The Culture of Cloth

Madeleine Vionnet started as a lacemaker’s apprentice at twelve and ended up popularising the bias cut. The single technique that changed how clothing relates to the female body forever. She freed women from the corset before Poiret ever did yet history gave him the credit anyway.This episode traces her full arc: the under-financed 1912 house that lasted barely two years before the war shut it down, the rebuild at “les trois coquettes” on rue de Rivoli, her obsessive study of Greek vases at the Louvre, and the mathematical precision (golden ratios, dynamic symmetry, geometric pattern pieces) that she insisted was dressmaking. We get into why she resented Poiret’s fame, why she called herself a technician rather than a designer, and how a nearly-forgotten couturier ended up shaping Miyake, Kawakubo, Alaïa, and half of modern fashion’s relationship to the body.

Garment technicians rarely get interviewed. But buyers, designers, textile experts? Everyone talks about them. But the person who actually decides whether a garment fits, closes properly, and survives being worn? Almost invisible.In this episode, I sit down with my friend and fellow industry veteran Debbie, a garment technician who’s spent her career being the bridge between a designer’s sketch and the customer trying it on in a change room. We get into what a tech pack actually is, why a 0.3cm measurement can cause a genuine crisis, and the emotional cost of watching manufacturing relationships get shifted offshore chasing cheaper margins.We also talk honestly about the parts of the industry nobody glamorises: sizing and grading gaps for larger bodies, the blame that lands on garment techs when something goes wrong in store, and why working retail first is still the best advice either of us can give anyone wanting into fashion.It’s a conversation about the unsexy, unseen decisions that decide whether a piece of clothing actually works and why that work deserves more credit than it gets.

It’s the final episode of The First Makers series. In this episode we speak about the Polynesian goddess Hina and how she is seen across many different islands and known by many different names, but her message is the same. We also touch on the important of the possum cloak in the culture of Indigenous Australians and how that knowledge was almost lost but is fortunately alive and thriving today. Cover image is of Mildred Taniova colouring in the tapa designs with red pigment. Arara village, Collingwood Bay, Oro Province PNG, 2001. Photograph by A. Hermkens.

Before there was a world, there was a thread.In this episode of First Makers, I’m looking at two very different models of the same idea. Divinity and thread as the origin of everything that matters. First, Mama Ocllo, sent by the Inca sun god Inti to teach the first women to spin and weave. She is a culture-hero, not a weaver herself, whose myth explains where an entire craft tradition came from. Then Spider Grandmother, who in Navajo and Hopi tradition isn’t a teacher at all, but the maker of the world itself. She spun existence out of clay and attached every living thing to her by a single thread of her own silk.Part of The Goddess Project, my ongoing series on ancient goddesses, the history of draped cloth, and why what women make has always mattered more than it’s been given credit for.Cover art by Susan Seddon Boulet

The First Makers: West Africa and the DiasporaThis edition is different from every other one in this series.Every tradition we’ve covered so far came to us through a written documentary record (the Kojiki, the Rigveda, Hesiod). The traditions in this edition travelled through the worst thing human beings have ever done to each other. And they survived.In this episode I cover:Anansi (ah-NAHN-see) – the Akan spider trickster of Ghana, whose web became the origin of kente cloth. The Dogon of Mali – whose sage Ogotemmêli described the loom as a living body through which divine word enters the world. To weave at night would be to weave silence and darkness into the cloth. Oshun (O-shun) – Yoruba goddess of freshwater, fertility, and the creative arts. When the other gods failed to populate the Earth, it was Oshun who succeeded.Yemoja (yeh-MOH-jah) – Yoruba mother of waters, mother of many gods, whose presence in the Americas is one of the most remarkable stories of religious survival in human history.Because then the Middle Passage happened. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were taken from their homes and forced onto ships crossing the Atlantic. They arrived with nothing except what they remembered and they kept it alive.In Brazil it became Candomblé. In Cuba, Lucumí. In Haiti, sacred textile flags were made inside Vodou temples to honour the spirits. This is the First Makers thesis in its fullest form. A tradition that survived the unsurvivable because the people who carried it refused to let it die.The First Makers is part of the Goddess Project – a long-form series tracing the history of draped cloth as political act, culminating in the Esther sewing pattern in August/September 2026.Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles. https://www.commonthreadspress.co.uk/products/diasporic-threads-black-women-fibre-textiles-revised-edition