9/23 Saturday Lecture with Virginia Postrel
Greek warp-weighted loom as depicted on a lekythos, or oil flask, c. 550–530 BCE. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Saturday, 9/23/23 10-11:15am PT
Presented In-Person *and* via Zoom
Koret Auditorium, de Young museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
In-Person Tickets: $5, sold at the door only \ free for TAC members
Virtual Tickets (Zoom): $5 Members of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Students. $10 General Admission \ free for TAC members.
Purchase Virtual Tickets (coming soon)
A recording will be available for two weeks following the talk.
Textiles are one of humanity's oldest and most influential technologies, but nowadays most people take them for granted. Drawing on her widely praised new book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, author Virginia Postrel will take us on a tour of some of the innovations—in fiber, spinning, weaving, and dyeing—that gave us today’s textile abundance and the ways textiles shaped civilization as we know it.
Chinese drawloom, with the draw girl controlling the pattern strings from above. Credit: Rare Chinese Books Collection, Library of Congress
Virginia Postrel is a Los Angeles-based writer and a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. She writes a newsletter at vpostrel.substack.com and is a contributing editor for the London-based magazine Works in Progress. Her latest book is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. Her previous books include The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies. During her research for The Fabric of Civilization, she learned to weave and is the president of the Southern California Handweavers' Guild. Visit her website at vpostrel.com.
Spinning on an Indian charkha, c. 1860 by Kehar Singh Credit: The Cleveland Museum of Art
Image Credits
Greek warp-weighted loom as depicted on a lekythos, or oil flask, c. 550–530 BCE. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chinese drawloom, with the draw girl controlling the pattern strings from above. Credit: Rare Chinese Books Collection, Library of Congress
Virginia Postrel: Speaker photo by Sonya Isenberg
Spinning on an Indian charkha, c. 1860 by Kehar Singh Credit: The Cleveland Museum of Art