Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round | Hacker News Reader

Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round

acoup.blog

71 pointsshalmanese13 comments

This is enormously informative (and also long) article.

It reminds me about shorter one https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... containing following calculation:

So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.

And that's just a standard shirt.

And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving.

It absolutely boggles my mind that a shirt could take 500 hours to make. As the article says, that makes clothing a family a full-time job. Although most of that time was spinning, which wasn't too strenuous or mentally taxing, and allowed for socializing. Starting to sound like a modern office job :]

Since the time being written about, we've had massive technological improvements. Have they actually made the experience of life better?

Read "Bread, How Did They Make It?"[1] from the same blog and modern life sounds a hell of a lot better. Medieval peasants lived a very precarious existence. A bad harvest would be enough to push them over the brink into starvation.

I'll take the office job where there's a bigger danger of eating too much than too little and where the only way that I would notice a bad harvest is if I read an article in the financial news about how coffee prices are up 8%.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

Very interesting. But it really could do with an illustrative video showing how spindle and distaff are used.

There is a link to a video in the article?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQYdmRw-gHM

"The great advantage the distaff provides is portability (note this video for a demonstration)." linking to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQYdmRw-gHM

This doesn't explain how clothing was made in earliest times. How did people wear anything at all, besides animal skins? Lots of Native American tribes didn't seem to wear much. And uncontacted tribes today, either.

Depends on the climate. What we think of as civilization also comes with cold winters where humans cannot survive without lots of clothing. Native American tribes had warm clothing where it was needed for life.

Like egypt, iraq, the pearl river valley? You know the historical origins of all eurasian agricultural societies and all places without a significant cold winter at all?

Baghdad can freeze. Egypt can nearly.

We all came from Africa, along the equator. Leaving that environment put special pressure on homo sapiens, including adapting culturally to extreme temperatures.

The author's historical speciality is Classical Antiquity (primarily Rome, IIRC), so his knowledge of pre-agricultural civilizations isn't particularly strong.

He does mention the Native Americans' typical use of "buckskin" in his prior post about the Dothraki's relation to historical steppe peoples (https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...).

Regarding Native American tribes, the author specifically mentions evidence for the backstrap loom in Incan villages pre-contact and evidence for ground looms in the late Neolithic.

> Lots of Native American tribes didn't seem to wear much

That's more Hollywood than history. Look at real photographs and many of them will be covered up completely except for the hands and head.

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