** A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK ** 'Fascinating . . . The history of the world through the eye of a needle . . . I recommend this book to anyone' THE SPECTATOR 'A charming, absorbing and history that takes us on a journey from the silk roads to sportswear, from ruffs to spacesuits . . . I devoured this quietly feminist book' SUNDAY TIMES 'Joyful and beautiful' NATURE 'Will make you rethink your relationship with fabric' ELLE DECORATION All textiles begin with a twist. From colourful 30,000-year old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to what the linen wrappings of Tutankhamun's mummy actually meant; from the Silk Roads to the woollen sails that helped the Vikings reach America 700 years before Columbus; from the lace ruffs that infuriated the puritans to the Indian calicoes and chintzes that powered the Industrial Revolution, our continuing reinvention of cloth tells fascinating stories of human ingenuity. When we talk of lives hanging by a thread, being interwoven, or part of the social fabric, we are part of a tradition that stretches back many thousands of years. Fabric has allowed us to achieve extraordinary things and survive in unlikely places, and this book shows you how -- and why. With a cast that includes Chinese empresses, Richard the Lionheart and Bing Crosby, Kassia St Clair takes us on the run with escaped slaves, climbing the slopes of Everest and moonwalking with astronauts. Running like a bright line through history, The Golden Thread offers an unforgettable adventure through our past, present and future.

The 18th-century French leather industry was a strategically important manufacturing sector, one vital to both civilian and military life. This study examines the production of leather in the Bordeaux trades during the 18th and 19th centuries, illuminating the realities of a craft economy and its relation to the wider French political economy.

This title explores the means through which the garment industry contributes to industrialisation, poverty reduction, empowerment of undereducated workers, in particular female labourers, and shared growth in contemporary low-income countries.

An evolution is currently underway in the textile industry and Textile for Industrial Applications is the guidebook for its growth. This industry can be classified into three categories-clothing, home textile, and industrial textile. Industrial textiles, also known as technical textiles, are a part of the industry that is thriving and showing great promise. Unlike conventional textiles traditionally used for clothing or furnishing by consumers, industrial textiles are used for manufacturing and functionality purposes, and generally by other industries. This book provides an encyclopedic review of industrial textiles, covering all of the latest trends in the development and application of these textiles with advice and suggestions on how to apply them in other industries. Discusses the latest technologies adopted in the industrial textile industry including nano finishing and plasma applications Covers the basic fundamentals about product characteristics and production techniques Caters to students and faculty involved in textile technology, composite technology, and other interdisciplinary courses as it relates to product engineering and product development Textiles for Industrial Applications details the market potential and growth of industrial textiles and explains the steps involved in the product development of industrial textiles. It discusses property requirement, the basic textile manufacturing process, manufacturing techniques and fibers used, as well as application methods. The book highlights recent developments in terms of raw material usage, manufacturing technology, and value-added finishes in this sector. A separate chapter focuses on the testing procedures of various industrial textiles.

The clothing industry provides employment for 60 million workers worldwide. More than a quarter of these workers are employed in the Asia-Pacific region, where the industry is based on subcontracted production on behalf of international buyers. Rapid movements of manufacturing activity from country to country in search of cost advantages make clothing workers part of a globalizing labour market where they increasingly suffer from job insecurity. This book presents carefully researched case studies which highlight the ways in which labour is informalized, fragmented and made disposable by the globalization of production. Chapters address issues pertaining to rights and citizenship, and new forms of activism and organization in conjunction and coordination with diverse support groups, consumers, and wider global campaigns. Contributors further examine the role of the nation state, government regulatory bodies, as well as independent monitoring systems such as the International Labour Organization. Although there has been considerable effort directed to understanding how firms operate across multiple countries - in studies of the organization of global production networks, and the implications for complexities of scale, (de)territorialization and state development projects - there has been far less focus on how these processes produce precarious labour and reshape worker consciousness. Offering new insights into the understanding and support of workers in the global textile and garment industry, this book will be of interest to academics in a variety of disciplines including Asian Studies, sociology, political economy, development, human rights, labour and gender.

Using the findings from data analysis of fifty-one developing countries, this bookanalyses several national and international factors that have resulted in uneven development of the textiles and clothing industry inthe developing world. The findings are further substantiated by case studies of major players in this industry, such as India and China. While international trade rules have played a critical role in the growth of the textiles and clothing industry, country- and industry-specific policies and capacity building initiatives have also resulted in the present scenarioin several countries. There is no common recipe for all developing countries for sustaining market share in the domestic and international markets.Regional and local factors need to be taken into consideration while formulating policies for the industry.

By the 1780s in the city of Barcelona alone, more than 150 factories shipped calicoes to every major city in Spain and across the Atlantic, from Veracruz to Montevideo. Catalan, Basque and Castilian families sent relatives throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, hoping to enrich themselves from the trade in calicoes. "Clothing the Spanish Empire" narrates the lives of families on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from the craze for calicoes, and in doing so helped the Spanish empire to flourish in the eighteenth century.

Consumers spend approximately $93 billion on denim products every year. This consumption comes at a great cost, with thousands of litres of fresh water, hazardous chemicals and energy contributing to just one pair of jeans, leaving the environment and the industry vulnerable to pollution and climate change. Using facts, figures, case studies and anecdotes, this book investigates why the industry has been so slow to adopt green technologies and offers practical solutions to designers and fashion executives who want to switch to cleaner manufacturing, including those working in the 'fast fashion' sector. It also offers advice to the eco-conscious consumer who wants to purchase denim more sustainably. Considering the full lifecycle of a pair of jeans from the cotton crop to disposal, it presents examples of how to go green at different stages. This book will be of great interest to fashion students and researchers, as well as designers, fashion executives, policy-makers and anyone who comes into contact with the world of denim.

Recent Advances in Decolorization and Degradation of Dyes in Textile Effluent by Biological Approaches outlines various eco-friendly, cost effective methods for removal of toxic textile dyes. Large amounts of dye are unbound and released into the environment due to inefficient dyeing processes. The release of wastewater containing dye into the environment has several adverse effects as it is toxic, mutagenic and has other undesirable effects on living organisms. Hence, it is necessary to remove these dyes from industrial effluents to have a sustainable environment. This book deals with conventional as well as advanced effective treatment methods for the removal of dyes in order to increase the domain knowledge of readers. Salient features: Describes physico-chemical characteristics of textile effluent, dye classes and toxicity of dyes commonly used in the textile industry Assembles effective approaches which are used to remove dyes from textile effluent prior to their release into the environment Presents several advanced approaches such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, immobilized cells or enzymes, biofilms and microbial fuel cells, etc. for the removal of dyes.

When the future of his family's rope business in Liverpool was threatened at the end of the 1920s Eric Rigby-Jones had to leave his wife and young family behind to risk everything on establishing a new factory in the Irish Free State. He was still an officer in the Territorial Army when he leased a former British cavalry barracks in co. Kildare from the Irish government in 1933. It had lain derelict since the departure of British troops in 1922. Within four years his company, Irish Ropes, was supplying nearly all of Ireland's rope. When war came in 1939 Ireland remained staunchly neutral and faced both German invasion and a British trade embargo. With the government determined to make the country self-sufficient Eric had to resort to increasingly desperate measures to ensure that Irish farmers never ran out of twine to gather the harvest. Tintawn and Binder Twine is the untold story of the foundation and eventual demise of an iconic Irish business, known around the world for its Red Setter twine and Tintawn sisal carpets; of the pioneering Englishman who founded it and introduced new concepts in industrial relations to Ireland; of a family separated in peace and war; and of the regeneration of an Irish town. It is also the story of sisal, the vegetable fibre that became the mainstay of East Africa's colonial economy, and of the first fifty years of an independent Irish state. A member of Eric's wider family, Thomas Jones, was secretary to the British delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921 and his son, Michael, was killed in the Staines air disaster in 1972 while travelling to Brussels with an Irish delegation for talks about the country's imminent membership of the European Union. Well-illustrated and drawing heavily on unpublished family letters, documents, and photographs as well as new research in British and Irish archives, the book reveals intriguing but little-known sides to Anglo-Irish relations during the Second World War. It has particular relevance in today's world of Brexit, borders, tariffs, and the bullying of small nations by large.

Cotton made the fortune of the Fuda family, Egyptian landed gentry with peasant origins, during the second part of the nineteenth century. This story, narrated and photographed by a family member who has researched and documented various aspects of her own history, goes well beyond the family photo album to become an attempt to convey how cotton, as the main catalyst and creator of wealth, produced by the beginning of the twentieth century two entirely separate worlds: one privileged and free, the other surviving at a level of bare subsistence, and indentured.
The construction of lavish mansions in the Nile Delta countryside and the landowners' adoption of European lifestyles are juxtaposed visually with the former laborers' camp of the permanent workers, which became a village ('Izba), and then an urbanized settlement. The story is retold from the perspective of both the landowners and the former workers who were tied to the 'Izba. The book includes family photo albums, photographs of political campaigns and of banquets in the countryside, documents and accounting books, modern portraits of the peasants, and pictures of daily life in the village today.
This is a story that fuses the personal and emotional with the scholar's detached ethnographic reporting-a truly fascinating, informative, and colorful view of life on both sides of a uniquely Egyptian socio-economic institution, and a vanished world: the cotton estate.

How Are Textile Fabrics Formed? Principles of Fabric Formation is a treatise on the modern production systems of woven, knitted, braided, nonwoven, triaxial, multiaxial, and 3D fabrics. This book offers a basic understanding of the technicalities involved in the formation of different types of textile fabrics, and brings out the relative merits and limitations of each production process in one single volume. Gain Insight into the World of Textile Fabrics Providing readers with an appreciation of the technicalities involved in the formation of different types of textile fabrics, the author describes all major fabric formation methods, and explains each stage of formation in the text. He also addresses all major topics related to the formation of different classes of textile fabrics, including yarn winding, warping, yarn sizing, woven fabric construction, weaving, weft knitting, warp knitting, braiding, nonwovens, and triaxial, multiaxial and 3D fabrics. Comprised of 16 chapters, this multifaceted work: Provides a technical description of fabric formation systems Focuses on the diverse technicalities involved in each and every stage of formation Contains a comprehensive compilation of the major principles involved Principles of Fabric Formation is an exclusive junior/senior undergraduate-level textbook with a focus on the diverse technical principles involved in production of the entire gamut of textile fabrics.

This book explores the mechanics of rotor spinning machines. It discusses the open-end spinning machine rotor's vibrations and bearings as well as the kinematics of the rotor's drive as individual drive or central drive, both as a reducing drive and multiplying drive. It examines explanations for the rotor's power requirements through different techniques such as Shirley institute (UK) and Zurich Federal Institute. It also covers power distribution inside the machine, different mechanisms of the machine, and air flow inside the spinning machine.

Fibres to Smart Textiles: Advances in Manufacturing, Technologies, and Applications offers comprehensive coverage of the fundamentals and advances in the textile and clothing manufacturing sectors. It describes the basics of fibres, yarns, and fabrics and their end use in the latest developments and applications in the field and addresses environmental impacts from textile processes and how to minimize them. This book serves as a single comprehensive source discussing textile fibres, yarn formation, filament formation techniques, woven fabric formation, knitting technologies, nonwoven manufacturing technologies, braiding technologies, and dyeing, printing, and finishing processes. Testing of textile materials, environmental impacts of textile processes and use of CAD and CAM in designing textile products are also included. The book also discusses applications including textile composites and biocomposites, technical textiles, smart textiles, and nanotextiles. With chapters authored by textile experts, this practical book offers guidance to professionals in textile and clothing manufacturing and shows how to avoid potential pitfalls in product development.

How has the firm of Swaine Adeney Brigg, one of Britain's oldest and most prestigious manufacturers of leather goods and umbrellas, survived for so long? What are the ingredients of its lasting success? This book charts how the company has kept pace with the shifting needs and demands of the marketplace, seizing trading opportunities, for the most part successfully, along the way. Swaine & Adeney began as makers of driving, riding, and hunting whips, becoming whip-makers to the royal family. With the coming of the railways, horse-drawn transport was greatly reduced and demand for whips shifted away from driving accessories to hunting and fashionable riding accessories. As the twentieth century dawned Swaine & Adeney survived the advent of the motor car by applying their leatherworking skills also to the making of luggage. Other equestrian accessory companies were absorbed: J. Kohler & Son, makers of coaching and hunting horns, and G. & J. Zair Ltd, whip-makers of Birmingham. In the dark days of 1943, Thomas Brigg & Sons, London's leading umbrella and walking-stick manufacturers joined forces with Swaine & Adeney, bringing with them their own long and impressive history of craftsmanship and royal patronage. Together, as Swaine Adeney Brigg, they emerged into the post-war era with renewed vigour. The hatters Herbert Johnson and the luggage-making arm of Papworth Industries were later added to the group. Neville Chamberlain, Margot Fonteyn, Augustus John, and Stirling Moss have been among the proud owners of the group's stylish products, and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau both wore Herbert Johnson hats.

In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England's burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. Vermette's groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North American history. He traces individuals and families, from the textile barons who created a new industry to the poor farmers and laborers of Quebec who crowded into the mills in the post-Civil War period. Vermette discusses the murky reception these cross-border immigrants met in the USA, including dehumanizing conditions in mill towns and early-20th-century campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and the Eugenics movement. Vermette also discusses what occurred when the textile industry moved to the Deep South and brings the story of emigrants up to the present day. Vermette shows how this little-known episode in U.S. history prefigures events as recent as yesterday's news. His well documented narrative touches on the issues of cross-border immigration; the Nativists fear of the Other; the rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.; and the construction of race and ethnicity.

The cross-cultural usage of a particular cloth type - blueprint - is central to South African cultural history. Known locally as seshoeshoe or isishweshwe, among many other localised names, South African blueprint originated in the Far East and East Asia. Adapted and absorbed by the West, blueprint in Africa was originally associated with trade, coercion, colonisation, Westernisation, religious conversion and even slavery, but residing within its hues and patterns was a resonance that endured. The cloth came to reflect histories of hardship, courage and survival, but it also conveyed the taste and aesthetic predilections of its users, preferences often shared across racial and cultural divides. In its indigenization, isishweshwe has subverted its former history and alien origins and has come to reflect the authority of its users and their culture, conveying resilience, innovation and adaptation and above all a distinctive South Africanness. In this beautifully illustrated book Juliette Leeb-du Toit traces the origins of the cloth, its early usage and cultural adaptations, and its emerging regional, cultural and aesthetic significance. In examining its usage and current national significance, she highlights some of the salient features associated with histories of indigenisation.

Fashion studies is a burgeoning field that often highlights the contributions of genius designers and high-profile brands with little reference to what goes on behind the scenes in the supply chain. This book pulls back the curtain on the global fashion system of the past 200 years to examine the relationship between the textile mills of Yorkshire - the firms that provided the entire Western world with warm wool fabrics - and their customers. It is a microhistory of a single firm, Abraham Moon and Sons Ltd, that sheds light on important macro questions about British industry, government policies on international trade, the role of multi-generational family firms and the place of design and innovation in business strategy. It is the first book to connect Yorkshire tweeds to the fashion system. Written in lively, accessible prose, this book will appeal to anyone who works in fashion or who wears fashion. There is nothing like it - and it will raise the bar for historical studies of global fashion. Here you'll find intriguing stories about a tweed theft from the Leeds Coloured Cloth Hall, debates on tariffs and global trade, the battle against synthetic fibres and the reinvention of British tweeds around heritage marketing. You won't be bored. -- .

The Grammar of Pattern describes characteristics of textile and other surface patterns, and identifies, illustrates, and reviews a wide range of pattern types including spotted, striped, checked, tessellating and other types of all-over patterns with original drawings and images. This book includes original black-and-white line drawings and color images. The modular nature of patterns is explored, and attention is focused on the vast diversity of pattern types which can emerge from a small inventory of components. The book features material that is easily accessible with obvious mathematical content kept to a minimum and offers fresh perspectives on the nature of tessellating and other all-over patterns. This book serves as an effective practical guide for both students and professionals. Select sample exercises and student assignments are included, making this an ideal course text for teachers engaged across the full range of design education.

D_TEX presents itself as a starting point at a crossroads of ideas and debates around the complex universe of Textile Design in all its forms, manifestations and dimensions. The textile universe, allied to mankind since its beginnings, is increasingly far from being an area of exhausted possibilities, each moment proposing important innovations that need a presentation, discussion and maturation space that is comprehensive and above all inter- and transdisciplinary. Presently, the disciplinary areas where the textile area is present are increasing and important, such as fashion, home textiles, technical clothing and accessories, but also construction and health, among others, and can provide new possibilities and different disciplinary areas and allowing the production of new knowledge. D_TEX proposes to join the thinking of design, with technologies, tradition, techniques, and related areas, in a single space where ideas are combined with the technique and with the projectual and research capacity, thus providing for the creation of concepts, opinions, associations of ideas, links and connections that allow the conception of ideas, products and services. The interdisciplinary nature of design is a reality that fully reaches the textile material in its essence and its practical application, through the synergy and contamination by the different interventions that make up the multidisciplinary teams of research. The generic theme of D_TEX Textile Design Conference 2017, held at Lisbon School of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, Portugal on November 2-4, 2017, is Design the Future, starting from the crossroads of ideas and debates, a new starting point for the exploration of textile materials, their identities and innovations in all their dimensions.

In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

You know shoddy: an adjective meaning cheap and likely poorly made. But did you know that before it became a popular descriptor, shoddy was first coined as a noun? In the early nineteenth century, shoddy was the name given to a new textile material made from reclaimed wool. Shoddy was, in fact, one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling as old rags and fabric clippings were ground into "devil's dust" and respun to be used in the making of suits, army uniforms, carpet lining, mattress stuffing, and more. In Shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a vivid ride beginning in West Yorkshire's Heavy Woollen District and its "shoddy towns," and traveling to the United States, the third world, and waste dumps, textile labs, and rag shredding factories, in order to unravel the threads of this story and its long history. Since the time of its first appearance, shoddy had become both pervasive and politically and culturally controversial on multiple levels. The use of the term "virgin" wool--still noticeable today in the labels on our sweaters--thus emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy's appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Public health experts, with encouragement from the wool industry, worried about sanitation and disease--how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else's old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was stuffed with dead soldiers' overcoats? Over time, shoddy the noun was increasingly used as an adjective that, according to Shell, captured a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. Introducing us to many richly drawn characters along the way, Shell reveals an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. By exploring a variety of sources from political and literary texts to fabric samples and old military uniforms, antique and art photographs and political cartoons, medical textbooks, and legal cases, Shell unspools the history of shoddy to uncover the surprising journey that individual strands of recycled wool - and more recently a whole range of synthetic fibers from nylon to Kevlar - may take over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments and blankets, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even the insulation in your walls. The resulting fabric is at once rich and sumptuous, and cheap and tawdry--and likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, or even the world around you, the same way again.

This detailed study is the first exploration of rural consumption of clothing in early nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources including newspapers, trade directories, court records, visual sources and surviving garments, Toplis investigates how the apparel of the mass of the British population was acquired.

This book presents a series of studies analyzing critical factors that promote and constrain textile & clothing (T&C) production and trade in the Belt & Road (B&R) countries, and forces that drive the restructuring and transforming of global T&C supply chain and operations in the B&R context. The book also offers insights into the challenges and opportunities for T&C manufacturing in B&R countries through interviews with T&C experts, and also examines how Hong Kong can strengthen its "super-connector" role by facilitating sustainable trade and development in the T&C industries, as well as discussion on the impact of global trade wars on T&C trade. In the studies presented in this book, they offer topics ranging from the macro-economy, international business environment and strategies, logistics and supply chain, policy changes, to sustainability. The studies offer descriptive, theoretical and empirical analyses that explore T&C business and management related opportunities and challenges that are derived from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Econometric analysis with the gravity model is applied to T&C trade and extended to cover other areas that have not been considered in previous studies, such as production costs, export supply chain costs, technologies, demographical factors, and factors related to the business environment and policies, including qualitative variables. Studies using in-depth interviews and linear regression analysis are also present to explore new factors for T&C trade and production relocation to B&R countries.

The 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh, killed over a thousand workers and injured hundreds more. This disaster exposed the brutal labor conditions of the global garment industry and revealed its failures as a competitive and self-regulating industry. Over the past thirty years, corporations have widely adopted labor codes on health and safety, yet too often in their working lives, garment workers across the globe encounter death, work-related injuries, and unhealthy factory environments. Disasters such as Rana Plaza notwithstanding, garment workers routinely work under conditions that not only escape public notice but also undermine workers' long-term physical health, mental well-being, and the very sustainability of their employment. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry to examine the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety. Contributors analyze both the labor processes required of garment workers as well as the global dynamics of outsourcing and subcontracting that produce such demands on workers' health. The accounts contained in Unmaking the Global Sweatshop trace the histories of labor standards for garment workers in the global South; explore recent partnerships between corporate, state, and civil society actors in pursuit of accountable corporate governance; analyze a breadth of initiatives that seek to improve workers' health standards, from ethical trade projects to human rights movements; and focus on the ways in which risk, health, and safety might be differently conceptualized and regulated. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop argues for an expansive understanding of garment workers' lived experiences that recognizes the politics of labor, human rights, the privatization and individualization of health-related responsibilities as well as the complexity of health and well-being. Contributors: Mark Anner, Hasan Ashraf, Jennifer Bair, Jeremy Blasi, Geert De Neve, Saydia Gulrukh, Ingrid Hagen-Keith, Sandya Hewamanne, Caitrin Lynch, Alessandra Mezzadri, Patrick Neveling, Florence Palpacuer, Rebecca Prentice, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Nazneen Shifa, Dina M. Siddiqi, Mahmudul H. Sumon.