This project aims to understand the circulation of globally-sourced textiles on Dutch ships around the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by examining data drawn from trade records alongside samples of textiles and visual culture depicting textiles in use.

AT ITS HEIGHT IN THE 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire stretched through Central Asia to the Balkans on one axis, and from the Middle East down to North Africa on the other. There, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and Bulgarians traded materials and traditions with Turks, Syrians, and Egyptians. Silks from Aleppo and Damascus, muslin from Mosul, and Egyptian cotton were dyed with vibrant plant-based pigments such as saffron and pistachio, or colors derived from insects, such as cochineal and lac.

Velvet was once among the most coveted fabrics in the world, but now only one family in Italy produces it the traditional way – and can trace its textile tradition back to 1499.

Selecting a fabric usually depends on the purpose. If you are using it to work, a tough fabric may be in order. If you are exercising something that is absorbent, yet has, airflow is good.

Tel Aviv University archaeologists have revealed that cloth samples found in the Israeli desert present the earliest evidence of plant-based textile dyeing in the region. They were found at a large-scale copper smelting site and a nearby temple in the copper ore district of Timna in Israel's Arava desert and are estimated to date from the 13th-10th centuries BCE.

We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions.

Clothes can be forms of thought as articulate as a poem or equation. Why then does philosophy like to dress them down? By Shahidha Bari. (May 19, 2016)

The masterpiece—the war memorial, wall hanging, apologia—tells the same old story, a case of do or die: a tale of friends betrayed, cross-Channel invasion, and the passage of a comet heralding the doom of old England… Alison Kinney on the Bayeux Embroidery. (May 27, ’15)

Back in February, the long-troubled craft store chain Hancock Fabrics filed for bankruptcy for the second time in a decade. This time, there will be no reorganization. The chain planned to close 70…

Forget all the smart washing machines you’ve seen at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, as there’s a fascinating new development that might let you clean your clothing using tech that’s straight out of a science fiction movie. The new technique involves wearing the dirty clothes out in the sun so that solar energy can catalyze a chemical reaction that would obliterate stains. In other words, the next time you drop ketchup...

A small town factory in the Netherlands might not seem like the obvious birthplace for African haute couture. Helmond is a place most people (Dutch or African) wouldn’t be able to point out on a map and yet, this unassuming little town is where one of the most iconic fashion brands of West and Central Africa was created. By Inge Oosterhoff.

Yes, I'm scrambling around the house hunting down loose change in the vain hopes that I can cobble together $250 before these sell out.

Chinese textile manufacturers drawn by cheap cotton, falling labor costs and government incentives are helping revive depressed mill towns in the American South. By Hiroko Tabuchi with Alexandra Stevenson.

Older than bronze and as new as nanowires, textiles are technology — and they have remade our world time and again