I checked out this book because I saw a museum show about the famous haute couture work of Guo Pei and saw this title all over the gift store. It started out with a series of essays on some of the biggest fabrics through history: the domestication of natural fibers such as wool (Norse people), flax (Egyptians), silk (Mongols), cotton (USA). A lot of the narrative in these early chapters relied on the ways modern archaeologists have found to learn something about ancient ancient fibers prone to decay. The chapter on the way lace played a role in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was as much about the social significance of the fabric as the practical difficulties to produce it.

Then came some recent innovations such as the development of clothing for mountaineering, polar expeditions, competitive swimming and running, the design of space suits by NASA, and the effort to mass produce spider silk. The chapter about how rayon was produced by forced labor in the mid twentieth century was all new to me. I was expecting more about the development of the clothing itself instead of the emphasis on spinning the fibers into thread in order to dominate their respective eras economically. From this book I learned a lot of things I had never heard before in an engaging manner.

The narration was good as it pulled me along even through some complex stories. I can recommend this to anyone interested in fiber arts and textiles including today's performance fabric technologies.