Worn

This is a remarkable book!  In sections titled, Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, and Wool, Sofi Thanhauser lays out the histories of these materials and how they function for better and worse in the communities that create and use them.  The stories are heartwrenching -- human culture has lost so muc with the modernization of clothing -- and also deeply inspiring.  Honest, responsible fabrics still exist, and regaining a healthy relationship with our clothing is possible.  As Minh and I work to make our wardrobes (and remove plastic-containing fabrics from our lives), Worn will be a key inspiration and research tool.

... stands a house built around 1740... Like many colonial-era American homes, the house was designed with no closets.  Rather, a single hook or a peg rail sufficed.  This was testament to a time when each member of the family owned two sets of clothing: one for Sunday, and one for every other day of the week.

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.

In the preindustrial period, anthropologists estimate, humans devoted at least as many hours to making cloth as they devoted to producing food.

By 2017, one garbage truck of clothes (5,787 pounds) was burned or sent to landfills every second.

When OSHA was first established in 1970, carbon disulfide was one of many chemicals whose old exposure limits were grandfathered in, and the inadequate ASA standard of 20 ppm became the law. (p182)

Rayon fabric had promised the luxe of silk to the ordinary woman.  But its story shows the hollowness of the twentieth-century promise of luxury for all: that it has too often substituted the image of well-dressed workers for the reality of safe and well-paid ones. (p182)

Even when in 1957 Japan committed to voluntary export restraints on clothing and textiles in response to pressure from U.S. congressional textile protectionists, it was clear that the State Department's policy of welcoming Asian imports spelled the beginning of the end for the U.S. garment and textile industries.  (p187)

The discovery of aniline dye was an accident.  In 1856, an eighteen-year-old chemist attempting to synthesize quinine from coal tar found that the inside of his beaker had turned a deep mauve.  This first color, marketed as Perkin's mauve, was soon followed by a bright fuchsia, and then by a whole range of other colors.  These dyes were the first commercial products of the synthetic chemical industry, out of which the pharmaceutical industry would one day be born.  Like coal tar itself, aniline dyes are fantastically toxic, and textile dyeing is among the most polluting industries in the world, responsible for about 20 percent of global wastewater according to the World Bank. (p191)

In 1995, a raid by California and federal authorities on an apartment complex in El Monte, east of Los Angeles, revealed seventy trafficked Thai nationals being held against their will, producing garments for American name brands. By 2000, an estimated one half of all garment producers in the U.S. employed their workers in sweatshop conditions: that is to say, firms employed women immigrants and paid them wages that violated federally mandated minimum wage standards and other employment standards set in the Fair Labor Standards Act. (p196)

Every year, half a million tons of plastic microfibers seep into the ocean, the equivalent of fifty billion plastic bottles. (p218)

In 1984 Sears, JCPenney, and seventeen other retailers and a host of retail associations formed the Retail Industry Trade Action Coalition (RITAC) to lobby for global sourcing. They had lobbied for lower tariffs from Caribbean Basin countries; they would go on to lobby for NAFTA – which allowed for the unrestricted flow of textiles and garments into the U.S. market from Mexico, seriously damaging American fabric and clothes manufacturers… When the Multifiber Arrangement quotas were phased out in 2005, the cost per unit of imports declined steadily. The U.S. garment industry was finally dealt its mortal blow. As recently as 1997, over 40 percent of all apparel purchased in the U.S. had been produced domestically. In 2012 that figure was less than 3 percent. (p219)

From its inception, the Wool Department sought to improve the quality of Wyoming wool, through careful testing and breeding recommendations. By mid-century, the project had succeeded: in increased both the quality and quantity of Wyoming wool. (p227)

Falling profits induced sheep ranchers to cut costs, and like others, the sheep industry of the West evolved in the postwar period to become reliant on an exploited workforce. More than three thousand people from Peru’s central highlands have migrated northward on H-2A visas to work as shepherds for American ranchers since the late 1960s, their three-year contracts facilitated by the Western Range Association. Peruvian shepherds legally earn $650-$750 a month to herd sheep 24/7, for three years, on Wyoming’s High Plains. (p231)

Denim aficionados know about Greensboro, both as the historic center of American denim production, and as the home of the Cone Denim Company’s White Oak Mills, which made selvedge denim using cast iron Draper looms from mid-century. (p242)

At Thistle Hill Weavers, Rabbit Goody’s custom and commission weaving business in Cherry Valley, New York… (p247)

By the 1970s, the Bampton Nott, the Berkshire Nott, the primitive Mendip, and twenty-four other native British breeds had become extinct. In response to this crisis in local sheep biodiversity, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust was formed in Britain in 1973. To date, the work of this organization has helped prevent any other native breed from slipping into extinction. (p250)

The Wool Clip, a cooperative of wool artisans, launched an annual festival, “Woolfest,” in 2005 to help support and promote the work of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust… (p251)

“Most important thing is not to panic,” she said. “There is no rushing tapestry weaving.” This advice was strangely soothing. So was it, later in the day, when the instructor at the spinning demonstration said, “That’s the great thing about fiber, you can repair it.” (p259)

Hand spinners carefully choose a fleece with the types of coloration they desire for a particular project. Indeed, the rise in hand spinning has created more room in the market for colored fleeces. Sheep have been largely bred for whiteness to make dyeing wool easier, and renewed interest in coloration is a relatively recent phenomenon. (p261)

The Rare Breeds Parade drew to its close, and I thought about the fact that these sheep, who had fed and clothed kings and commoners alike down through the centuries, were a testament to a kind of human intervention that works over long periods of time rather than in short, exhausting bursts. Breeding these sheep had been a multigenerational project. (p262)

An old ditty, quoted as early as 1603, shows how the British farmer tended to the long-range health of the soil. “A man doth sand for himself; lyme for his sonne; and marle [add clay to soil] for his graunde childe.” (p263)

The Herdwick sheep native to Cumbria are notable for how they "heft" to a particular part of the fell.  A hefted sheep has a strong and unshakable sense of where it belongs.  It becomes so attached to its pasture that, although it can be sold down to the lowlands, it can never be moved to another part of the fell: it will simply walk back home.  Ninety-five percent of the world's Herdwick sheep exist within twenty miles of Coniston, a village in the Furness region of Cumbria... (p264)

As Paul clipped, an announcer talked about how sheep sense emotion, so that "there is no place for anger in handling sheep.  They don't go together."  Scientists call this "kinopsitic behavior": a social adaptation for detecting and avoiding predators that involves learning signals.  Sheep are highly attuned to rapid movements of group members.  The announcer's statement made me think, however, not so much about sheep, as about people.  If weaving calms, and spinning soothes, and anger has no place in handling sheep, no wonder a culture robbed of its sheep goes mad.  (p265)

In Static, Velma wove a television set.  On its screen, the television displayed the banded colors of a traditional Navajo chief's blanket: brown, white, gray, and blue.  Gray, brown, and white were all colors of undyed sheep's wool.  Blue was made using indigo traded from the Spanish, who brought the dyestuff with them to the New World.  In a visual pun, the weaving marked the way that Navajo weaving, or Navajo culture, is figured as stationary, or static, by the larger American culture. (p271)

Anni Albers described weaving this way: "Like any craft it may end in producing useful objects, or it may rise to level of art."  She implies that "useful objects" fell below "art" on a hierarchy of importance.  For the Navajo, however, weavings were to become "art" when the violent intervention of the U.S. government robbed the Navajo of subsistence, and they were forced to cater to western taste by producing weavings that had no other purpose than to hang on a wall. (p276)

Incursions on traditional clothing also came from the manufacture of Pendleton woolen blankets for the Indian market, the new availability of western clothes at trading posts, and the pressure to wear Anglo American clothing in school and at work.  As their weavings shrank to fit on the walls of their western customers, the Navajo themselves began to wear machine-made cloth.  Did Navajo weaving then, in Anni Albers's terms, "rise to the level of art"?  Or was art, rather, a term imposed on it by a culture that had cleaved in two the creative and the productive acts? (p277)

Nikyle's grandmother kept Rambelais sheep, but spoke of another kidn of sheep, called Dee dii, or "four horns."  These were the kind of sheep that had been on the reservation at th etime when the government demanded stock reductions.  Some people, Nikyle said, had preserved their sheep from the culls by leading them up into the buttes until the officials had gone.  Similarly, some children escaped removal to boarding school by hiding out on the buttes, among the sheep.  (p285)

Nikyle's grandmother told them, "If you want to do this, this is all it takes.  Just, everything has to be in harmony.  You can't have any negative thoughts towards your sheep, towards the wool, towards your loom.  Even while you're weaving, you have to think very positive and you can't treat this like, 'Oh my gosh I have to do this and make money.'"  It was also important to show a proper attitude to the sheep, she said.  "In every aspect, they're life.  So, you don't mistreat it.  You don't talk down on them.  You have to cherish them.  When you no longer have your grandparents, when you no longer have your actual parents, the sheep will be your parents.  They'll feed you, they'll clothe you.  They'll provide you with a livelihood."  (p286)

Dressing is an individual act, but it is also a deeply social one.  Clothing is not merely a demonstration of our relations to one another, it is a crystallization of these relationships.  It is not suprising, then, that myths and stories about cloth and clothing are a place where people grapple with what ought to be their correct relationship with one another: with ethics.  Myths and stories about cloth and clothing contain warnings: about locking women up and forcing them to spin ("Rumpelstiltskin") or weave ("The Crane Wife"), about the idiocies of the powerful ("The Emperor's New Clothes").  They explore the limits of human cruelty ("Snow White"), as well as the limits of human changeability and the relationship between the interior and the exterior self ("Cinderella," "Cap-o'-Rushes").  (p292)