The Culture of Cloth

Veronica Tucker

Clothing is never just clothing. Every fibre, every colour, every silhouette is telling you something about power, politics and whose story got told and whose didn’t. The Culture of Cloth is a podcast about learning to read that story. Most fashion history looks at the outside but this show looks at the inside. The construction, the decisions, the invisible hands that made it, and the world those hands were living in. The women who encoded military intelligence into knitting. The weavers whose binary logic built the first computer. The dyers, the spinners, the pattern cutters whose names were never written down. Cloth tells the truth even when the official record doesn’t. For makers and thinkers. For everyone who has ever looked at a garment and felt there was more to it than they were being told. Hosted by Veronica Tucker.

  1. Oct 14

    Interview with Grace Snell | Costume Designer of Sense & Sensibility 2026

    I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Grace Snell (https://www.instagram.com/graceesnell/) who created the costumes for the 2026 Sense and Sensibility.There's been a lot of online dialogue about this film, as there is anytime a new adaptation enters the Austen-verse, yet it was so fantastic to watch Grace's work online in the lead up to the film. Then I got invited to see the film myself and then was finally being able to ask Grace all the nitty-gritty questions that had been bubbling away in my brain for weeks. Grace and I talk about:- How it felt to be part of the Austen-verse and her connection to Austen's work.- The huge role natural dyeing played in not the costume design but how it spoke to the different characters.- How hers and Georgia Oakley's (director) creative approach to costume design and filmmaking is very much about intuition and collaboration.- How she collaborated with the WONDERFUL John Bright (who was actually the co-costume designer on the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility) on one of Fanny Dashwood's costumesLet me know what you thought of my first ever big interview with a costume designer and whether you'd love more of these :) Link to YouTube video: https://youtu.be/MrklArVNQAEFollow me here:https://www.instagram.com/veronicatuckerthelabel/Shop my sewing patterns here:https://www.veronicatuckerthelabel.com/Shop my phone case designs here:https://thedairy.com/collections/veronica-tucker-phone-cases

    Interview with Grace Snell | Costume Designer of Sense & Sensibility 2026
  2. Jun 22

    The First Makers: West Africa & the Diaspora

    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 Dogon of Mali – whose sage Ogotemmêli described the loom as a living body through which divine word enters the world. To weave at night would be to weave silence and darkness into the cloth.  Oshun (O-shun) – Yoruba goddess of freshwater, fertility, and the creative arts. When the other gods failed to populate the Earth, it was Oshun who succeeded. Yemoja (yeh-MOH-jah) – Yoruba mother of waters, mother of many gods, whose presence in the Americas is one of the most remarkable stories of religious survival in human history. Because then the Middle Passage happened. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were taken from their homes and forced onto ships crossing the Atlantic. They arrived with nothing except what they remembered and they kept it alive. In Brazil it became Candomblé. In Cuba, Lucumí. In Haiti, sacred textile flags were made inside Vodou temples to honour the spirits.  This is the First Makers thesis in its fullest form. A tradition that survived the unsurvivable because the people who carried it refused to let it die. The First Makers is part of the Goddess Project – a long-form series tracing the history of draped cloth as political act, culminating in the Esther sewing pattern in August/September 2026. Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles. https://www.commonthreadspress.co.uk/products/diasporic-threads-black-women-fibre-textiles-revised-edition

    The First Makers: West Africa & the Diaspora
5
out of 5
24 Ratings

About

Clothing is never just clothing. Every fibre, every colour, every silhouette is telling you something about power, politics and whose story got told and whose didn’t. The Culture of Cloth is a podcast about learning to read that story. Most fashion history looks at the outside but this show looks at the inside. The construction, the decisions, the invisible hands that made it, and the world those hands were living in. The women who encoded military intelligence into knitting. The weavers whose binary logic built the first computer. The dyers, the spinners, the pattern cutters whose names were never written down. Cloth tells the truth even when the official record doesn’t. For makers and thinkers. For everyone who has ever looked at a garment and felt there was more to it than they were being told. Hosted by Veronica Tucker.

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