Textile

• 1. Introduction

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  Dyed flax fibres in a cave in the Republic of Georgia date to 34,000 BCE, and radiocarbon places the microscopic strands at roughly 36,000 years ago. That is the oldest hint that textile is far more than the cloth on your back. Textile is an umbrella term covering fibres, yarns, filaments, threads, and many types of fabric. The word once meant only woven cloth. Yet the same family of materials now reaches from a simple t-shirt to bulletproof jackets, spacesuits, doctor's gowns, and the geotextiles buried under roads. How did a craft that began with leaves, barks, and fur pelts become the oldest industrial art on Earth? What separates a fabric from cloth, a fibre from a yarn, and a household towel from an implant sewn inside a body? And why is an industry this ancient now the second biggest polluter of agricultural land after oil? The threads of those answers run back at least 70,000 years, to the first clothes made of animal skins.

• 2. Fibre To Fabric

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  Fibre is the smallest component of any fabric, a thin, hair-like structure with a length-to-width ratio that can run a hundred times its diameter. Fibres are twisted or laid out into long, continuous strands of yarn. Those yarns are then turned into fabric by weaving, knitting, crocheting, knotting, tatting, or braiding.

  Felting and bonding skip the yarn stage entirely, transforming loose fibres straight into fabric. Felting interlocks and tangles fibres through pressure and friction, often with soapy water added to lubricate them and open the microscopic scales on wool. Needle punching, adhesives, and chemical binding are newer ways to bond fibres into nonwoven cloth.

  Natural fibres tend to be short, called staple, while synthetic fibres are made in longer lengths called filaments. Silk is the only natural fibre that is itself a filament. A fibre must be strong, cohesive, and flexible, judged by strength, flexibility, length-to-diameter ratio, and spinnability. After manufacturing, the material is processed and finished to add aesthetics, physical characteristics, and utility, the final step before any thread reaches a person's hands.

• 3. Words For Cloth

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  Textile comes from the Latin adjective textilis, meaning woven, which stems from textus, the past participle of texere, to weave. The word once applied only to woven fabrics before it grew to cover fibres, yarns, and fabrics together.

  Fabric carries a different lineage. It descends most recently from the Middle French fabrique, meaning building, and earlier from the Latin fabrica, a workshop, art, trade, or skillful production. That noun traces back to faber, an artisan who works in hard materials, and finally to the Proto-Indo-European dhabh, to fit together.

  Cloth marks the narrowest term of the three. Materials woven, knitted, tufted, or knotted from yarns are called cloth, while wallpaper, carpets, plastic upholstery, and nonwoven materials are fabrics that never qualify. The word descends from the Old English clath, a woven or felted material to wrap around one's body, with cousins in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Middle High German, and the German kleid, all meaning garment. Cloth often refers specifically to a piece that has already been processed or cut.

• 4. Named By Place

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  Cashmere takes its name from Kashmir, an anglicization of the region, and stands synonymous with the Kashmir shawl woven from the wool of cashmere goats. The pattern of textile naming runs through base-fibre names, places of origin, and loose groupings by technique or design.

  Calico originated in the southwestern Indian city of Calicut, while jaconet is an anglicization of Jagannath Puri, where the lightweight cotton was first produced. Jersey, a knitted fabric, was made first on Jersey in the Channel Islands, and kersey, a coarse woollen cloth, is named for a town in Suffolk, in the east of England. The paisley motif originated in Iran and Persia, moved to India with the Mughals, and was carried by the British along the silk route to Paisley in Scotland.

  Other names describe the cloth itself. Dosuti, a coarse handspun cotton from 19th-century Punjab and Gujarat, takes its name from Do and Suti, two yarns, while eksuti used a single thread. Dacca in Bengal produced fine muslins with poetic names: Baft Hawa, woven air; Shabnam, evening dew; and ab-i-ravan, flowing water. Nainsook translates to eye-pleasing, and tansukh, a soft Mughal cloth recorded in the 16th-century Ain-i-Akbari, translates to body-pleasing.

• 5. The Loom And The Machine

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  Early looms date to 5000 BC, and around 200 BC the Chinese invented vertical looms and pedal looms that turned the craft into an industry. By the 1st century AD, every necessary component of a loom had come together: harnesses and heddles to govern the warp, a shuttle to carry the weft, a reed to compact the cloth, and a take-up roller.

  John Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1734 in Bury, Lancashire, one of the first innovations in cotton woven fabric. Samuel Crompton built a spinning machine in 1779 that produced yarn faster than ever, and Edmund Cartwright invented the first power loom in 1785. In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard developed his programmable loom, drawing on earlier work by Basile Bouchon in 1725, Jean Baptiste Falcon in 1728, and Jacques Vaucanson in 1740.

  Knitting followed its own slow path. Developed by Danes around 900 BC, it did not reach other civilizations until 900 AD, and Europe learned to knit by hand around 1400. By 1450 three to four stockings could be knit in a week, until William Lee invented a stocking frame in 1589 that could knit one stocking a day. In 1765 the spinning jenny, invented in the United Kingdom for spinning wool or cotton, made textile production the first economic activity to be industrialized.

• 6. Beyond Clothing

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  Threads coated with zinc oxide nanowires, once woven into fabric, can power so-called self-powering nanosystems, using the vibrations of wind or body movement to generate energy. That experiment sits at the far edge of technical textiles, the materials chosen for function over appearance.

  Geotextiles reinforce embankments, roads, airfields, railroads, dams, and even protect melting glaciers. Medical textiles include implants, sutures, dressings, bandages, gowns, and face masks. Agrotextiles shade and protect crops, while protective clothing resists heat, radiation, molten metals, punctures, and bullets. Because the legal and technical demands are so strict, these products are tested against stringent performance requirements.

  Textiles have also carried meaning far older than industry. Along the east-west axis of sub-Saharan Africa, cloth strips produced in the savannah served as currency. In ancient Greece, textiles were among the objects offered to the gods as votive offerings. The Bayeux Tapestry, a rare example of secular Romanesque art, depicts the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, and the Banton Burial Cloth, the oldest known warp ikat in Southeast Asia, was likely made by native people of northwest Romblon and now sits in the National Museum of the Philippines.

• 7. Fibres Of The World

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  Glass fibres woven and coated with Teflon produce beta cloth, a virtually fireproof fabric that replaced nylon in the outer layer of United States space suits beginning in 1968. Mineral fibres like asbestos, basalt, and glass serve fire blankets, insulation, and composite reinforcement, a world apart from the soft fibres next to skin.

  Wool, the hair of domestic sheep or goat, is coated in lanolin, a waterproof and dirtproof wax removed before processing. Cashmere comes from the Indian cashmere goat and mohair from the North African angora goat, while pashmina is a very fine cashmere. Angora is the hair of the angora rabbit, and qiviut the fine inner wool of the muskox. Silk is drawn from the cocoon of the Chinese silkworm, with mulberry silk from the Bombyx mori and wild Tussah silk from worms fed on oak leaves; about four-fifths of world silk is cultivated.

  Synthetics arrived in the 20th century, made from petroleum through chemical synthesis. Nylon imitates silk and fills pantyhose and rope, polyester runs through nearly all clothing, and aramid fibres such as Twaron armour against flame and cuts. Spandex, sold as Lycra, stretches activewear and swimsuits, while olefin, dry and hydrophobic, is sold as a sintered felt under the name Tyvek. Milk or casein fibre, first made in Germany during World War I, wrinkles easily but shares a pH close to human skin.

• 8. The Cost Of Cloth

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  Global fibre production per person rose from 8.4 kilograms in 1975 to 14.3 kilograms in 2021. Output roughly doubled from 58 million tons in 2000 to 113 million tons in 2021, and is expected to reach 149 million tons by 2030, with synthetics already accounting for 70 percent of use, mostly polyester.

  China stands as the largest exporter of textile goods, with apparel exports valued at 161 billion dollars in 2016, down 8 percent in a single year as work orders shifted toward Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar. The global textiles and apparel export market reached 772 billion dollars in 2013, when China led at 274 billion, followed by India, Italy, Germany, and Bangladesh.

  The weight of this trade falls hard on the environment. After oil, the fashion industry is the second biggest polluter of agricultural land. The sector is believed to use 79 trillion litres of water a year and to discharge around 20 percent of all industrial effluent, with dyes counted among the most significant contaminants. Natural fibres can demand up to 150 kilograms of water per kilogram of material. In 2023, North Carolina State University researchers used enzymes to separate cotton from polyester, an early step toward recycling the textile waste piling up in landfills.