The Culture of Cloth

Epizodai

• The First Makers: Pacific and Oceania 19.07.2026 8min

  It’s the final episode of The First Makers series. In this episode we speak about the Polynesian goddess Hina and how she is seen across many different islands and known by many different names, but her message is the same. We also touch on the important of the possum cloak in the culture of Indigenous Australians and how that knowledge was almost lost but is fortunately alive and thriving today. Cover image is of Mildred Taniova colouring in the tapa designs with red...
• The First Makers: The Americas 09.07.2026 9min

  Before there was a world, there was a thread. In this episode of First Makers, I’m looking at two very different models of the same idea. Divinity and thread as the origin of everything that matters. First, Mama Ocllo, sent by the Inca sun god Inti to teach the first women to spin and weave. She is a culture-hero, not a weaver herself, whose myth explains where an entire craft tradition came from. Then Spider Grandmother, who in Navajo and Hopi tradition isn’t a teacher at all, but the maker ...
• The First Makers: West Africa & the Diaspora 22.06.2026 13min

  The First Makers: West Africa and the Diaspora This edition is different from every other one in this series. Every tradition we’ve covered so far came to us through a written documentary record (the Kojiki, the Rigveda, Hesiod). The traditions in this edition travelled through the worst thing human beings have ever done to each other. And they survived. In this episode I cover: Anansi (ah-NAHN-see) – the Akan spider trickster of Ghana, whose web became the origin of kente cloth. The Do...
• The First Makers: South & East Asia 13.06.2026 14min

  Every culture created a goddess who presided over making. But not all of them did it the same way. This episode introduces two categories. The first: goddesses whose mythology is explicitly about weaving. Documented, primary sources, this is what the texts actually say. The second: goddesses that weavers chose. Figures whose domains of creativity, wisdom and skill made them the natural patrons of women at the loom, even though weaving isn’t the centre of their story. Both catego...
• A Compass, Not a Photocopier: Trend Forecasting, AI and Why Origin Matters with Tully Walter 05.06.2026 53min

  Tully Walter is a Strategic Futures Director at Soon Futures and this is one of the most substantial conversations I've had on the show. We get into what trend forecasting actually is (observed, invented, or accelerated) and how the answer changes depending on who's paying. We talk about cultural appropriation and why origin gives a trend its meaning, what happens when that context gets stripped out, and why the Prada sandal situation was an after-the-fact correction that should have been bui...
• The First Makers: Celtic & European 30.05.2026 11min

  Every 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 9min

  While 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 17min

  There'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 10min

  The 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 9min

  Women 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/