Essay
The Future of Textiles
by Natalie Chanin,
Olivia Ware Terenzio
What is the future of textiles? Read news headlines, from business to environment to fashion, and you would be justified in pointing to the movement of nearly all textile production overseas, where supply chains are opaque and workers are often exploited; the prevalence of synthetic and toxic materials; and the massive and devastating volume of »
Essay
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by Joseph "Chip" Hughes
“We were accused of killing both the cotton and textile industries based on our campaigns to raise critical issues of worker health, union representation, environmental protection, and civil rights.” It may have been us who killed the textile industry, at least according to a number of the cotton mill owners who operated across the South »
Art
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by Libby O'Bryan
“In general, local, artisanal, values-based makers are in constant struggle to validate their craft. Textiles, especially, are up against large global labor markets that have trained consumers to buy more disposable goods for less money.” After a career as a textile buyer and production manager in New York City’s Garment District and after seeing so »
Photo Essay
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by Maurice Bailey,
Nik Heynen,
Rinne Allen
“The future of indigo can be a redemption story, one that brings hope to a people, to a culture, to an archipelago of islands.” We came together on Sapelo Island through a vision of how heritage agriculture could help try to save a culture; we came together because Cornelia Walker Bailey had this vision, and »
Interview
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Collecting and Connecting for a Sustainable Future
by Rebecca Burgess,
Natalie Chanin
“When one region is down, we support them, when we’re down, we receive that support.” Fibershed is a non-profit that fosters regional networks, with a stated focus to build local textile economies, grow climate-beneficial agriculture, and support education and advocacy. Project Threadways started the Southeast Fibershed affiliate to connect growers, producers, and makers across the »
Essay
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Fashion, Waste, and Microplastics
by Makalé Cullen
“The future of fashion is inside us. We will, we are, wearing nanofibers internally, purchased not from a rack, but at the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the restaurant.” The future of fashion is inside us. We will—we are—wearing nanofibers internally, purchased not from a rack, but at the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the restaurant. Our identities, which »
credit: Rinne Allen
Essay
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Adaptive Reuse and Historic Value
by Elijah Gaddis
“The Loray had been in operation for almost a century, changing its products and expanding or retrofitting its buildings to meet the evolving demands of the southern textile industry.” In 1993, Bill Passmore started taking photographs of his coworkers at the Firestone plant, formerly called the Loray, in Gastonia, North Carolina. He cataloged the spaces »
Interview
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Berea Student Craft
by Emily Hilliard,
Erin Miller,
Emerson Croft
“If this was truly Student Craft and it was meant to reflect the students’ work and they were going to find joy in the process, they had to have some ownership over what was happening. So, we started with the Rainbow Baby Blanket.” Berea College, located in the foothills of Appalachian Kentucky, was founded in »
Interview
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Beading and Legacy in New Orleans
by Marwan Pleasant,
Natalie Chanin,
Olivia Ware Terenzio
“I’m the Flag Boy. I love the position. I embrace it a lot. It is just like a whole character. It’s a spirit that takes over you on Mardi Gras Day.” Marwan Pleasant was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he grew up masking as a Mardi Gras Indian in the Golden Eagles tribe. Pleasant »
Back Porch
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by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.” I bought it in my early twenties—a bright red cotton T-shirt with the emblem “Women’s Radical Sewing Society.” I had »
Poetry
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late fall 1849, eastern maryland
by Saida Agostini
“I run towards the woods like a young girl in love” I run towards the woods like a young girl in lovethe ground crisp with frost my breathexultant and whiteI spent the night before praying in an empty fieldstalks of cotton reaching towards dark skyclouded with rain and thunder I wakein early dawn dress drenched head clangingwith a familiar ache and there »
