Curious: there is an unbelievably huge wealth of this type of "content" that lives almost exclusively in history books, or at least seems profoundly difficult to find on the internet.
Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface...
Incidentally, if anyone is interested in the general topic of making cloths / tailoring, I just recorded a podcast episode on this - the show is about deep, obsessive hobbies and the first episode is about a neuroscientist who transforms into a tailor at night: https://www.whentheworkisdone.com/
There are a lot of books covering historical subjects on the web. Their contents usually won't show up in a general web search though. I have learned a lot about the past from old books. Google Books, the HathiTrust, and archive.org are useful here. Newer books are often available on Library Genesis.
As an example: have you ever wondered about the state of toxicology in the late Victorian era? What poisons were known, what poisons were detectable (and how), and other nuts-and-bolts details of a certain kind of murder mystery? This information is hard to find in modern web pages -- particularly if you don't know enough to tell who is a trustworthy guide to the past.
But a HathiTrust search does the job easily.
Use the "advanced full text search" form. Search for the word poisons. Restrict results to English language documents in the years 1880-1900. You'll get a wealth of books back, like this illustrated 1885 text:
"Micro-chemistry of poisons : including their physiological, pathological, and legal relations; with an appendix on the detection and microscopic determination of blood: adapted to the use of the medical jurist, physician, and general chemist"
Ah, deep obsessive hobbies. My mother once made a couple of suits for herself and my sister-in-law, starting from an almost raw fleece (she refused to do the cleaning of the fleece to get rid of the twigs and other crap). Also, for clothes construction and fabric arts, see my sister-in-laws blog, which made the front page of HN a few months ago. [0][1] She makes clothes, and teaches the art and craft of it.
> My mother once made a couple of suits for herself and my sister-in-law, starting from an almost raw fleece (she refused to do the cleaning of the fleece to get rid of the twigs and other crap).
So she made you a ghillie suit, or did you end up getting rid of them later?
I think that GBS has resumed, or at least that the Ngram Viewer is now sourcing data from sources updated since ~2000 -- 2008, the previous cutoff year.
> Curious: there is an unbelievably huge wealth of this type of "content" that lives almost exclusively in history books, or at least seems profoundly difficult to find on the internet.
> Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface...
The accurate and valuable knowledge humanity has produced is mostly behind paywalls: Books and scholarly journals (and also the best journalism). The masses get the dregs - rumors, speculation, ignorance, disinformation, misinformation - 99% crap is not an exaggeration, IMHO. It also is a massive barrier against anyone, including kids, who try to actually learn. Then the experts wring their hands about all the ignorance and false beliefs held by the public, and how uneducated everyone is.
Reading actual scholarly work - from people who have personally examined the primary evidence, and who have the expertise to put it in context with prior evidence and have the skills to evaluate it - is transformative (as is the best journalism - people who also examine the evidence, etc.). The difference between that and usual Internet information is mind-altering - they are different worlds, and often say completely different things. What seemed reasonable on the Internet immediately becomes ignorant and deceptive, sometimes intentionally, and useless. (An important trick is to remember next time that what seems reasonable and useful is really, no matter how convincing it feels, is really ignorant and useless.) Also, IME the scholarly work usually is easy to read - easier than the BS on the Internet, because people who know what they're talking about and have evidence tend to write clearly and get directly to the point.
I sprung for a personal subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary - I think ~$90 as a special. Just that is transformative: a quick history, at my fingertips, of every concept ever expressed in English - with the primary evidence right there!
...
If we could make all the valuable, accurate information available to the public, it could be transformative for everyone. I wish the Gates Foundation would spare a few billion to buy the IP to the scholarly journals and books and make them open. That may do more than any investment.
If this was true why do people send kids to school? They can drop them off at the library and let them transform themselves by themselves. Any half baked library has enough info to keep you occupied on any subject you want for your entire life. But rarely does it lead to transformation which is why we end up with schools.
People confuse information access with learning. Effective learning, esp for the 6 inch chimp brain wondering around in a dark jungle, always requires a teacher. Someone who is constantly providing feedback to keep the chimp on track, pointing out how to correct blundering, which paths are dead ends, which paths are worth exploring etc etc etc.
Where things start breaking down is the availability of high quality teachers, guides, mentors, coaches etc
Fortunately, this blog seems to get a fair amount of love from HN. That's how I discovered it and became a regular reader. It makes lots of points that seem like they would be common sense, except that they are directly opposite the way the past is shown in popular culture. For instance: It's safe to assume that people in the past believed in their religions. Also, people like to look nice. This is reflected in how they dress, and nomadic peoples are no exception.
The depiction of medieval folks wearing drab and dirty and torn clothes in black, browns, and and grays is THE biggest peeve I have with costume design in ‘historical’ movies and tv shows. The absolute worst offenders in recent memory being Vikings and The Last Kingdom, but there are a plethora of others. Not to mention the biker-gear-leather-fetish as armor look they all seem to go for.
> Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her [that] modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time.
> I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: "Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?"
Yes, this makes sense, but you can convey what you want to an audience without compromising historicity so thoroughly I believe.
Taking the Vikings tv show example - Ragnar Lothbroke would have been in richly and boldly colorful, probably embroidered, clothing of wool and linen and maybe even silk or cotton from trade.
He would have been covered in gold and silver jewelry, and his armor and weapons would have been gilt or inlaid with silver, gold, and copper-alloy and intricately engraved.
Instead we get an extra from Sons of Anarchy complete with tats and edgy haircut.
Edit, also 3/4s of those impressions the modern audience does have is from decades of movies and tv shows. I think a project that respects its audience could do its part to start projecting more accurate impressions of past aesthetics and fashion sensibilities.
By the by, any series (or movies) that you'd recommend for their historical accuracy, especially with respect to the everyday things like clothing and other customs?
Master and Commander is really good for more recent history of the Napoleonic Wars era as far as clothing, language and customs.
Outlaw King (netflix movie about Robert Bruce) is bad, but a leap better than other medieval outings - they at least try, the armor is sloppy, ill-fitting, and anachronistic but the weapons, clothing and heraldry are really good.
Others more expert than me have mentioned Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier as being the best movie attempt at 15th century armor.
A company that makes clothes and merchandise for 'viking' enthusiasts kick started a short film that is absolutely excellent in terms of language, clothes, and attitude of the very late Viking period, although they too fall prey to the Vikings-as-bad-ass-biker trope on occcasion. (Not to mention the romantic sanitization of all the unsavory activities any early medieval raiders or pirates would get up to).
In general though, true historical accuracy is very hard to find outside niche youtube videos, even if you aren't terribly nitpicky about what is 'accurate'.
Except the French crew in Master and Commander had clothes from almost a century before the events in the movie. This was done to denote their "foreignness".
Yeah, this is a good point (more like half a century really). I always sort of rationalized in my head because of O'Brians emphasis in the books of sailors' innate conservatism but you are correct.
Not to mention there's no way a French crew would be in an American heavy frigate in 1805.
I'm a huge POB fan but I felt I could overlook a lot of the liberties taken with the movie. At least it got made! And I think the shipboard scenes on the Surprise were really well done.
And this is not a knock against the actor himself - I think he did a fantastic job of conveying the mix of pensiveness, thoughtfulness, brutality and ferocity an early Medieval warlord like Ragnar would have had.
In the vein of historical accuracy, that article repeats the assertion that nobles basically randomly pooped all over the floor in Versailles. Does anybody know if that's actually true? I feel like I've heard so many conflicting versions of this tale (yes there were essentially small mountains of shit and nobody batted an eye, no these were basically lies and gossip and fabricated by enemies at the time and framed in such a way that it is clear by their salacious tone this was not normal and very disapproved of, etc.) that I have no idea what to believe.
I tried to look into that claim a little more and found a website claiming there was a single French princess who behaved this way on the theory that she was too important to have to waste her time visiting bathrooms, and that her unusual behavior outraged the palace servants (who had to clean it up - the princess wasn't exactly wrong about being important).
This seems more plausible than the presentation here.
> If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny.
Well, that claim didn't age well. It's hard to get non-low-rise pants in any variety now.
> Also, presumably, there would not been a single viking with bright pants, but rather all characters having colors. So one wiking would stand out less.
That doesn't follow at all. The whole concept of "the expense of the dye and the purity of the white mark these as the pants of an important man" is that the pants stand out from what everybody else is wearing. That's how you can tell that the one guy who can afford to wear them is rich and important.
But then these pants also fit the character.
And those Vikings are of course highly anachronistic. And wearing something closer to the criticized "Drab barbarian clothes."
Yeah, it's like they saw one depiction of "sackcloth and ashes" and decided to extrapolate it to be the constant fashion of the lower classes throughout medieval history.
"Alternately, if the dye for a given hue or color came from something rare or foreign or difficult to process (for instance, in all three cases, Tyrian or royal purple, which came from the murex sea snails – if you have ever wondered why no country has purple as a national color this is why, before synthetic dyes, coloring your flags and uniforms purple would have been bonkers expensive), then it was going to be expensive and rare and there just wasn’t much you could do about that."
The wearing of Tyrian purple clothes (made from the murex snails) was just banned for commoners in Rome, and its production was seriously disrupted if not stopped after the fall of Constantinople, to the extent that soon after that Roman Catholic Cardinals were commanded to wear red instead of purple garments, which they had formerly been treated to. This extraordinarily profitable business in dye is why Byzantium is so often coloured purple in video games like Civilization.
Reading this actually makes me think the opposite: That we basically do the exact same processes but with the production obfuscated away and at a larger scale.
When you peel back the layers of garment manufacture today it's basically the same processes and materials as this series lays out.
What I basically mean is, I’m really glad I don’t have to spend my time and effort making clothes from scratch or smelting iron, or farming wheat. Or any of the many tasks that led up to making that even possible.
I’m really glad someone else has figured out how to do the many, many extremely time consuming steps (like domesticating sheep and wheat and flax) so that we can now enjoy those benefits.
But I also then feel like, shit, I really ought to be doing something for the world. They literally worked ALL this out for me. I barely have anything I need to do to survive and live an easy life, compared to back then at least.
I was gratified to learn upon visiting historical Williamsburg that turmeric, the spice my mother always warned me to be careful with when adding to food because "It will stain the pot, stain the wooden spoon, stain your clothes, and stain anything else it touches" was, in fact, a historical ingredient for yellow dye.
Great to see stuff like this on HN.
Curious: there is an unbelievably huge wealth of this type of "content" that lives almost exclusively in history books, or at least seems profoundly difficult to find on the internet.
Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface...
Incidentally, if anyone is interested in the general topic of making cloths / tailoring, I just recorded a podcast episode on this - the show is about deep, obsessive hobbies and the first episode is about a neuroscientist who transforms into a tailor at night: https://www.whentheworkisdone.com/
There are a lot of books covering historical subjects on the web. Their contents usually won't show up in a general web search though. I have learned a lot about the past from old books. Google Books, the HathiTrust, and archive.org are useful here. Newer books are often available on Library Genesis.
As an example: have you ever wondered about the state of toxicology in the late Victorian era? What poisons were known, what poisons were detectable (and how), and other nuts-and-bolts details of a certain kind of murder mystery? This information is hard to find in modern web pages -- particularly if you don't know enough to tell who is a trustworthy guide to the past.
But a HathiTrust search does the job easily.
Use the "advanced full text search" form. Search for the word poisons. Restrict results to English language documents in the years 1880-1900. You'll get a wealth of books back, like this illustrated 1885 text:
"Micro-chemistry of poisons : including their physiological, pathological, and legal relations; with an appendix on the detection and microscopic determination of blood: adapted to the use of the medical jurist, physician, and general chemist"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc2.ark:/13960/t9d51...
Or from 1883:
"Indian snake poisons, their nature and effects."
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924003195769&vi...
1899:
"Practical materia medica for nurses, with an appendix containing poisons and their antidotes"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t0pr8z...
Ah, deep obsessive hobbies. My mother once made a couple of suits for herself and my sister-in-law, starting from an almost raw fleece (she refused to do the cleaning of the fleece to get rid of the twigs and other crap). Also, for clothes construction and fabric arts, see my sister-in-laws blog, which made the front page of HN a few months ago. [0][1] She makes clothes, and teaches the art and craft of it.
0: https://weaversew.com/wordblog/2020/11/07/thats-not-why-i-di... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25195659
> My mother once made a couple of suits for herself and my sister-in-law, starting from an almost raw fleece (she refused to do the cleaning of the fleece to get rid of the twigs and other crap).
So she made you a ghillie suit, or did you end up getting rid of them later?
Speaking of books, and Google:
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-los...
(Also, funny how these days I am getting better results searching HN directly...)
I think that GBS has resumed, or at least that the Ngram Viewer is now sourcing data from sources updated since ~2000 -- 2008, the previous cutoff year.
(I cannot readily find a source confirming the first point. The second is confirmed through a Tweet: http://nitter.cc/searchliaison/status/1282797986863386624)
> Curious: there is an unbelievably huge wealth of this type of "content" that lives almost exclusively in history books, or at least seems profoundly difficult to find on the internet.
> Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface...
The accurate and valuable knowledge humanity has produced is mostly behind paywalls: Books and scholarly journals (and also the best journalism). The masses get the dregs - rumors, speculation, ignorance, disinformation, misinformation - 99% crap is not an exaggeration, IMHO. It also is a massive barrier against anyone, including kids, who try to actually learn. Then the experts wring their hands about all the ignorance and false beliefs held by the public, and how uneducated everyone is.
Reading actual scholarly work - from people who have personally examined the primary evidence, and who have the expertise to put it in context with prior evidence and have the skills to evaluate it - is transformative (as is the best journalism - people who also examine the evidence, etc.). The difference between that and usual Internet information is mind-altering - they are different worlds, and often say completely different things. What seemed reasonable on the Internet immediately becomes ignorant and deceptive, sometimes intentionally, and useless. (An important trick is to remember next time that what seems reasonable and useful is really, no matter how convincing it feels, is really ignorant and useless.) Also, IME the scholarly work usually is easy to read - easier than the BS on the Internet, because people who know what they're talking about and have evidence tend to write clearly and get directly to the point.
I sprung for a personal subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary - I think ~$90 as a special. Just that is transformative: a quick history, at my fingertips, of every concept ever expressed in English - with the primary evidence right there!
...
If we could make all the valuable, accurate information available to the public, it could be transformative for everyone. I wish the Gates Foundation would spare a few billion to buy the IP to the scholarly journals and books and make them open. That may do more than any investment.
If this was true why do people send kids to school? They can drop them off at the library and let them transform themselves by themselves. Any half baked library has enough info to keep you occupied on any subject you want for your entire life. But rarely does it lead to transformation which is why we end up with schools.
People confuse information access with learning. Effective learning, esp for the 6 inch chimp brain wondering around in a dark jungle, always requires a teacher. Someone who is constantly providing feedback to keep the chimp on track, pointing out how to correct blundering, which paths are dead ends, which paths are worth exploring etc etc etc.
Where things start breaking down is the availability of high quality teachers, guides, mentors, coaches etc
I agree completely about the value of education. I am not one of those who think everyone can be an autodidact and nobody needs to go to college.
However, people also learn things on their own, to a great degree. Most people reading this haven't been in school for a long time.
Fortunately, this blog seems to get a fair amount of love from HN. That's how I discovered it and became a regular reader. It makes lots of points that seem like they would be common sense, except that they are directly opposite the way the past is shown in popular culture. For instance: It's safe to assume that people in the past believed in their religions. Also, people like to look nice. This is reflected in how they dress, and nomadic peoples are no exception.
The depiction of medieval folks wearing drab and dirty and torn clothes in black, browns, and and grays is THE biggest peeve I have with costume design in ‘historical’ movies and tv shows. The absolute worst offenders in recent memory being Vikings and The Last Kingdom, but there are a plethora of others. Not to mention the biker-gear-leather-fetish as armor look they all seem to go for.
IF you enjoy this kind of thing, (and you aren't already an acoup fan), he wrote an entire article about the biker-gear-leather-fetish trope in Game of Thrones: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
Ah great read! A tad condescending in tone but I imagine they do have to deal with outraged fans a lot.
The blog is called "a collection of unlimited pedantry", so at least some pedantry is to be expected !
> The blog is called "a collection of unlimited pedantry", so at least some pedantry is to be expected !
While we're on the topic of pedantry, the blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", not "unlimited". Pfft!
https://www.tor.com/2014/03/25/how-history-can-be-used-in-fi...
> Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her [that] modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time.
> I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: "Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?"
Yes, this makes sense, but you can convey what you want to an audience without compromising historicity so thoroughly I believe.
Taking the Vikings tv show example - Ragnar Lothbroke would have been in richly and boldly colorful, probably embroidered, clothing of wool and linen and maybe even silk or cotton from trade.
He would have been covered in gold and silver jewelry, and his armor and weapons would have been gilt or inlaid with silver, gold, and copper-alloy and intricately engraved.
Instead we get an extra from Sons of Anarchy complete with tats and edgy haircut.
Edit, also 3/4s of those impressions the modern audience does have is from decades of movies and tv shows. I think a project that respects its audience could do its part to start projecting more accurate impressions of past aesthetics and fashion sensibilities.
By the by, any series (or movies) that you'd recommend for their historical accuracy, especially with respect to the everyday things like clothing and other customs?
Master and Commander is really good for more recent history of the Napoleonic Wars era as far as clothing, language and customs.
Outlaw King (netflix movie about Robert Bruce) is bad, but a leap better than other medieval outings - they at least try, the armor is sloppy, ill-fitting, and anachronistic but the weapons, clothing and heraldry are really good.
Others more expert than me have mentioned Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier as being the best movie attempt at 15th century armor.
A company that makes clothes and merchandise for 'viking' enthusiasts kick started a short film that is absolutely excellent in terms of language, clothes, and attitude of the very late Viking period, although they too fall prey to the Vikings-as-bad-ass-biker trope on occcasion. (Not to mention the romantic sanitization of all the unsavory activities any early medieval raiders or pirates would get up to).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yqbowUiH-s
In general though, true historical accuracy is very hard to find outside niche youtube videos, even if you aren't terribly nitpicky about what is 'accurate'.
Except the French crew in Master and Commander had clothes from almost a century before the events in the movie. This was done to denote their "foreignness".
Yeah, this is a good point (more like half a century really). I always sort of rationalized in my head because of O'Brians emphasis in the books of sailors' innate conservatism but you are correct.
Not to mention there's no way a French crew would be in an American heavy frigate in 1805.
I'm a huge POB fan but I felt I could overlook a lot of the liberties taken with the movie. At least it got made! And I think the shipboard scenes on the Surprise were really well done.
And this is not a knock against the actor himself - I think he did a fantastic job of conveying the mix of pensiveness, thoughtfulness, brutality and ferocity an early Medieval warlord like Ragnar would have had.
In the vein of historical accuracy, that article repeats the assertion that nobles basically randomly pooped all over the floor in Versailles. Does anybody know if that's actually true? I feel like I've heard so many conflicting versions of this tale (yes there were essentially small mountains of shit and nobody batted an eye, no these were basically lies and gossip and fabricated by enemies at the time and framed in such a way that it is clear by their salacious tone this was not normal and very disapproved of, etc.) that I have no idea what to believe.
I tried to look into that claim a little more and found a website claiming there was a single French princess who behaved this way on the theory that she was too important to have to waste her time visiting bathrooms, and that her unusual behavior outraged the palace servants (who had to clean it up - the princess wasn't exactly wrong about being important).
This seems more plausible than the presentation here.
IIRC it was pretty normal there to throw the content of the chamberpots out of the window in the morning. Which led to a great stink in the summer.
Or it works the other way. Modern audiences don't understand the significance of a wool cap in Shakespeare.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn...
> If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny.
Well, that claim didn't age well. It's hard to get non-low-rise pants in any variety now.
You can still find some pants that have the waistband at the actual waist, but they are unfortunately few and very far between.
I like these a lot: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/sarma-worker-pants/55... And in wool: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/sarma-worker-trousers...
Wear them with button suspenders, so comfortable. Why did suspenders ever go out of fashion?
Otherwise, find a good menswear store or even a tailor to custom make you proper-waisted pants. It's worth it.
Literally the next line in the article is "In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all".
It's been less than 10 years.
People were already complaining about the impossibility of buying pants that fit years before that program came out.
> Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine?
You are already starting with "I want the princess to be cartoon character rather then human character".
Also, presumably, there would not been a single viking with bright pants, but rather all characters having colors. So one wiking would stand out less.
It's theatre, of course we're starting with "these people need to be clear, larger-than-life character archetypes, not fully nuanced humans".
No, the ones with nuanced humans are much better. Or at least the ones with tiny bit more nuance then story for 3 years old.
> Also, presumably, there would not been a single viking with bright pants, but rather all characters having colors. So one wiking would stand out less.
That doesn't follow at all. The whole concept of "the expense of the dye and the purity of the white mark these as the pants of an important man" is that the pants stand out from what everybody else is wearing. That's how you can tell that the one guy who can afford to wear them is rich and important.
Hmm, pants with bold stripes you say ?
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
But then these pants also fit the character. And those Vikings are of course highly anachronistic. And wearing something closer to the criticized "Drab barbarian clothes."
A note, the pictures seem to have vanished in the Tor version of the article. It would probably be better to link to the original version on Ex Urbe: https://www.exurbe.com/the-borgias-vs-borgia-faith-and-fear/
Speaking of Vikings, he covered the latest Assassin's Creed too :
https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...
Yeah, it's like they saw one depiction of "sackcloth and ashes" and decided to extrapolate it to be the constant fashion of the lower classes throughout medieval history.
"Alternately, if the dye for a given hue or color came from something rare or foreign or difficult to process (for instance, in all three cases, Tyrian or royal purple, which came from the murex sea snails – if you have ever wondered why no country has purple as a national color this is why, before synthetic dyes, coloring your flags and uniforms purple would have been bonkers expensive), then it was going to be expensive and rare and there just wasn’t much you could do about that."
The wearing of Tyrian purple clothes (made from the murex snails) was just banned for commoners in Rome, and its production was seriously disrupted if not stopped after the fall of Constantinople, to the extent that soon after that Roman Catholic Cardinals were commanded to wear red instead of purple garments, which they had formerly been treated to. This extraordinarily profitable business in dye is why Byzantium is so often coloured purple in video games like Civilization.
See generally, Sumptuary Laws:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
It’s easy to forget, or just not realise, how insanely far we have come as a species, and all the shoulders we’re standing on.
It makes me very, very grateful for where we are now, but also feel really, really spoilt.
Reading this actually makes me think the opposite: That we basically do the exact same processes but with the production obfuscated away and at a larger scale.
When you peel back the layers of garment manufacture today it's basically the same processes and materials as this series lays out.
I believe, that you both think the very same idea just using different words.
What I basically mean is, I’m really glad I don’t have to spend my time and effort making clothes from scratch or smelting iron, or farming wheat. Or any of the many tasks that led up to making that even possible.
I’m really glad someone else has figured out how to do the many, many extremely time consuming steps (like domesticating sheep and wheat and flax) so that we can now enjoy those benefits.
But I also then feel like, shit, I really ought to be doing something for the world. They literally worked ALL this out for me. I barely have anything I need to do to survive and live an easy life, compared to back then at least.
I was gratified to learn upon visiting historical Williamsburg that turmeric, the spice my mother always warned me to be careful with when adding to food because "It will stain the pot, stain the wooden spoon, stain your clothes, and stain anything else it touches" was, in fact, a historical ingredient for yellow dye.
If you are into these kind of things, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichcahuipilli (Ichcahuipilli, the mesoamerican military armor)