The Culture of Cloth – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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