling them apart, leaving them lying around for days, and later coming back with them and idly fidgeting with their insides it must have taken for the first usable and thread to have been created. Then consider the sheer volume of times this accidental process had to have been accidentally repeated before the dots started to connect in some very fortuitous and awake person’s mind, that x plant, of exactly y age, pulled apart and treated in this way and played around with using that strange pulling motion is what results in this very long thing object I can tie things with.

If ~176,000 years (between the evolution of modern humans and the first known threads) was enough time for people to have taken that many totally useless, apparently random actions, for that knowledge to have coalesced, someone somewhere is going to find a reason and be able to put a nuclear weapon to its very clear and obvious use. Fabric’s discovery against all numerical odds has made me worry that no politics or institutions are capable of foreclosing any single action that we know how to take, even the most awful ones. Given infinite time, the only safety is in never knowing.

I feel like we should be all the more realistic and gentle about the fact that we've put Chekhov’s gun in our hand, lay off the booze, and maybe check in to civilizational inpatient therapy. We can’t keep our finger off the button forever. We’re too fidgety.

My third speculation is that while we will go to Mars or elsewhere in space, it’s going to be a really long time until anyone can function anything close to normally anywhere but Earth. Consider the underwear situation on the International Space Station; it is not just a gross indignity that that we cannot figure out this bare minimum of comfort and hygiene. It underscores in a very visceral way how much our bodies are living and breathing, wet machines of constant conscious and unconscious consumption and secretion. We may forget this sometimes, because we are we've evolved in such harmony with an equally wet, heaving planet full of other such creatures.

We can surround ourselves with fancy technologies that present to ourselves a veneer of control. We can make sure we survive for a few minutes by not freezing or suffocating, we can freeze-dry food, we may even be able to figure out radiation shielding and group dynamics enough that a journey to Mars is safe. But we're also going to need to have some fabric up within the folds of our figures, and when it sticks to us, we’ll remember that beneath our bones we are subject to our surroundings in ways that nothing but cold empty space can make us mentally account for.

Humans can visit, but whatever version of us really lives out there is going to be substantially different than whatever we are now.

Cloth and Us

After reading this book, I wondered why humans ever got started wearing clothes. I can’t see how a little bit of fabric, most of which probably wouldn't be very tight or warm, would really make a difference to a person's quality of life in hunter-gatherer times. Weather is quite permissive for evolution; you might shiver when it’s 40 degrees, but it’s actually pretty hard to die of exposure. Blankets and fire would have been all that was needed at night to survive. If it they weren’t, maybe we would have evolved the fur “clothes” that other animals have. But we didn’t. I can understand wanting wool if you live in a very cold place, I understand why you might prefer silk on your skin if only much rougher clothes were what you were used to; but none of that explains why the first person got dressed.

Now I write all of this without ever having walked around naked in the open weather, even on one of my two trips to Burning Man. So maybe I’m overlooking some truly awful physical discomfort with nakedness that would have been an immediate and obvious trigger for Cro-Magnon to put on clothes.

But plenty of other people are naked at Burning Man, and seem just fine. There must be some other dimension of human experience that makes us cover up, now buried deep under fabric’s abundance. Maybe it’s related to the feeling of our skin in the world other than temperature. Or maybe it’s something social: how people in large groups respond to seeing one another’s sex organs, perhaps.

Whatever the truth, this gap in knowledge about the “why” of this thing woven throughout the story of our commerce and politics sparks questions about life before civilization, questions about expression, identity, utility, and what it means to be human that might not have easily understandable or expected answers. Reading The Golden Thread made me realize how much fabric speaks to deeper dimensions of the human experience than we are generally aware of, and how much its history give us the opportunity to discover about ourselves.