Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

by Victoria Finlay

‘Do you know about St Thomas More’s hair shirt?’ he asked us, generously ignoring my phone camera. We didn’t, so he took us to see it in the side chapel. Just a square was visible behind the glass, perhaps thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres, deeply folded across the diagonal. The rest had been squashed into a box behind the frame. From a distance it looked like chain mail, but closer up it was like the tough, thin, metallic mesh of a landing net I once saw when I was researching an article about a circus; or the scratchy pile of a bouclé sisal carpet. The thing I found most surprising was the colour. Not black. Nor even brown, nor white, which apparently it might once have been. Instead it was a soft, slippery, silvery grey. Like graphite. And like graphite, in that flattering light, it shone. I didn’t take a photograph.