Friends of Haptic & Hue

Clothes are never just clothes, even in times of conflict and war. They are memory, community and the quiet insistence that life goes on. People take pride in what they wear even in the most extreme circumstances. War can strip life down to its essentials – survival, shelter and safety – but what you wear still matters, partly because it may be one of the few things that you still control.   In th...

Mending our own clothes, or having it done professionally, is not a token act. It can have a powerful environmental and economic impact. Textile waste is one of the most pressing environmental problems the world faces. Every year we create 150 billion new garments, and every year we discard 92 million tonnes of textiles. The US alone throws away 17 million tonnes of textiles, most of which goes in...

Knitting is one of the most popular textile crafts today and it's estimated that there are well over a hundred million active knitters globally. But where does it come from? When did knitting first appear and what do we know about how it spread around the world?   This episode of Travels with Textiles is devoted to knitting and its history. We explore the origins of knitting and what we know about...

How do clothes change what we know about someone? This episode of Travels with Textiles takes a look at this in different ways. First, we talk to Eleanor Houghton about her extraordinary new book: Charlotte Bronte's Life Through Clothes which took her nine long years to complete. We may think we know the story of this famous Victorian author, but this book reveals a very different person.   We the...

In the high regions of the world a race against time is going on to save some of the most important historic textiles yet found. Climate change means that ice and snow is being uncovered for the first time in thousands of years, and clothes and shoes abandoned or lost in the past are turning up at the edge of snowfields perfectly preserved. But unless the archaeologists reach them quickly, they ro...

Happy New Year and welcome back to Travels with Textiles, just for Friends of Haptic & Hue. Do you know anything about the person who designed the pattern on your clothing or your furnishings? Most textile designers remain anonymous and yet their work can be recognised globally. Women in Print is a new show that looks at the female designers behind one of the most famous names in pattern and print...

What's in a carpet? A great deal according to the historian and carpet scholar Dorothy Armstrong, who has just published a book called Threads of Empire: A History of the World in 12 Carpets.   For centuries carpets have been the most coveted and expensive of textiles, they have even attracted carpet forgers, and almost no other textile has done that. Every empire builder, king and prince has want...

It is hard to think of a greater contrast than the opulent style of the ill-fated Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and the misery of decades of clothes rationing under Cuba's Communist regime. But this month Haptic and Hue's Travels with Textiles considers both, and also takes a look at the forgotten French couturier who helped to rescue women from corsets in the early 20 th century   Was Marie...

Danish Design is globally famous and has been exported around the world. But what about Danish textiles? For the first time the renowned Danish Design Museum in Copenhagen has an exhibition devoted to the textile designers of the past 100 years who contributed so much so the Danish design movement. We talk to the curator as she tells us why these largely female designers produced work that was so...

Five thousand years ago, weavers in southern Egypt were given one of the oddest commissions they must ever have received. Please make a linen shroud for an elephant. Why were they asked to do this, and how long did it take them? This is just one of the themes that we are exploring in this month's episode of Travels with Textiles, which comes from the wonderful Centre for Textile Research in Copenh...

A new project is just getting underway in Western Norway to document the craft skills of the Arctic peoples that enabled them, down the centuries, to create beautiful handstitched clothing perfectly fitted to the environment. The University of Bergen is working in collaboration with people from the European Arctic, Greenland, and Western Canada to analyse and understand some of the incredible skil...

UNESCO has just announced that it is adding an old quilting practice to the list of crafts that have  intangible cultural heritage status . Quilting in a flat frame with a rocking stitch has a history that stretches back certainly to the 16 th  century and maybe much further. This is one of the original forms of quilting on cloth, creating beautiful and complex patterns as it is done. This techniq...

Mary Schoeser is one of the world's great authorities on textiles. She has devoted her life to understanding textiles and the extraordinary stories behind them. Now the Fashion and Textile Museum in London has just opened a new exhibition curated by her. In this month's Friends of Haptic & Hue we have a special interview with Mary where she talks to us about the exhibition and how she put it toget...

In this episode of Friends of Haptic & Hue Bill and Jo travel to the unique Westminster Menswear's Archive in London to talk to Professor Andrew Groves about how men dress and what their clothes tell us about who they are and what they want from their garments.   Professor Groves says men's clothing has been overlooked compared to women's wear and that it hasn't been thought or written about in th...

DNA testing is normally used to solve modern crimes, but textile archaeologists are beginning to use it to unravel the mysteries of the past. It can tell us about the origin of fur and leather used in clothing constructed five thousand years ago, or it can track down where the sheep's wool or silk used in garments came from.   In this episode of Friends of Haptic & Hue, we are at a special winter...

Imagine committing yourself to a project that you knew would take almost a decade of your life: that's what Sandra Sawatsky did when she started on her embroidery project to tell the epic story of our relationship with oil in all its forms.    The Black Gold Tapestry, which runs to 220 feet and uses 23 miles of thread, starts in pre-history and traces the environmental and societal changes that ma...

As 2024 comes to a close, we wanted to send the year away with a look back at some of your favourite episodes of Haptic & Hue. We learn a great deal from researching and putting together each one, but we wondered: what do they add up to? Does paying close attention to textiles down the ages reframe history in a fresh way?   For this programme – called the Best of Friends - we have put together exc...

Friends of Haptic & Hue are celebrating their second birthday this month and to mark the occasion we are adopting two stitches in your name at the Royal School of Needlework's Stitchbank. Bayeux Stitch and Knotting both have extraordinary stories behind them which you can hear more about in this month's episode of Travels with Textiles, as well as the work that goes into Stitchbank itself as an ef...

200 years of the finest Scottish embroidered art goes on show in Edinburgh next week. Many of the pieces have never been seen in public before. This extraordinary collection comes out of the castles, grand houses, cottages, and tenements cared for by the National Trust for Scotland. The Trust's work is usually associated with landscapes, buildings, furniture, and art, but in a sign of the growing...

What do clothes tell us about the times we live in and the people we are? A unique collection of American women's clothing goes on display in New York in the next few days. This is very far from the art or elite clothing normally held in museums and galleries: instead, this is what women really wore in good times and bad. Kiki Smith, who created this collection as a research resource, says that th...

Hampton Court Palace – just outside London – is famous for once being one of Henry the Eighth's favourite palaces. This is where he played tennis and courted some of his wives and, unsurprisingly, it is still rumoured to have several ghosts. Today they share the palace with one of the great institutions of the stitching world. The Royal School of Needlework is based at the palace, it has a profess...

The 80 th anniversary of the Normandy Landings took place this month, with much reflection on the lasting peace that the end of World War II brought to a devasted Europe. This episode of Travels with Textiles looks at how textiles have been used to mark and commemorate conflict and war. We tell the extraordinary story of Canada's Izzy dolls, two million of which have been distributed to children c...

Faith Ringgold – who died last month – was an extraordinary artist and chronicler of 20th century American life. She used many media to carry her message and some of her best-loved works are her story quilts – pieces that combine craft, art, and activism, like Echoes of Harlem, Tar Beach, and Street Story. In this episode of Travels with Textiles we pay tribute to Ringgold's astonishing talent in...

Georgina von Etzdorf has been called the most talented textile designer to come out of Britain since William Morris. Her fabrics, which had their roots in the Arts and Crafts movement, helped to define the 1980s and 90s and were worn by rock stars and royalty alike. In this month's episode she talks to Travels with Textiles about how she started as a designer and why she has now decided to sell he...

The final report into the most extensive collection of Bronze Age textiles and fibres ever found in the UK at a site that has been called Britain's Pompeii is published this week. Travels with Textiles has an exclusive interview with the textile archaeologist who has spent years studying the materials from the site. We travel to Morocco to see the rug weavers and think about their changing lives,...