The Culture of Cloth

The Woman Who Freed the Body (And Got No Credit): The Madeleine Vionnet Story

Madeleine Vionnet started as a lacemaker’s apprentice at twelve and ended up popularising the bias cut. The single technique that changed how clothing relates to the fe

“The Fun Police”: Garment Tech Confessions

Garment technicians rarely get interviewed.  But buyers, designers, textile experts? Everyone talks about them. But the person who actually decides whether a garment fit

The First Makers: Pacific and Oceania

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

The First Makers: The Americas

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 orig

The First Makers: West Africa & the Diaspora

The First Makers: West Africa and the Diaspora This edition is different from every other one in this series. Every tradition we’ve covered so far came to us through a

The First Makers: South & East Asia

Every culture created a goddess who presided over making. But not all of them did it the same way. This episode introduces two categories.  The first: goddesses whose m

A Compass, Not a Photocopier: Trend Forecasting, AI and Why Origin Matters with Tully Walter

Tully Walter is a Strategic Futures Director at Soon Futures and this is one of the most substantial conversations I've had on the show. We get into what trend fore

The First Makers: Celtic & European

Every single one of these goddesses survived, but none of them survived intact. In this episode I trace the weaving goddesses of Celtic and European mythology (Brigid, A

The First Makers: Ancient Mediterranean & Near East

While researching the Goddess Project, I came across something that stopped me completely. Every culture, independently and without contact with each other, created a god

The Dictionary Was Named After a Woman Weaver

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

The Most Powerful Colour in History Smelled of Garlic

The most coveted colour in the ancient world came from a sea snail that smelled of garlic and cost more than gold.  Tyrian purple built empires, wrote laws, and ended ca

Women Invented Binary Code

Women invented binary code. They ran it by hand across thousands of threads, encoded it into the punched cards that built the first computer and knitted it through enemy