Haptic & Hue

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Cabbage and Mungo: How Recycling Returned To Savile Row Oct 05, 2023

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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, which is then woven into fresh cloth. The radical difference is that this time the recycled cloth is being bought back by these high-end workshops to be tailored and sold to the Row's own bespoke customers.

Savile Row, in the heart of London, has been at the centre of high-quality men's tailoring for 200 years. It has supplied handmade suits, from the finest woven cloth, to film stars and royalty, to statesmen and sportsmen. It has a reputation for quality and excellence second to none. Now it is embracing recycling, and it seems, its top-end clients are happy to pay for it.

It's incredibly rare to find a recycling loop like this one – especially in textiles - where the waste is turned into quality new material to be used by the same workshops that created it in the first place. This episode tells the story of how this is happening and follows the journey that turns tiny bits of fabric that would previously have been binned, into new bespoke garments, ones that come with great credentials and an interesting story behind them.

Along the way Haptic & Hue gets a privileged glimpse into the world of Savile Row tailoring – the training and the standards that need to be maintained from start to finish to produce a garment that may well last a century or more.

If you would like to see a full script of this episode, see photos or discover links to further information about the topics discussed you can find all this information at www.hapticandhue.com/listen. You can follow Haptic & Hue on www.instagram.com/hapticandhue/

The People's Art - Material and The Modern Masters Sep 07, 2023

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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 was an intense hunger for new design. After five long years of uniforms, and sacrifice, people wanted something interesting to wear, and colourful fabrics to decorate their homes with. In America manufacturers were quick to turn their machines from military production to domestic demand.

This episode of Haptic & Hue is about how fresh and fashionable textiles were amongst the first items people were able to enjoy in the post-war period. It focuses on a short period when manufacturers turned to established artists, like Picasso, Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall and Miro, to help them create brilliant new textiles. It looks in particular at Daniel B Fuller's attempt to build what he called "A Museum Without Walls' with his Modern Masters series of textiles in the 1950s.

It is also about what grew out of that, and tells the story of a young artist, unknown at the time, who worked for these same textile producers as a pattern designer, using his experience and skills to change the face of twentieth century art.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

The Tangled Tale of Tartan Jun 01, 2023

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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 everywhere.

But tartan is much more than a pattern, it is a fabric of contradiction and surprise. It holds many meanings, often simultaneously. It can represent the establishment and the power of the state, and at the same time signify rebellion and treachery. It can be an emblem of enslavement and oppression, or it can represent comfort, family, and home. Its meanings are as diverse as its many patterns.

In this episode of Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles, we look at where tartan comes from and how it acquired its many meanings and controversies, and why some people love it and others hate it. Tartan is a textile of duality, able to hold many ideas within its simple grid design. It has a history that has spread out across the world and taken a sense of what it means to be Scottish with it.

But there is more than history to tartan: we also hear from a bespoke kilt-maker, who designs and registers her own tartans. She creates modern tartans able to embrace new definitions of identity and community and expand far beyond the Highland glens they first sprung from.

All of this has been put into context by the first exhibition in living memory about Tartan in Scotland itself, which opened in April 2023 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, which we went to see as part of making this episode.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

A Dance to The Music of Time May 04, 2023

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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 revolutionary in almost everything it did. The dancers, the music, the choreography, the sets, and the costumes astonished audiences – no one had seen anything like it before. The ballets became so popular that the costumes were copied by fashion designers and began to appear on the street.

The Ballet Russe was such a phenomenon that artists like Matisse and Picasso were happy to design for it, joining in-house artists like Bakst and Goncharova. Today, over a hundred years later, very little survives of the incredible performances given across Europe and America by the company, except the glorious music and the wonderful costumes.

These are often battered and bruised by a life on the road – they are far from pristine, stained with sweat and makeup, repaired and remade, but they have extraordinary power and wonderful stories to tell us, of where they were made and how they were used to change our ideas about dance and culture.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

A Sliver of Deep Blue Cloth Apr 06, 2023

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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 January. We travelled to Derbyshire to see it and realised from a note on the back that we were looking at a piece of so-called 'slave' cloth, handwoven in Yorkshire in 1783. Millions of yards of this fabric were handmade in Britain and Ireland and sent to the plantations for nearly two hundred years, but until now none was known to have survived.

This episode of Haptic & Hue unravels the story-threads of this tiny piece of cloth which begin on the upland moors of Yorkshire, and takes us to America and the Caribbean, but also involve Wales, the Lake District, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the Baltic. The different light that textiles cast on this history show us how profits from the system of slavery were part of the everyday lives of workers and landowners all over Britain and Europe and didn't just benefit a few rich plantation owners.

For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

No Costume? No Carnival! Mar 02, 2023

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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 equality with the rich and powerful. Each Carnival is different and takes its traditions and ideas from its own culture and the needs of its own people.

This episode looks at how different Carnivals developed and how textiles and masks play a central role in the political ideas behind them. It starts in Venice a thousand years ago as the poor were allowed to let off steam once a year. It crosses the Atlantic as the rich plantation owners brought Mardi Gras to the Caribbean, and saw it creatively developed by the enslaved and the poor into a series of glorious feasts of costume, music, and dance. It tracks Carnival as it was brought to Britain by Caribbean migrants as a celebration of their culture and community. And in all of these, it thinks about how textiles and clothing play a central role.

If you would like to see a full script of this episode, pictures of the carnival traditions discussed in this podcast, or discover links to further information about the topics discussed you can find all this information at www.hapticandhue.com/listen.

Is the Needle Mightier Than the Sword? Feb 02, 2023

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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 our lives has been only dimly understood. This is changing as a new breed of archaeologist – textile archaeologists take centre stage and in doing completely alter our understanding of how humanity developed.

In this episode of Haptic & Hue, we talk to one of the world's most eminent textile archaeologists, Margarita Gleba. The evidence that she and others are piecing together for the first time from precious ancient textiles tell us new stories about how human beings organised their families, farms, towns, and cities, waged war and traded, how they expressed ideas of status and identity in clothing and how they used textiles in every corner of their lives.

Some of the greatest mysteries of our existence remain to be unlocked and their secrets may lie in the textiles that have not yet been properly analysed or researched. Listen to Margarita Gleba as she takes us on an expert's tour of the deep past and with her knowledge of textiles begins to sketch in some of the gaps.

If you would like to see a full script of the episode or discover links to further information about the topics discussed here you can find all this information at www.hapticandhue.com/listen.

Coarse Shifts and Fine Silks Jan 05, 2023

Show notes

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 understand the people of the past, what their lives were really like, and who they were.

This episode is about the clothes of a community, the community that lived at Mount Vernon in America when it was the home of George Washington and his wife Martha. George is a hero to Americans as the general who commanded the Revolution against the British and went on to become the first president. But what do his clothes tell us about him as a living, breathing person? His estate, Mount Vernon was not just home to him and his family - more than 300 people lived and worked on five farms there. Too often the focus of researchers and historians in the past has been on the textiles and fabrics of the rich and powerful, but clothes can tell us a good deal too about the poor and dispossessed and we can also look at the fabrics and the textiles that were used to dress everyone at Mount Vernon, from the Washingtons themselves to their field workers and labourers.

If you would like to see a full script of the episode or discover links to further information about the topics discussed here you can find all this information at www.hapticandhue.com/listen.

Stitches by Candlelight Dec 01, 2022

Show notes

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 displaying her power in violet taffeta and purple velvet, who wore silver to mourn, black to display her statesmanship, and white for innocence and piety.

The book is Clare Hunter's Embroidering Her Truth, Mary Queen of Scots and the Language of Power, and it is Haptic & Hue's choice for our Book of the Year 2022. In this special end-of-year episode, Jo talks at length to Clare about her research and what it told her about Mary. It sets Mary in context both as a consumer of elite textiles and also as an embroiderer during her long captivity. At her death, Mary left over 300 embroideries, many of which can still be seen both in Scotland and England, which she used to tell her own story. They give us an insight into her state of mind and the messages she was trying to convey to the outside world.

You can find a full script of this podcast, pictures, links and show-notes at www.hapticandhue.com/listen. Embroidering Her Truth, Mary Queen of Scots and the Language of Power can be bought in the Haptic & Hue UK bookshop. Haptic & Hue earns a small commission on this at no extra cost to you.

Stitches by Candlelight Dec 01, 2022

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