Turning the last page of artist and writer Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn: A People’s History of Clothing and looking again at the image on the cover – a neatly collared and cuffed shirt, decorated with an intricate map of the heavens – I couldn’t help thinking that some sort of dishevelled, blood-soaked garment might have been more apt.
Thanhauser’s geographical reach is impressive – from China and Taiwan, through India, Paris, Cumbria, across North America, and down to Jamaica and Honduras, she charts the history of five fabrics with which we’ve clothed our bodies: linen, cotton, silk, synthetics and wool – as is the rigour of her examinations of the cultural, economic, political and environmental impacts of their production. But the takeaway is the terrible cost of life along the way. There’s scant attention given to just how transcendent a well-cut dress can make one feel; this is not that kind of book.
Today, we’re all aware of the evils of fast fashion. The textile industry accounts for a tenth of global carbon emissions and a fifth of global waste water, within which microfibres have become the dominant source of plastic pollution. Three of the four worst garment factory disasters in history occurred in the 2010s. But all these, says Thanhauser, are just “the newest face of a problem that is centuries old”.
Throughout which, nothing quite rivals the terrors of the cotton industry. It isn’t just that the cotton plantations of the American South relied on slave labour; they were also established on great swaths of land that had been “cleared” of their indigenous populations. (One Confederate soldier, who had witnessed the slaughter of thousands in the American Civil War, declared the removal of the Cherokee from Georgia the “cruellest” thing he’d ever seen.) British colonial rule in India, meanwhile, first deliberately decimated the production of hand-loomed traditional fabrics, leading to poverty and famine, then forced the production of cotton in its place. And today, of course, Xinjiang cotton is synonymous with Uyghur forced labour and human rights violations in China.
More insidious horror stories can be found in the chapters on synthetics. The Fascist states of 1930s Europe looked to rayon – the first man-made fibre – not only to achieve textile independence from British-dominated cotton, but also with more ambitious schemes in mind. The Nazis, for example, fed an experimental yeast sausage (Biosyn-Vegetabil-Wurst) made from the by-products of rayon to the inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, causing the deaths of hundreds. Many of the workers who made rayon suffered from carbon disulphide poisoning (one of the solvents – later discovered to be a powerful neurotoxin – used in the production process), the symptoms of which include psychosis, depression, rage, and suicidal and murderous impulses.
