Picture of author.
6 Works 1,236 Members 32 Reviews 3 Favorited

About the Author

Virginia Postrel is an award-winning journalist and a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. She is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and has been a columnist for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. She is the show more author of The Substance of Style and The Power of Glamour. Her research is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles, California. show less

Works by Virginia Postrel

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Members

Reviews

Simply a brilliant and iconoclastic work of nonfiction. The author has a mind for ideas and their consequences and makes a case for the defense of the independent creator.
 
Flagged
jwhenderson | 9 other reviews | Jan 27, 2023 |
The book consists of seven chapters with a preface and afterward. Each chapter deals with a particular part of fabric production: Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, Consumers, and Innovators. Each chapter starts in ancient times and ends in modern ones, showing how things have changed over time.

Fabric is one of those things that is so ubiquitous and important for life, and yet is also so ordinary and cheap nowadays that we simply forget about it. The book emphasizes that for most of human history fabric was at the forefront of thought. The amount of time and effort that’s gone into clothing and cloth for other purposes (sails, table coverings, curtains, blankets, etc.) is astronomical.

The book begins with the idea that modern people look at ancient art dealing with women and see a spindle and think, ah, this is a domestic scene. But we forget that the spindle as a means of turning fibres into thread was the start of production, necessary for the home, yes, but also an important industry. Millions of women over the course of history have spun thread and made cloth, whether of flax, cotton, wool, or silk. It was constant work because cloth is always needed. The book also shows how spinning thread was undervalued, partly because it was women’s work, but also because the higher the cost of thread, the higher the cost of cloth. We do the same thing today, keeping the final cost of clothing low so the rich can buy a lot of it, even if that means exploiting the workers who sew the cloth into clothing.

My interests are in ancient and medieval history so I didn’t expect the modern sections to interest me, but they were also fascinating. Learning about how cotton plants were cross bread and a fluke mutation created the cotton plants bred today was neat.

This is an excellent book dealing with a topic that affects everyone, but to which we give entirely too little thought.
… (more)
 
Flagged
Strider66 | 13 other reviews | Jul 19, 2022 |
This was a very interesting account of the ways in which textiles have played a role in the development of civilization. Virginia Postrel looks at all stages of textiles from fiber to thread to cloth and dye, as well as the roles of traders and consumers, from ancient times to the present day. She concludes with innovators who are driving today’s textile industry forward in ways their forebears could never have imagined.

In every chapter of this book I found “aha moments,” and things that sent me off to the internet to learn more. I had never thought about the parallels between weaving and computer programming, but that explains a lot about why I find weaving patterns so interesting. Postrel unpacks a lot of scientific concepts in ways that make them easier for the layperson to understand. Although I admit some of these interested me more than others (I may have skimmed at times), I found this book fascinating on so many levels.… (more)
 
Flagged
lauralkeet | 13 other reviews | Jul 16, 2022 |
Recm'd by a former supervisor (SM). Fascinating account of the role of yarn and fabric making in the development of civilization. A great take away line from the introduction was an explicit inversion of the hoardy Arthur C Clarke quote: "any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature."
Well worth the read.

(2022 Book 2)
 
Flagged
bohannon | 13 other reviews | Feb 12, 2022 |

Lists

Awards

You May Also Like

Statistics

Works
6
Members
1,236
Popularity
#20,768
Rating
3.8
Reviews
32
ISBNs
20
Languages
2
Favorited
3

Charts & Graphs