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 Diaspora This 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

Every culture created a goddess who presided over making. But not all of them did it the same way. This episode introduces two categories. The first: goddesses whose mythology is explicitly about weaving. Documented, primary sources, this is what the texts actually say. The second: goddesses that weavers chose. Figures whose domains of creativity, wisdom and skill made them the natural patrons of women at the loom, even though weaving isn’t the centre of their story. Both categories are true. They’re just true in different ways. In this episode I cover: Amaterasu (Japan) — the sun goddess whose most significant mythological moment begins in a weaving hall, documented in the Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE) Zhinu and Orihime (China and Japan) — the Weaver Girl of the Milky Way, a myth over 2,600 years old that travelled the Silk Road and became Japanese Leizu (China) — the empress who discovered silk when a cocoon fell into her tea, invented the loom, and was eventually deified for it Saraswati (India) — goddess of knowledge and the arts, and the patron weavers in Kanchipuram have invoked before beginning new patterns for centuries Benzaiten (Japan) — who began as Saraswati in India, travelled through China, and arrived in Japan transformed Dewi Sri (Java, Bali, Lombok) — the rice goddess in whose name women across Indonesia have always woven sacred cloth You never find a god of weaving. Not once, across any of these traditions. Every time, in every culture, the act of making cloth belongs to the feminine divine. The First Makers is part of the Goddess Project, a long-form series tracing the history of draped cloth from the beginning of time, culminating in the release of the Esther sewing pattern in August–September 2026.

Tully Walter is a Strategic Futures Director at Soon Futures and this is one of the most substantial conversations I've had on the show. We get into what trend forecasting actually is (observed, invented, or accelerated) and how the answer changes depending on who's paying. We talk about cultural appropriation and why origin gives a trend its meaning, what happens when that context gets stripped out, and why the Prada sandal situation was an after-the-fact correction that should have been built in from the start. We talk about AI. About what it can synthesise, what it can't feel, and why a forecast that looks right isn't the same as a forecast that is right. Tully's line on this one is worth the whole episode: AI doesn't have the magic ✨ We also get into the trench coat problem in Australia, why independent makers can use trend forecasting differently to the big end of town, and what it actually feels like to stand in a room full of planners and fight for a trend you believe in. And we close with the Fashion Five: Tully's first childhood memory of fashion, her style icon, her favourite designer, and what makes her hopeful about the future of the industry. The Culture of Cloth is hosted by Veronica Tucker of Veronica Tucker the Label, a label built around the Goddess Project, a content series tracing the history of draped cloth as a political act. Find the Goddess Project content below: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veronicatuckerthelabel?igsh=MXkxNGNtNTVlZDUycQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/veronicatuckerthelabel YouTube: https://youtube.com/@veronicatuckerthelabel?si=JvM1ZGgv9Uy-xyGl

Every single one of these goddesses survived, but none of them survived intact. In this episode I trace the weaving goddesses of Celtic and European mythology (Brigid, Arianrhod, Frigg, and Holda) and the pattern running through all of them. They were rewritten, renamed, absorbed into new religions, turned into fairy tales, reduced to saints. Brigid survived by becoming a saint. Holda survived by becoming a fairy tale. Arianrhod survived in a manuscript written by people who tried to contain her. Frigg survived as a constellation, the stars of Orion’s Belt named for her spinning tool. And then there’s the distaff. The broomstick. The spindle that cursed Sleeping Beauty. The ordinary tools of women’s making, reframed as instruments of evil. This is Edition II of the First Makers series, part of the Goddess Project, tracing the history of draped cloth as a political act. The carousel is live on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY8g1jMgefZ/?igsh=aW04bXZ3N3I1eXd2

While researching the Goddess Project, I came across something that stopped me completely. Every culture, independently and without contact with each other, created a goddess who presided over weaving. Not because ideas travelled along trade routes, but separately. Across thousands of years and thousands of kilometres. In this episode I walk through the oldest part of that record, from Uttu, the Sumerian spider goddess who dates to 3000 BCE, through Inanna, Neith, Hathor, Isis, and Athena. Six goddesses, roughly 5000 years, and one argument running through all of them: making was never just craft. Part of The Goddess Project series. Find the companion carousel on Instagram 🔗 link below https://www.instagram.com/p/DYsJxDcAeiW/?igsh=aWo3Y3Jybmt0ZGxx

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/