Worn: A People's History of Clothing

I expressly ordered this for my wife.A fascinating History of Clothing.

Years ago, fabrics varied from region to region as people used local yarns and dyes to make traditional textiles. Now everything is transported around the world and most clothes are made in factories in countries where labour is cheaper and there are no trade unions to help workers. I remember a time when M&S proudly stated that most of their clothing was made in the UK. No longer so. This book is a potted history of why that happened but seems to be mainly aimed at the American market. It tells us about denim looms and the proud Navaho people weaving while interned on their reservations, but hardly a mention of Scottish tweeds. I loved the beginning, explaining how the author became interested in the history of clothing manufacture after visiting Dumptique, a posh used clothes shop on Martha's Vineyard. A book to dip into.

An amazing achievement of a book that I expected to be a light history of clothing, but instead turned out to be a history of sexism and racism and the rape of nature. It examines racism, particularly slavery and the history of the Klan. Also the fact that the freed slaves were barred from so many jobs. I despaired of man's inhumanity to man as shown in this book, and the endless territory grabs from the Native Americans. Mechanisation is also examined in detail, and Gandhi chose the spinning wheel as an emblem of the struggle to resist it, but triumphed in India just the same, and all over England and the United States. This is a book that does not make easy reading, as it takes in a lot of people's tragedies, but it is worthwhile reading, and I doubt that I have ever read such a history that contains so many little known facts, but it is based around clothes and is very well written. For example, Singer. It gives a potted history of the man and I never knew he was in the theatre as well as the inventions he made. Nor the fact that other people also invented the sewing machine but he made improvements to it. A fantastic book, and I really recommend it highly. I would give it at least ten stars if I could but I am limited to five. I have not covered the whole of the book, just some interesting facts from it to stimulate the readers interest. The book is literally stuffed with such facts, and as I said, I recommend it highly, as the best book I have read in this vein.

As others have pointed out, this is less ‘A people’s history of clothing’ as the subtitle is sryled, more A people’s history of fabric’ – and as absorbing, if not more so, than the history of clothing I was expecting.Thanhauser’s no-punches-pulled analysis of the main fabrics in our clothing history – to wit, Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics – both those plant derived – Rayon/Viscose, and petrochemical – Nylon and onwards, and finally, Wool – is written with a clear agenda.Thanhauser looks at the changes across history from fabric creation as a cottage industry, often carried out in the home by females, (weaving, spinning) and the construction of clothing as a highly skilled artisan craft (tailoring) to what happened following mechanisation and the Industrial Revolution.This is so searingly written a book about the ethics of the clothing industry, and its raw materials, textiles, and their creation, that I was surprised that this wasn’t a book published by Polity.This explores, damningly the politics of capital, the exploitation of labour, and, always, the easy greed with which our species dominates not only fellow humans, but also pillages and exploits other species, not to mention the planet itself, to satisfy present desires.By the end of the book, I seriously felt, despite Thanhauser’s attempt at indicating a way forward through the return of artisanal craft, as espoused in her section on Wool, that the only ethical solution would be nudity. As this is not only not seen as acceptable, but, in North Europe probably unadvisable due to the climate. Reversing evolution and growing a thick warm pelt is also not going to happen any time soon for our species.Each fabric, its social and industrial history is deconstructed, Our appetite for each fabric, and a culture dedicated to increasing consumerism, means environmental destruction.‘Natural fabrics’ are no less pitiless in their environmental and human cost than the synthetics, at least on industrial scale. Cotton, with links of course to the slave trade, is a remarkably greedy of water crop, both in its growing, and in its turning to thread and fabric.The silk industry, at industrial scale, is cruel both to those who work in it, and cruel to the silkworm itself – Thanhauser absolutely does not shy away from describing how the caterpillars are despatched.And then, there is the toxic waste, the noxious fumes, the poisoned water supplies, the carbon footprint, the industrial accidents, in the factories where labour creates our synthetics.We pay less, far less for our clothes, only because in far off countries others labour for little.We have lost our own textile industry because we have been unwilling to pay more. The exploited are in far off lands, so we don’t have to think about the real cost of our cheap clothingWool, which Thanhauser favours, because she looks at artisanal crafters, rescuing and promoting rare breeds, is of course also problematic at industrial megaheft.There are of course also problems for those on more modest incomes – artisanal fabrics, inevitably are at a price tag outside what many could affordI’m not quite certain where that happy medium is to be foundThis is an important and sobering book. I have only dropped a star because the final ‘wrap’, where she goes a bit overboard almost on the metaphysics of fabric, seemed a bit contrived to me.

Using main section headings of Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics and Wool allows the author to take a historical view of the emergence of different fabrics and technologies (both to make them and to make things out of them); but she also takes a view based around gender, race and class, which makes it more interesting and valuable.She constantly points out how developments in markets and technology end up with women or Global Majority People being exploited and driven into poverty and despair while the administration and the White men end up with the profit and little of the work. Interestingly, this is sometimes cyclical - the downtrodden seamstresses in the 19th century have more in common with garment factory workers now than with the unionised specialists of the 1950s, for example.A deep and wide-ranging book that has an awful lot to recommend it, interrogating intersectional inequities while engaging in historical work.

I didn't feel that, for me, this book lived up to the promise of its "blurb." I had been hoping for more history and more emphasis on the clothing of the title. It was obviously well researched but I found I lost my enthusiasm early on and just revisited it now and again in order to review it.Although the author does discuss other countries, as a UK reader I found it very focussed on AmericaThank you to netgalley and penguin books for an advance copy of this book