The long arc of human history has been accompanied since the 1400s one way or another by lace. The Italians call this, delightfully, ‘Stitches in Air’ and it has many origin myths from the Venice lagoon to the gently rolling countryside of northern Europe. It has been smuggled and stolen, worn and desired by kings and cavaliers, by maids and madmen. It has been painted and preserved and the songs and rhymes of lace makers have been passed down the generations. This episode of Haptic and Hue is a...
Jul 07, 2022•40 min
The Italian Renaissance produced glorious masterpieces by artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo who are justly feted for their talent. But look again at these pictures and you realise that they show the work of other artists as well, artists whose work was hugely skilled, well rewarded, and just as valued by the elite of the day who could afford to buy it. But the names of these spinners and dyers, the weavers and embroiderers are lost to us, and their work has largely crumbled to dus...
Jun 02, 2022•37 min
In 18th century London, the secret of your birth could literally hang by a thread. If your mother took you to the Foundling Hospital because she was unable to care for you, you were given a new identity to avoid any shame. But, in case she was later able to reclaim you, she left a token, often a textile cut in two, and she kept the other half as a way of proving she was your mother. Often it was just a scrap of cloth, the only thing that could prove the link between you and your birth mother. Th...
May 05, 2022•40 min
Over the past months, we have watched in horror as nearly ten million people have fled their homes in Ukraine to escape the Russian invasion. They have become the world’s latest refugees. That word was first applied to some of the most skilled and expert handweavers who began arriving in London in the 1500 and 1600s to escape death and persecution in France. This is the story of how these forced migrants – known as Huguenots - changed the face of London, and created some of the world’s most comp...
Apr 07, 2022•37 min
Welcome to the fourth season of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles. This season is called Threads of Survival and the eight episodes focus on people who have seen hardship and difficulty, but who have survived and often flourished against the odds. This introduction sets the context for the new Season and provides a mini-guide to the thinking behind the episodes. In it, we will explore stories of different peoples and different threads and textiles that in the face of poverty, intolerance, viole...
Mar 31, 2022•18 min
Can a nation simply forget an astonishing operation in which its women and children made nearly half a million quilts to comfort the victims of the Second World in Europe? It seems that Canada has come close to doing that. Only now, nearly 80 years later, is this story being pieced together for the first time by some very determined researchers and textile sleuths. It’s a tale that has never been properly told and the women and children who made these quilts have never been honoured or thanked p...
Jan 27, 2022•44 min
Samplers tell stories in stitch, but whose tale are they telling? Perhaps the story of a young woman describing her family and choosing her own patterns and pictures, a child learning her alphabet and numbers by stitching. Or maybe it’s an anonymous sampler from a woman being prepared for a role in which she will spend a life stitching other people’s stories, effacing her identity, working as a seamstress or a servant. This episode of Haptic and Hue looks at how women in the past were united by ...
Jan 13, 2022•42 min
There’s a way of producing cloth that has been called 200 years of secrecy and lies. It has played a central role in wars, and slavery. It was the foundation of cheaper clothing and clothes rationing. It has changed laws and been the subject of many official inquiries as well as helping to grow the finest rhubarb in the world. This episode looks at how it may now be entering a new phase of its life, offering us a way to prevent our addiction to textiles from ruining the planet. Shoddy cloth and ...
Nov 18, 2021•43 min
How do textiles shape a city, and how, in turn, does a city and its people shape and change the world of textiles? This episode looks at what the fabrics created in Lyon, in France, tell us about the lives of the people who lived and worked here. It looks at how the innovations that the weavers of Lyon helped to bring about changed us forever, ushering in early ideas of fashion, and at the same time witnessing and utilising the very first steps towards the digital age. This podcast explores one ...
Nov 04, 2021•31 min
African Wax Cloth is having its moment in the sun and it seems to be everywhere, from the catwalks of Paris and New York to the humblest country fabric shop. To the world’s eyes, it is joyful and original, a celebration of West African identity and culture. But what is this fabric, where does it really come from and what does it mean to the different societies and communities that have had a hand in shaping it? The is episode explores the curious origins of African Wax Cloth, and the twists and ...
Oct 21, 2021•39 min
Textiles can tell us different stories – not just those of the rich and powerful – they have the power to take us beyond that and tell us tales of working people, families living difficult lives in tough times, those whom history and the written records tend to overlook. This episode is about whole cloth quilting. It explores how this technique and process eventually settled in one area of England and became an emblem of pride and local identity for people who had hardscrabble lives. North Count...
Oct 07, 2021•38 min
Can something belong to us all – just by virtue of the fact that we are human beings? If anything has a claim to that – it is the Paisley motif, which has woven its way in and out of human history like no other pattern. This episode traces the history and some of the many appearances attached to this lovely shape, from its incarnation as a tree of life in Ancient Babylon to an emblem of America’s Wild West or the Swinging Sixties in London. Paisley has many names and even more meanings. It is th...
Sep 23, 2021•36 min
In the West of England lies an old house that is a quiet treasure chest of textiles. The man who has built up this astonishing United Nations of cloth is using them to change the way all of us value and understand textiles. Over many years Karun Thakar has created a collection of handmade textiles from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Some of these fabrics would have been the height of fashion in their day, destined for trade, but others are humble domestic miracles telling tales of hardship and strugg...
Sep 09, 2021•37 min
Welcome to the third season of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles. This series is called The Chatter of Cloth and each of the eight episodes starts with a piece of fabric and tracks its tale. This introduction sets the context for the season and provides a guide to what is in store. Textiles have been called a detective story that you can hold. Here are eight small detective stories for those of us who can hear what textiles have to tell us about great events, extraordinary kingdoms and empires ...
Sep 02, 2021•17 min
There is one kind of fabric that produces a powerful sense of nostalgia in many of us, and that’s the very democratic cloth that covers the seats and benches of public transport systems around the world. Whether you live in London or Los Angeles, Berlin or Bombay, our buses, metros, and trams use a patterned, wool, fabric called moquette. It comes in thousands of different patterns and weaves, and the sight and touch of each one enables us to reach into our memories and be transported back to a ...
Jul 01, 2021•31 min
Cloth is more than something useful or beautiful, it can also have enormous power. We are surrounded by fabrics of meaning and belonging, fabrics that tell us who people are and where they come from if they share a nation, a clan, a school or a religion with us. This episode explores the ultimate textile with a message – a flag. One commentator calls flags a kind of window onto history that can link people across time and anchor them to their communities. In this podcast, we look at one particul...
Jun 17, 2021•36 min
Cloth and wealth have gone hand in glove for much of history: where there are textiles there has almost always been money, and often lots of it. The Medicis of Florence started life as wool traders in Tuscany before they became bankers, popes, princes, and queens. It was wool that started them on a journey that saw them become the principal financiers of the Florentine Renaissance, they were the backers of almost everyone who mattered including Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Botticelli, Rapha...
Jun 03, 2021•38 min
How cloth helps us grieve. Sorrow is a universal human experience – whether it’s for a loved family member, for a way of life that once was, or for events that engulf nations and sweep away millions. The episode looks at how textiles are an essential part of the process of grieving, and how they bring us comfort and help us deal with deeply felt emotions. It looks at the special place cloth plays in mourning a much-loved father, the loss of a child or partner in political repression, or how they...
May 20, 2021•37 min
Unravelling the journey that fleece takes from the fells to fabric. This episode tracks how greasy wool bred in the wind and rain of a Lake District Farm becomes a smartly tailored jacket, a beautifully knitted pullover or a laceweight shawl, fine enough to pull through a wedding ring. A Feeling of Warmth looks at the skills and processes needed from the shepherd, the spinner, the weaver, and the tailor before we can put a wool garment made sustainably and ethically on our backs. Thanks to Maria...
May 06, 2021•36 min
On the face of it repairing and reinforcing textiles simply prolongs the life of our clothes and helps minimize textile waste, things worth having – but for many, it also delivers much more than that. The French sculptor, Louise Bourgeois said: ‘The act of sewing is a process of emotional repair’, it helps to centre us, and tells us stories about ourselves and the resilience of our families and communities. This episode looks at the case for mending and thinks about how different cultures approa...
Apr 22, 2021•39 min
Is costume design magic or camouflage? The second part of A Feeling of Transformation , looks at the enormous heart and skill that goes into getting costumes right for screen and stage. Find out how costume designers look at textiles and fabric with a different eye: they think how this will tone in overall and how will it read on camera? A talented, young costume designer, Sinead Kidao, who has worked on films like Beauty and The Beast, Little Women, and The Dark Knight Rises talks about how she...
Apr 08, 2021•33 min
Do clothes conceal us or reveal us? Listen to how actors use clothes to make stories believable. Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer, who have played a huge variety of roles between them, from mobsters to Tudor ladies in waiting, from regency bucks to flower sellers, talk about why costume is so important to them. Mark Twain once wrote: “without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a va...
Mar 25, 2021•33 min
There is nowhere in the world quite like Gees Bend, Alabama with the story of how its quilt-makers were acclaimed as artists, and their work bought by galleries and museums around the world. Necessity is the mother of invention and this is particularly true in this small community, where for generations women have created quilts to keep out the cold and to furnish their homes. They used anything and everything that came to hand, and over time they honed their skills and their designs. Isolation,...
Mar 11, 2021•36 min
Why does touch matter so much to us? What is the connection between cloth and our emotions? This new season of Haptic and Hue's Tales of Textiles explores how we express ourselves through cloth, whether it's the comfort quilts and blankets bring us, the way we use clothes to take the burden of losing someone we love, or why certain patterns and fabrics connect us strongly with memories of childhood, school or first love. Each episode takes a different feeling and unravels what it means to us in ...
Mar 04, 2021•17 min
Majesty and Mannequins Episode 7 Catch her out of the corner of your eye as she skitters across the stage of history. She has seen revolutions, war, disaster, pandemics, peace and joy, and survived it all. She is probably 3,500 years old, maybe more. She is called Pandora. This episode looks at the unseen role miniature mannequins, or Pandora figures, have played in diplomacy, war, royalty, communications, and marketing, down the centuries from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, through the Seco...
Dec 10, 2020•40 min
Sewing, mending, knitting and all the fibre skills are seen as 'Women's Work' in Western cultures. But why is this? We hear from men who were taught to sew and knit in wartime, in prison or in isolation, and we talk to men who freely choose to stitch, knit and spin as a hobby. What are the barriers men face if they take up these skills and what does the world lose if they don't? This episode looks not just at the gender divide of the West but also thinks about the textile traditions of Africa wh...
Nov 25, 2020•33 min
This episode tells the story of the top designer of fabrics to the French fashion industry. It looks at the way in which a modern supplier, competing in a global market, still uses ancient weaving technology with handweavers working on table looms to produce thousands of fresh designs every year. I provide a full transcript, pictures, links to the work of the contributors to these podcasts, and a list of resources that have inspired me on my website at: www.hapticandhue.com/listen . If you would...
Nov 12, 2020•26 min
The haute couture embroiderers of Paris are amongst Europe’s most celebrated and skilled artisans. This episode looks at the needlewomen who sit behind the seams of the garments we see on the catwalks and in the fashion magazines. It tracks the history of haute couture and thinks about how it is changing in response to modern tastes and trends. I provide a full transcript, pictures, links to the work of the contributors to these podcasts, and a list of resources that have inspired me on my websi...
Oct 29, 2020•31 min
What does it mean to earn your living as a maker? Can you feed yourself? This episode looks at the renowned hand-weaver, Janet Phillips, who has done just that for more than 50 years. It celebrates her half-century at the loom and asks what it takes to achieve this. I provide a full transcript, pictures, links to the work of the contributors to these podcasts, and a list of resources that have inspired me on my website at: www.hapticandhue.com/listen . If you would like to sign up for your own l...
Oct 15, 2020•19 min
The story of the elegant, crisp and artistic textile designs that burst upon the world in the 1950s - the period now known as Mid Century Modern . It looks at the women who created them and in doing so became part of the first cohort of women to dominate any field of design, and it thinks about how these fabrics transcended their function and became a symbols of peace and better times. I provide a full transcript, pictures, links to the work of the contributors to these podcasts, and a list of r...
Oct 01, 2020•36 min
