FABRIC’s kaleidoscopic history of material has an addictive dipping-into quality, as facts about Elizabeth I ordering all males below the rank of gentleman to wear a woollen cap, or Charles II decreeing in 1666 that only woollen grave clothes could be used, excite the appetite for more apparel revelations.

Religious figures loom large in the history of fabric. Jacques de Vaucanson, a novice in a Lyon friary, made automatons for the amusement of his brothers. While these inventions soon vexed the order of the Minims, Vaucanson’s mechanical duck caught the eye of Louis XV, who made him Inspector of Silk Manufacture.

In the mid-1740s, Vaucanson refined a Chinese silk loom, to receive pattern instructions from a rotating drum rather than a second weaver. But foreseeing the impact on their livelihoods, Lyon’s clothworkers smashed the machines and ran the former monk out of town. After the French Revolution, the loom was spotted in the Conservatory of Arts and Trades by a straw-hat maker, Joseph Marie Charles, known by the suffix “-ard” attached to his father’s family. And, with some punch-card refinements, the Jacquard loom was born.

Britain’s medieval wool trade was founded on the flocks of Carthusian monasteries. New Zealand’s still pre-eminent merino-wool industry began with Samuel Butler, the grandson of the Bishop of Lichfield, who abandoned plans for Holy Orders to settle outside Christchurch in 1860 with one of South Island’s earliest merino flocks. Genesis’s story of Jacob and Esau can be read as a manual on selective sheep-breeding.

Bookended by the deaths of Finlay’s parents, her mother dying unexpectantly while nursing the author’s terminally ill father, a muffled drum of sadness beats beneath fabric’s history. Captain Cook’s ships brought disease to the makers of bark cloth in Polynesia, Industrial Revolution efficiencies in spinning entrenched slavery in America’s plantations, silk moths are killed within hours of producing eggs, merino sheep used to be branded on the face, and are still exported to the Middle East in conditions where hundreds die per voyage.

Fabric’s pace slows in the reportage sections on Finlay’s investigations, but the array of historical detail, analysis, and colourful characters more than compensate.
 

Susan Gray writes about the arts and entertainment for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and the Daily Mail.

Fabric: The hidden history of the material world
Victoria Finlay
Profile £25
(978-1-78125-706-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50