Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at the different light textiles cast ...
Pleats Please: the Story of the World's Oldest Fashion Technique
There’s a fashion technique that’s been in continuous use for over five thousand years – proof, if proof is needed, that there is nothing new in fashion. We have tunics that survive from the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt that use it and you can see it still in the catwalk collections of today. It’s incredible to think that the simple pleat has pleased the human eye for so long and in so many different ways. Pleating adds movement and life to garments and often signals wealth and abundance. Each culture has found its own way to use them, from the stitched smocks of early English farm workers to the glorious billowing dress Marilyn Munroe wore above the subway grating in the 1950s. This episode tells the story of the pleats on the world’s oldest surviving garment, hears from an expert modern pleater in New York, and tries to unravel the mystery behind one of the world’s most famous pleated garments. For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/. And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/
--------
41:55
The Quilts That Hold The Heart of Hawaii
What happens when one of the most traditional museums in the world revolutionises the way it presents the story of the past? The answer is not only a riot of craft and colour, but a reminder of the crucial role of textiles in framing our histories. The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, in the UK, has just added 15 brand new, intensely colourful Hawaiian quilts to its collection of extraordinary artifacts. These skilfully stitched quilts were specially made for the Museum, which holds more than half a million precious objects from all over the world and from all periods of human existence. Quilting is a craft that over two hundred years Hawaiians have made very much their own – although it was first brought to the islands by incomers. They have developed a unique style that embeds the deep beliefs and rituals of Hawaiian life and keeps them alive in the designing, making, and gifting of these beautiful quilts. For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/. And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/
--------
42:05
Tapestries For Troubled Times
Tapestries for Troubled Times The stitches of the Bayeux Tapestry fix the story of the Norman Conquest of England in our imaginations in an extraordinarily charismatic way. But nearly a thousand years later modern stitchers are picking up their needles to reframe their stories in just as powerful a fashion, showing that textiles can rewrite our histories. The Bayeux Tapestry was created by women in an age of great violence and uncertainty. It became the defining narrative of the battle between Harold Godwinson and William, Duke of Normandy, for the throne of England that took place in 1066. The Great Tapestry of Scotland - finished just over ten years ago is an incredible work that retells the story of an entire nation from its very beginnings. It shows that when women tell the story in stitches a very different kind of history emerges. Neither work changes the facts – nothing does that - but both are demonstrations of the power of stitch to redefine how we see ourselves and give us different perspectives on events, which ones we find important and what we feel about them. This episode of Haptic & Hue is about the power of Tapestry, ancient and modern, to recreate and reframe our stories. For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/. And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month, hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/
--------
39:12
Plain Sailing: The Cloth That Turned The Tide of History
A coarse, plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in some of the gaps, but there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about how sails were made and how sail-making changed the communities that undertook this work. Without sailcloth the Greeks could not have fought the Trojans, there would have been no Viking empire, William the Conqueror would not have invaded England, the Polynesians could not have settled the Pacific, Columbus certainly would not have sailed the ocean blue, Magellan would not have circumnavigated the world and there would have been no transatlantic slave trade. Sails made so much possible. But even though these form the structure of our history and cultural heritage, there has been very little focus on the sails that made them possible, and almost none on the communities that made the sails. This episode of Haptic & Hue looks at the most ancient sails we know about and takes us right up to the modern sails used for the sort of yachts in the recent America’s Cup Race in Barcelona. We talk to a modern craft sailmaker and hear how a small village in Somerset was once at the heart of the global industry of sail-making. We also hear from a Danish textile archaeologist about why Viking sails were unique. For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/
--------
41:19
Flax is Back! The Great Linen Revival
There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it's gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from creating surfboards to skis, from acoustic insulation to car doors. Flax looks back as well as forward. Like no other yarn, it is the ancient fibre of civilisation. Linen has walked the long centuries alongside mankind. In Europe and Western Asia, its cultivation reaches back thousands of years to the beginning of human settlement and farming. It clothed the pharaohs of Egypt in life and death, it powered the ships of ancient Greece and Troy, it is mentioned more than 80 times in the Old Testament. This is the fabric that wrapped the Dead Sea Scrolls to keep them safe down the centuries. Join us this month as Haptic and Hue travels to Ireland, once the undisputed centre of the world’s linen processing industry to see what it is making of the great flax revival and how Irish linen is faring. For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/
Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it.
Netherlands