2018 non-fiction. Kassia St Clair, a design journalist, looks at the
history of fabric and how it has influenced, and been influenced by,
the history of civilisation.
Which is a huge brief, and even at full length this book is only
368 pages; with five sections torn out to make 15-minute Book of the
Week episodes, it gets even thinner.
The sections we get are about Egyptian flax and linen, Chinese silk,
American cotton, Nazi rayon, and some short pieces on "lab-blended
materials" (Gemini pressure suits, and squabbles over allowable
sporting swimsuits). But they're all tremendously superficial, aimed
at an audience who has never thought about this stuff before, rather
than… well, the sort of people who might read history books! So I'm
not quite sure who was expected to buy it…
This ought to be a companion book to Clare Hunter's Threads of Life
(which came out the following year); but even after the condensation
process, Hunter managed to retain something approximating a thesis
that textile art is an important and ignored part of history, whereas
here it's more like "ooh, look at the shiny thing". At least at this
remove, St Clair doesn't seem to have any actual point to make, just a
treasure-box of historical trivia. Not that I mind historical trivia!
Maybe I should just give up on Books of the Week, or at least be much
more selective (I've enjoyed four out of the fourteen I've listened
to). The last time the BBC broadcast a new episode was in January
2020, and many of the books don't seem interesting to me anyway. But a
few of them have been great.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.