In today’s world of polyester, acrylic and spandex, traditional textiles and fibres can be increasingly difficult to find when it comes to buying quality clothing. What are the origins of the fibres used to create the textiles which our parents and grandparents grew up with, in the days before manmade fibres started to dominate the fabric-making world?
In this posting, we’ll find out together! We’ll find out what various fibres and textiles are, what they’re used for, and where they come from. While there are a multitude of fibres out there, I’ll just be covering the most common ones in this posting, or it could go on forever!
So rug up, and get comfortable…
COTTON
Used to make all kinds of fabrics, from toweling to velour to seersucker, and used to make all kinds of garments, from shirts, to blouses, to socks, and undergarments, cotton has been cultivated for centuries. That said, cotton, which grows in warm environments, is extremely difficult to harvest! Picking the bolls of cotton from the plants by hand was a slow, labour-intensive, and even painful exercise. Although the plant itself has no thorns or spines, the cotton boll – the bulb, or ‘fruit’ of the cotton plant – can be hard and spiky. When the boll opens, you gain access to the fluffy cotton fibres inside.
Once you’ve picked the cotton, it must then be processed to remove all the seeds caught up inside the fibres – an extremely slow, laborious process which took hours to complete! This is what slaves in the American South had to deal with day in, day out, for weeks on end during harvest-time on cotton-producing plantations back in the 1700s and 1800s. To make cotton-processing easier, Eli Whitney invented the cotton engine, or “Cotton Gin”. Raw, unprocessed cotton fluff was stuffed into one end of the machine, and a crank was turned, spinning a spiked drum. The drum-spikes basically ‘combed’ the cotton fibres through a mesh, teasing them out bit by bit. The mesh was just wide enough to let the cotton fibres through, but not large enough to admit the seeds caught up in the fibres. In this way, the raw cotton fibres could be separated from the seeds, and pure cotton could be gathered up, baled, and shipped out for spinning and weaving into fabric.
Once packed and shipped, raw, processed cotton was sent to cotton mills, either in the northern United States, or across the Atlantic to the UK. Here, it was spun and woven into fabric. The deafening noise of the rattling looms and spinning-wheels caused some cotton-mill workers to go deaf. It’s the origin of the term “Cloth Ears”, meaning an inability to hear properly.
LINEN
Light, airy and breathable, linen is the fabric produced from the fibres of the flax plant. Because of its light weight, softness and absorptive nature, linen fabric is often used for warm-weather clothing. Linen jackets, trousers and suits, linen shirts and handkerchiefs…linen was also used for toweling and bedsheets, which is why we still have the terms “bath linen” and “bed linen” today. Linen is generally the recommended material for summertime clothing because of its thin, strong, breathable, and lightweight construction.
SILK
We’ve all heard of the expression ‘smooth as silk’, but where does silk come from?
Silk is the thread which is extracted from the cocoons of the silkworm (the adorably-named ‘bombix mori’).
Silkworms eating mulberry leaves
Silkworms are now purposefully farmed and bred to produce silk, and the little critters are pretty pampered for the luxurious fibre that they generate. They’re fed almost exclusively on the leaves of the White Mulberry tree, although they can eat a (limited) number of other leaves. Sericulture, the practice of farming silkworms, has a history of at least 5,000 years, and originated in China. For literally thousands of years, China was the main producer, and exporter of silk, and guarded its silk-weaving and silk-farming processes jealously! Europeans loved silk for its softness and smoothness, its strength, and durability, but getting silk was almost impossible. Imperial decrees forbade anybody from detailing to a “foreign barbarian” where, how, when, or with what silk was manufactured, and Europeans remained in ignorance for centuries.
Eventually, knowledge of silk leaked out of China, and by the Middle Ages, silk-farming and production had begun in the Middle East and later, in Europe.
Silk has incredible properties. Spun, and then woven into fabric, it’s incredibly strong and dense, despite its light weight, and this made it ideal for all kinds of garment-making applications. In fact, some of the world’s first bulletproof vests were made of silk! Layers and layers and layers of silk were placed on top of each other, and then firmly stitched and quilted together, to form a thin, but very firm protective cloth padding which was impenetrable by arrows, and even by various types of gunfire. It’s how a lot of body-armour was produced before the invention of kevlar.
WOOL
Shorn from sheep (or lambs), wool has been used for centuries for everything from blankets and bedding, to tunics, hose, trousers, jackets, suits, coats, scarves and mittens. Depending on how it’s been carded, spun, and woven, wool can be anything from soft and plush to thick and fluffy, to smooth and luxurious!
These days, most “wool” garments are not pure wool. To give it strength and durability, it’s usually blended with synthetic fibres (polyester) to create a ‘wool-blend’. High-quality wool-blends are anywhere from 60-40 wool-poly, up to 80-20 or even 90-10 wool-poly. Wool has incredible water-shedding properties, as well as insulation, for warmth. It’s also robust against grime and light stains, and, depending on how it’s constructed – even fireproof!…although for that last quality, you’d want 100% wool construction.
Back in the old days, wool garments were 100% wool, and you can still find that today, if you know where and how to look, but they will cost more.
CASHMERE
Fluffy cashmere goats!
Mmmm…cashmere! Soft, fluffy, smooth, and warm. Cashmere is the name of the wool that is shorn from the Cashmere or “Kashmir” goat, which is native to India and Pakistan. Famed for centuries for its softness, cashmere is used for scarves, socks, coats, and other winter-weather clothing. As with pure-wool fabric, pure-cashmere is expensive. To stretch the budget a bit, cashmere may also be blended, almost always with wool, or sometimes, silk, for a more lightweight finish.
ALPACA
A type of camelid native to South America (in particular, Peru), alpaca wool is again, one more step above just ordinary sheep-wool. What makes Alpaca and Cashmere wool so popular is that the fibres of their wool are so extremely fine. This means that any fabric produced from their wool is both thin, and lightweight, but also incredibly dense, which makes them beautifully soft, and warm. Alpaca wool is used for blankets, scarves, and winter clothes due to its natural insulating properties and luxuriously soft texture.
VICUNA
Ever heard of vicuna? Probably not! That’s hardly surprising, considering that at one point, this little South American camelid was very-nearly extinct! Today, they’re no-longer extinct (yay!!)…but that fact has done little to hide the fact that vicuna wool is the MOST EXPENSIVE WOOL IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.
How expensive?
Well, for any reasonably sized vicuna-wool garment (say, a suit, an overcoat, a jacket, etc), you can expect to pay MULTIPLE TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars.
This is because of two main reasons: Vicuna wool is extremely fine and soft, and therefore, dense, and high quality (Oooh, luxury!), but also, because vicuna are small animals, and only produce a relatively tiny amount of wool each year. In an entire year, you’d be lucky to get more than a few tons of fleeces out of the global population of vicunas. Not a few hundred tons, not a few thousand…just…a few tons. And that’s it. And because vicuna only live in South America, you also have to factor in import and transportation costs for this valuable fibre, which drives the already high prices up even higher!…just to get your hands on what would be only a few hundred kilos of wool, if that.