Book Feature: Worn
Every now and then I come across a book that is so eye-opening it continues to rumble around in my mind long after I am done reading it. Worn: A People’s History of Clothing is just such a book. Author Sofi Thanhauser traces the social history of the clothes we wear and the materials we use to create them in a way that has prompted me to rethink a lot of what I knew about fabric.
It’s no secret that the clothing industry has become one of the worst sources of pollution on the planet, but it can be as difficult to sift through the information about the overproduction of clothing as it is to sift through the mountains of cast-off garments that grow ever out of control. Thanhauser takes a thoroughy-researched deep-dive into the history of clothing, orgainzed around five broad categories: Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, and Wool. It’s a complex history, entangled with many other aspects of culture and heavily influenced by colonialism, but Thanhauser’s engaging storytelling and first-hand accounts of travelling the world in search of that story made it hard to put down. The history of clothing is the history of women’s rights, the history of industrialization, the history of agriculture, and more.
But Anna, what exactly does all this have to do with quilting?
I came away from reading Worn with a much more nuanced understanding of the materials that I use to practice my art, because of course these are the same materials that make up our clothing. Before reading this book I was interested in working as much as possible with secondhand or repurposed fabric. Since reading it, making my art sustainable has become even more of a passion.
It even made me rethink one of my learning goals. For a while I have been casually interested in learning about surface design from the perspective of designing fabric. But by the time I finished reading Worn, I realized that contributing to the continued manufacture of more NEW fabric was inconsistent with the values I wanted to bring to quilting, and so instead i have doubled down on exploring new ways to work with what already exists.
Thanhauser reflects, “ We have to become good readers of cloth. Even, and especially, of the monochrome, mass-produced fabric bolt. And we might learn to approach our clothes with certain questions. Where did they come from? From what histories? From whose hands? From what fields? Where will they go when they break down? I hope this book can begin to provide some of those answers, but perhaps more important, to provoke the frequent asking of these questions”(p, 294).
Get the Book:
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing
By Sofi Thanhauser
2022, Pantheon Books
ISBN: 9781524748395 (hardcover), 9781524748401 (ebook)
Please buy local or check your library!