The Culture of Cloth
Veronica Tucker
0
Clothing is never just clothing. Every fibre, every colour, every silhouette tells a story about power, politics, and whose story got told. The Culture of Cloth is a podcast about learning to read that story, starting with the cloth itself and following it wherever it leads. It looks at the construction, the decisions, the invisible hands that made it, and the world those hands were living in. Hosted by Veronica Tucker.
Épisodes
-
The First Makers: Celtic & European 30.05.2026 11minEvery single one of these goddesses survived, but none of them survived intact. In this episode I trace the weaving goddesses of Celtic and European mythology (Brigid, Arianrhod, Frigg, and Holda) and the pattern running through all of them. They were rewritten, renamed, absorbed into new religions, turned into fairy tales, reduced to saints. Brigid survived by becoming a saint. Holda survived by becoming a fairy tale. Arianrhod survived in a manuscript written by people who tried to conta...
-
The First Makers: Ancient Mediterranean & Near East 24.05.2026 9minWhile researching the Goddess Project, I came across something that stopped me completely. Every culture, independently and without contact with each other, created a goddess who presided over weaving. Not because ideas travelled along trade routes, but separately. Across thousands of years and thousands of kilometres. In this episode I walk through the oldest part of that record, from Uttu, the Sumerian spider goddess who dates to 3000 BCE, through Inanna, Neith, Hathor, Isis, and Athena. S...
-
The Dictionary Was Named After a Woman Weaver 17.05.2026 17minThere's a word you use every single day that used to mean woven fabric. And the most authoritative dictionary in the English language is named, etymologically, after a medieval woman weaver. In this episode we follow the thread from Old English occupational suffixes through spinster, webster, and the World Wide Web, to Noah Webster, the Hattori clan, and the myth of Arachne. Women's textile labour was so economically central that it got encoded into the language itself, into surnames carried ...
-
The Most Powerful Colour in History Smelled of Garlic 10.05.2026 10minThe most coveted colour in the ancient world came from a sea snail that smelled of garlic and cost more than gold. Tyrian purple built empires, wrote laws, and ended careers and when Constantinople fell in 1453, the knowledge of how to make it disappeared almost entirely. In this episode we trace the colour from the Phoenician city of Tyre to the courts of Rome and Byzantium, through the chemistry that made it impossible to fake, and the laws that made wearing the wrong shade a capit...
-
Women Invented Binary Code 04.05.2026 9minWomen invented binary code. They ran it by hand across thousands of threads, encoded it into the punched cards that built the first computer and knitted it through enemy checkpoints during wartime. We didn't call it code because we didn't call anything women did by its right name. This is the story of fabric as information technology and the consistent pattern of who builds the foundation and whose name ends up on it. Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veronicatuckerthelabel/
