The Fabric of Civilization:
How Textiles Made the World

with Author Virginia Postrel

Online presentation via Zoom. The presentation will be broadcast live from the Koret Auditorium at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Tickets for the in-person presentation are sold at the auditorium doors, and cost $5.

A recording will be available for 14 days 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 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.

Virginia Postrel is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work focuses on the intersection of culture, commerce, and technology. She is a contributing editor for the London-based magazine Works in Progress. She writes a newsletter at vpostrel.substack.com. 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.

Image, from the 18th-century Encyclopédie, shows a French draw loom and the graph of a weaving pattern.

Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection

Image courtesy of Virginia Postrel

Learn more about the Textile Arts Council.