Haptic & Hue

There's a piece of clothing that has a good claim to being a universal garment. It is thousands of years old and yet it featured on the catwalks last year. It's stylish and at the same time the humblest and simplest of garments. It has been worn and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. It has been repurposed and reshaped throughout human history and it has fulfilled many functions.   The cloak has kept...

As the war in the Ukraine brutally shows, few people have had as hard a struggle down the centuries to maintain their identity as Ukrainians. For hundreds of years, they have been occupied and subjugated by one power after another, the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Poland, the Nazis, and Russia again. Through it all Ukrainians have held onto their traditions: one of the strongest...

The needle and thread have been humanity's constant companions for tens of thousands of years: far longer than the dog, the sword, or the wheel, and much longer than reading and writing. Down the centuries the needle has rendered us incredible service and we have come to depend on it. And yet the activity of stitching has long been ignored in the record of human endeavour. Even the modern trend fo...

Sewing is one of the most vital but also one of the most overlooked human crafts. Every piece of clothing we wear has been put together by someone who has learned to sew. Millions of people sew for pleasure and millions more earn their living in the textile and clothing industries – often in underpaid and unprotected jobs.    The craft of using a needle has been one of humanity's greatest skills,...

There is a quiet revolution happening on Savile Row in London, home to some of the world's finest men's outfitters, as the makers of bespoke suits embrace textile recycling in a unique new scheme. A number of houses on The Row have been collecting woollen offcuts as they cut and tailor handmade men's clothing – just as they did in times gone by– and sending them off to be recycled into new yarn, w...

Have you ever wanted a Picasso on your walls – or maybe a Joan Miro, a Chagall, or perhaps a Raoul Dufy? For a time in the mid-50s in America you could buy work by these artists for just a few dollars: that's a few dollars a yard, because these were fabrics and not original paintings – but they were beautifully designed, sophisticated, and elegant.  As peace crept back after World War Two there wa...

Who doesn't love a good tartan? It is everywhere from high fashion catwalks to shooting parties on winter hillsides, from military uniforms on parade to much-loved old sofas. It is at home in the humblest of cottages and the most splendid of royal palaces. It has a kaleidoscope of different uses and meanings. It is one of the most recognised patterns on earth, a global textile, visible almost ever...

This is the tale of how textiles played a central part in one of the great cultural and artistic upheavals of the last century, helping to bring about a change that was to reach deep into many lives, influencing fashion, interior design, illustration, art, and dance.   The Ballet Russe, gathered together by the mercurial figure of Serge Diaghilev in the early part of the twentieth century, was rev...

Warning: This podcast and the text below uses terms considered offensive and inappropriate today.   An extraordinary sample of indigo cloth has been found in a British record office which is thought to be a rare surviving fragment of fabric used to clothe enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America. The Haptic & Hue team of Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor was alerted to its existence in early Ja...

It's Carnival season, time to take to the streets for a party and see the spectacle. But Carnival is about so much more than that. At its heart is the idea that with costumes and masks, people can become shapeshifters, and transform themselves for a short period into someone else. Carnival is the work of a community and a chance for the powerless and the poor to be free for a day and claim equalit...

The little needle is one of the oldest tools in existence. We know that human beings began to use them more than sixty thousand years ago. Needles, and the textiles that came later have changed humanity completely and helped to make modern society what it is. But until recently very little attention has been paid to them. The contribution that textiles and the tools that surround them have made to...

Clothes are a window to our identity – they tell others who we are, what we believe in, and whether we are rich or poor, powerful or powerless. They also tell us a great deal about who someone is, whether they are tall or short, skinny or full-bodied, and what sort of life they lead, one of leisure or one of unremitting hard work. These clues make garments and textiles a wonderful way to understan...

Mary Queen of Scots is one of the most written about women in history. We think we know her well – but here's a new account that re-interprets her life from the point of view of the textiles she wore and the embroideries she stitched. It casts a completely different light on her difficult existence and brings her fully into focus as a living, breathing human being. Here is a renaissance queen disp...

Mary Queen of Scots is one of the most written about women in history. We think we know her well – but here's a new account that re-interprets her life from the point of view of the textiles she wore and the embroideries she stitched. It casts a completely different light on her difficult existence and brings her fully into focus as a living, breathing human being. Here is a renaissance queen disp...

Mary Queen of Scots is one of the most written about women in history. We think we know her well – but here's a new account that re-interprets her life from the point of view of the textiles she wore and the embroideries she stitched. It casts a completely different light on her difficult existence and brings her fully into focus as a living, breathing human being. Here is a renaissance queen disp...

A ragged flag and torn flag, nearly eighty years old was posted last month from a home not far from London. It doesn't look like much but it is infinitely precious, both to the person who sent it and to the family in Japan that created it. If the family can be found, this flag may be the only thing that remains of their brother, father, uncle or grandfather who went missing in the Second World War...

Imagine the person who sits behind the counter in the post office or serves your coffee in the Main Street coffee shop has a superpower, one that she shares with your child's teacher, the administrator in a building company, and the nurse you met last week at the clinic. All of them are talented textile designers, part of a community that works to the highest standards and turns out work that bear...

What happens to your old clothes? Do you drop them off at the charity shop or turn them into the textile recycling bin at the store? They leave your wardrobe and your thoughts – but what happens next and where do they end up? This episode of Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles wraps up old clothes, flea markets, the invention of a special form of jazz, the horror of today's textile excess, and glimme...

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...

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 spinner...

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 j...

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 m...

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...

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...

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 se...