Zoom Meeting: The Fabric of Civilization

The Fabric of Civilization

Virginia Postrel

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. Her latest book is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (now available paperback). 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.