Show Notes
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.
More from The Culture of Cloth
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Grace Snell (https://www.instagram.com/graceesnell/) who created the costumes for the 2026 Sense and Sensibility.There's been a lot of online dialogue about this film, as there is anytime a new adaptation enters the Austen-verse, yet it was so fantastic to watch Grace's work online in the lead up to the film. Then I got invited to see the film myself and then was finally being able to ask Grace all the nitty-gritty questions that had been bubbling away in my brain for weeks. Grace and I talk about:- How it felt to be part of the Austen-verse and her connection to Austen's work.- The huge role natural dyeing played in not the costume design but how it spoke to the different characters.- How hers and Georgia Oakley's (director) creative approach to costume design and filmmaking is very much about intuition and collaboration.- How she collaborated with the WONDERFUL John Bright (who was actually the co-costume designer on the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility) on one of Fanny Dashwood's costumesLet me know what you thought of my first ever big interview with a costume designer and whether you'd love more of these :)
Madeleine Vionnet started as a lacemaker’s apprentice at twelve and ended up popularising the bias cut.
It’s the final episode of The First Makers series. In this episode we speak about the Polynesian goddess Hina and how she is seen across many different islands and known by many different names, but her message is the same. We also touch on the important of the possum cloak in the culture of Indigenous Australians and how that knowledge was almost lost but is fortunately alive and thriving today.
Before there was a world, there was a thread. In this episode of First Makers, I’m looking at two very different models of the same idea. Divinity and thread as the origin of everything that matters. First, Mama Ocllo, sent by the Inca sun god Inti to teach the first women to spin and weave. She is a culture-hero, not a weaver herself, whose myth explains where an entire craft tradition came from. Then Spider Grandmother, who in Navajo and Hopi tradition isn’t a teacher at all, but the maker of the world itself. She spun existence out of clay and attached every living thing to her by a single thread of her own silk.