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Victoria Finlay
Fabric
Fabric
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A magnificent work of original research, unwinding history through cloth - how we make it, use it and what it means to us.
'Subtle, compendious and rich' - James McConnachie, The Sunday Times
Gabi's Review
Victoria Finlay is a British writer and journalist whose most well-known book is the wonderful Colour: Travels Through the Paint Box. Her new book, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World, is equally engaging and informative: a tapestry of history, memoir, and science, weaving together the story of textiles as an evolutionary technology that has shaped human civilisation. The book transforms how we see the clothes on our backs, revealing fabric not as static material but as a dynamic force that has been innovated, contested, and refined over millennia. Finlay’s overarching aim is to show how fabrics, from ancient natural fibres to modern synthetics, have evolved in response to human needs, driving social, economic, and technological change. Through her global travels and meticulous research, she presents textiles as a mirror of humanity’s ingenuity and its costs, culminating in a vision of fabric as a living, ever-adapting technology.
Finlay’s ability to make fabric a character in humanity’s story, from wool’s medieval markets to Kevlar’s bulletproof vests, is achieved with revelatory historical and anecdotal detail. Her personal experience, such as beating bark in Papua New Guinea and reeling silk in China, creates what she calls her own “patchwork quilt” of fabric. She begins with an examination of the history of natural fibres before turning her lens on synthetic ones.
In the chapter devoted to wool, she reveals the medieval European economic engine. In England, wool drove up to 50% of export revenue by the 13th century. Monasteries and merchants grew rich on white-wooled breeds like Cotswold, while taxes on wool funded wars and castles. Socially, wool empowered a merchant class but displaced peasants through land enclosures, revealing an evolution that underscores its role as a technology that reshaped power dynamics.
Finlay also examines the history of linen or flax, tracing how its ancient utility of clothing Pharaohs to powering Viking sails endured well into the 19th century in its qualities of status and durability. While its strength made it versatile, mechanised production came at a cost. Children as young as 6 worked 16-hour shifts as doffers or flax dressers, inhaling dust that scarred their lungs. Similarly, linen’s dyeability and durability drove trade in Ireland and northern Europe, but its labour-intensive process relied on exploited workers, with a huge social cost to its technological evolution. Cotton was another global game changer. This fabric originated in India and revolutionised clothing, but its spread relied on the depredations of colonial trade and slavery.
Finlay’s chapter of the luxury of silk is particularly absorbing. She discusses how the production of silk (sericulture), which originated in China around 3000 BCE, was a guarded technology, smuggled to Byzantium by monks. The Silk Road made the fabric a global currency, linking China to Rome and sparking global trade networks. Findlay demonstrates how these natural fibres were humanity’s first textile technologies, evolving through cultivation, processing, and trade to meet societal needs. Wool and linen built regional economies, cotton globalized trade, and silk symbolized luxury, but all carried social costs and cannot be produced in quantities that scale to population demands.
Fabric then shifts its lens to synthetic fibres, showing how the 20th century’s quest to meet population-driven demand for fabric spurred a new evolutionary phase. With natural fibres stretched thin by growing populations and industrialisation, scientists stepped in, pioneering synthetics to mimic and surpass nature’s slow offerings. Finlay frames this as a double-edged sword: it solved practical problems but introduced environmental (non-biodegradable) and health risks. It appears there is always a trade-off in fabric’s technological evolution!
One triumph in fabric, Kevlar, was invented by DuPont’s Stephanie Kwolek in 1965, as a pinnacle of synthetic innovation that saved many lives. Gore-Tex, a waterproof breathable fabric, introduced by W.L. Gore & Associates in the 1970s, was originally environmentally disastrous, causing vast toxification of waterways and food chains before being re-engineered to produce a safer model. Finlay concludes her book with a forward-looking nod to the Higgs collaboration, a project to index clothing’s environmental and social impacts, offering consumers empowerment in choice at point of sale. The Higg Index by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition aims to quantify textiles’ lifecycle impacts such as water use, carbon emissions, labour conditions, and chemical pollution.
Fabric is a must-read that reframes clothing as a technological saga which argues that technology can evolve to empower both people and the planet.
Publisher Review
Bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe in a vibrant exploration of cloth through the ages. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama. And through it all she uncovers the hidden histories of fabric: how and why people have made it, worn it, invented it and made symbols of it
Interlaced with Victoria's own story of grief and recovery, Fabric is a lush patchwork of travel, history, memoir and culture - an unforgettable look into how we have made fabric, and how it has made us.
'Dazzling ... Finlay's adventures, vividly recounted, make enthralling reading ... This book is equally an inspiration and an education' - Bel Mooney, Daily Mail
'A gorgeous adventure through the history of cloth' -Stylist
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