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The Culture of Cloth

Veronica Tucker 5 Episodes Jul 25, 2026

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.

Episodes

“The Fun Police”: Garment Tech Confessions Jul 25, 2026 3263 Garment technicians rarely get interviewed. But buyers, designers, textile experts? Everyone talks about them. But the person who actually decides whether a garment fits, closes properly, and survives being worn? Almost invisible.In this episode, I sit down with my friend and fellow industry veteran Debbie, a garment technician who’s spent her career being the bridge between a designer’s sketch an

The First Makers: Pacific and Oceania Jul 19, 2026 533 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.

The First Makers: The Americas Jul 9, 2026 587 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.

The First Makers: West Africa & the Diaspora Jun 22, 2026 820 The First Makers: West Africa and the DiasporaThis 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 First Makers: South & East Asia Jun 13, 2026 893 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 w

A Compass, Not a Photocopier: Trend Forecasting, AI and Why Origin Matters with Tully Walter Jun 5, 2026 3231 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 s

The First Makers: Celtic & European May 30, 2026 685 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 b

The First Makers: Ancient Mediterranean & Near East May 24, 2026 558 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 Su

The Dictionary Was Named After a Woman Weaver May 17, 2026 1036 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 texti

The Most Powerful Colour in History Smelled of Garlic May 10, 2026 630 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

Women Invented Binary Code May 4, 2026 543 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 foundatio

The Culture of Cloth

Episodes

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