I can’t. Every single sentence in this could not be more wrong if the author deliberately set out to be the wrongest person in wrongville. I just.
I don’t care what else might be useful in this book, if your introduction is as fundamentally incorrect as this, the reliability of everything else you’ve ever said and that your editor has ever touched is immediately thrown into question.
I… that is… such bullshit. Wool and silk are arguably the easiest fibers to dye. Cotton’s a stone bitch to color. (Let’s not even get into ‘change clothes irregularly’, that’s bullshit too.)
I know, right?? Protein fibres suck up dye like no-one’s business; it’s cellulose that hates it.
And as for the others… linen bedsheets, bitch. And linen and silk woven so finely as to be practically transparent. And I’d like to take my records of inventories with 100+ linen shifts for one person, because of multiple-changes-per-day, and shove them up his grant.
It’s like he assumes that without cotton we also wouldn’t have, like, modern inventions and techniques? “Wool is hard to clean” I mean yeah you have to use Woolite on the gentle cycle and air dry but that’s not that much harder than using normal detergent
Aside from how fucking wrong this dude is about textiles…you guys do realize that Mister DIckbag here is actually attempting to justify how we *needed* the slave trade so that we would have the Cotton-Driven Modernized World, right?
Where is this dude, who published him, and how many parts can you separate a body into with a gardening hoe before the hoe’s edge is too big for the pieces.
*eyes the photo and highlighted text in the original post, and twitches a moment before screeching angrily*
Linen is a fucking awesome damned fiber, and the only godsdamned thing I can wear when my skin has decided that EVERYTHING is evil and itchy. And I still have TWENTY YEAR OLD LINEN TUNICS THAT ARE WEARABLE. Not tunics that rarely get worn, but my damned working tunics that get worn about a third of the days out of the year. Granted, I have only four left that are that old, and two are going to become one tunic because there are worn spots in the one I prefer to wear, and one of them hasn’t been worn in several years because it’s had to have a fair sized patch put on it, and is currently being decorated so it’s a spiffy fancy linen tunic. But still.
And pretty much all the ancient scraps of fabric that have been found after thousands of years? LINEN AND WOOL AND SILK. Linen-wrapped mummies. Wool pieces in salt caves and bogs. Silk and wool and linen fragments in burials. And yeah, several of them look pretty drab because THEY GOT OVERDYED BY THE GROUND THEY WERE BURIED IN.
(I do not have the spoons to go finding links, but. Mummies of Urumchi. There’s a book about the Hallstadt bands. Women’s Work. Woven Into the Earth. Linen. And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head and have access to. My spelling may be off on the couple of non-English words, because the books are downstairs, but still.)
And as for the colors – HAVE YOU SEEN THE COLORS YOU CAN GET WOOL AND LINEN AND SILK IN? Check out Red Fish Dyeworks if you want to see the sort of colors that can be achieved for hand-dyed silk and silk blends while still not getting into more modernly-popular colors. Bokkens (I think that’s how it’s spelled?) for linen. Jaegerspun for wool. (Hello, yes, these are people I get thread from, and my mom’s shop doesn’t have the room for all the colors.)
Washing… Linen needs to be rinsed and hung to dry mostly, unless you get it muddy or very gross. Also, it was underthings for centuries because it’s actually pretty damned easy to wash.
Wool takes forever to dry, so you generally don’t want to get it wet as much. HOWEVER. If your wool thing does get wet and/or muddy, hang it up where it gets good air circulation to dry. When dry, brush off the dirt. (Hey, the things you pick up from doing reenactment when a majority of your clothing is linen and wool and the only reason cotton is used is because when making clothes for growing kids, cotton is cheaper.)
Silk I’m honestly not as familiar with for pre-modern cleaning methods, but you know what? Dry cleaning is not a modern invention, so even if people didn’t wet-wash it, they could still readily clean it. Though they’d probably have paid someone else to do dry-cleaning, because people have been paying other people to do their laundry for fucking millennia. (That I picked up from someone else’s research for fanfic. Pre-internet fanfiction, at that, so book-research.)
If you hang up your tunics/dresses/gowns, they smell less. Sweet-smelling herbs in among clothes and in the chests/closets where they were kept were a thing. Clothes aren’t inherently smelly unless you’re a complete ass who doesn’t bother to take care of your clothes.
AND COTTON IS A NATURAL FIBER, YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER NUMBSKULL!
*takes a deep breath*
I am going to go get dinner and maybe walk in circles for a bit to calm down, because stupid fucking pieces of less-useful-than-shit are not good for my health.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 