Fashion understood as a system for embellishing and clothing the human body has been around since our earliest existence. Although a cultural product, fashion is so deeply engrained in human experience as to fuse with our very nature. This is the cloth culture described by numerous scholars.
These scholars consider cloth to be any thin sheet employed to wrap, shape and fold. This includes woven textiles, as well as cloths produced through twining, looping or netting. Animal skins fall into this classification, be they depilated or complete fleeces.
The scholarly community is undecided as to the date at which the earliest expressions of clothing emerged. Remarkable insights concerning this early historical period comes from studies of lice. It appears that body lice diverged some 200,000 years ago from head lice, suggesting that the use of body wraps emerged in a previous evolutionary stage. More accurate dating is difficult, since clothing is by its nature evanescent and leaves few archaeological traces. The first evidence of cloth culture dates to some 50,000 years ago, when reeds, bark, skins, cords and other types of cloth are all documented. A fundamental tool for the production of clothing is the sewing needle, the earliest evidence of which also dates to some 50,000 years ago.
The use of woven textiles in cloth culture is likewise ancient, and archaeological traces of woven fabrics date to some 35,000 years ago. These are flax garments excavated in the Republic of Georgia.
This is the same period in which the earliest evidence of cave painting is found, suggesting that aesthetic as well as practical needs both find expression at the same time. The oldest fibers used in textile weaving were derived from flax, nettle, hemp and cotton. Wool emerged later, but soon soared to preeminence. Sheep are the most important source of wool, and while wild sheep emerged some four million years ago, they were only domesticated about 10,000 BC in Mesopotamia, as one of the advances of the Neolithic Revolution. By 4,000 BC domesticated sheep had expanded throughout Eurasia and North Africa, as well as the British Isles and China. Woolen clothing is found throughout these territories, dating to as old as four thousand years ago.
As is the case of all important products of human ingenuity, cloth is complex. There is a visual element, a scent, a tactile or haptic element, and the sound of cloth in movement.
No doubt sensitivity to these features is as old as cloth itself.
The modern garment industry continues to document the gamut of features characterizing woven fabrics, including smoothness, firmness, fullness, crispness and hardness. These correspond to mechanically measurable fabric properties, like stress, shear, bending, compression, and surface friction. The study of these characteristics became an exact science in the 1970s when a Japanese textiles researcher, Professor Kawabata, identified the critical variables of cloth.
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| Prof. Yasunari Kawabata |
The features of the fabric used to make men’s suits, for instance, include smoothness, crispness, stiffness, anti-drape or spread, fullness and softness, and surface appearance.
Other fabric measures include prickliness and garment pressure. Fashion could not exist without the fabrics industry, and the modern technological interface between the garment industry and cloth manufacturers is precisely the Kawabata Evaluation System (KES). By using five experiments, KES produces fifteen curves allowing the determination of the 21 parameters which are held to characterize any fabric. KES is a fundamental accessory in assessing cloth qualities. Whether these laboratory measures can fully substitute the physical handling of cloth is a question that is being explored in these days.
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Countless trade fares are organized throughout the world to promote fabrics within the fashion industry. One of the most important are Premier Vision (Paris and New York) and Pitti Immagine Filati (Florence), which draws together fashion designers from all over the world. This year with the Covid epidemic the Premier Vision and the Pitti Fair are being organized online.
One wonders how buyers will effectively assess the sensory quality of fabrics without being able to touch them.
KES is useful, but anyone with experience in this sector knows that machinery cannot replace personal experience.
In so many areas of human endeavor there is talk about how technical systems based on Artificial Intelligence will eventually replace the human subject.
But textiles and fashion have been around from the most remote human times, and it seems unlikely that they can ever be completely isolated from direct experience. Pitti Immagine rightly advocates innovation as a core value, including technology able to blend virtual and conventional reality.
This may be possible with a generic public, but the real fashion artisan will never be satisfied with a computer-generated report. No more than a sommelier can assess the quality of a wine without direct sensory analysis.
Gregory Overton Smith, D.Phil.(Oxford)
Temple University Rome
