The Culture of Cloth

There's a word you use every single day that used to mean woven fabric. And the most authoritative dictionary in the English language is named, etymologically, after a medieval woman weaver. In this episode we follow the thread from Old English occupational suffixes through spinster, webster, and the World Wide Web, to Noah Webster, the Hattori clan, and the myth of Arachne. Women's textile labour was so economically central that it got encoded into the language itself, into surnames carried by families who have no idea what their name originally meant. If you carry a surname like Webster, Baxter, Brewster, Tucker, Fuller, Walker, Weaver, Tkachenko or Hattori then this episode is about you. Want to find out if your surname has a textile origin? Start here: Behind the Name surname database: surnames.behindthename.com  SurnameDB (49,000+ names): surnamedb.com Forebears (31 million surnames with distribution maps): forebears.io/surnames Find me on Instagram at @veronicatuckerthelabel. The Culture of Cloth is produced and hosted by Veronica Tucker.

The most coveted colour in the ancient world came from a sea snail that smelled of garlic and cost more than gold.  Tyrian purple built empires, wrote laws, and ended careers and when Constantinople fell in 1453, the knowledge of how to make it disappeared almost entirely. In this episode we trace the colour from the Phoenician city of Tyre to the courts of Rome and Byzantium, through the chemistry that made it impossible to fake, and the laws that made wearing the wrong shade a capital offence. This episode is part of The Goddess Project, a series tracing the history of cloth, colour, and the body from ancient Mesopotamia to the 20th century. If you want to see the colour while you listen, the full carousel is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYGCiWYk09m/?igsh=bW13YWZjNmpiZzVs Quotes from Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour used with her kind permission. Find her at https://www.instagram.com/kassiastclair?igsh=NjdvZWMwb296YXhh. Find me at https://www.instagram.com/veronicatuckerthelabel?igsh=MXkxNGNtNTVlZDUycQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr or search Veronica Tucker the Label.

Women invented binary code. They ran it by hand across thousands of threads, encoded it into the punched cards that built the first computer and knitted it through enemy checkpoints during wartime. We didn't call it code because we didn't call anything women did by its right name. This is the story of fabric as information technology and the consistent pattern of who builds the foundation and whose name ends up on it. Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veronicatuckerthelabel/