@lingerie_addict Has A Really Cool Thread On Ancient Fashion Over On Twitter.

Cora Harrington
@lingerie_addict

Having a thread about a stone age girl going viral and having a thread about the fashion industry going viral makes me want to do a thread connecting both of these subjects to talk about one of my favorite prehistoric articles of clothing: the Lendbreen Tunic.

img desc: Norwegian historian and researcher shown alongside the Lendbreen Tunic. Tunic is long, brown, and plain.
Cora Harrington
@lingerie_addict
Starting off with the technicalities, the Lendbreen Tunic is actually from the Iron Age, not the Stone Age. As far as I know, we don’t have any Stone Age clothing still in existence. The oldest garment we have is from the Bronze Age and is called the Tarkhan Dress.

img desc: Photo of the Tarkhan Dress. It looks like a linen tunic with some threadbare areas and pleats.

tweet: The Lendbreen Tunic was found chilling in a crumpled up ball in the Norwegian mountains because the earth is melting, and the ice going away revealed it. It's roughly 1700 years old, is made of wool, and has what we would think of as a very basic construction.

img desc: Deceptively important ball of dirty wool in some rocks

Tweet:
So let's set the stage. While clothing today is the cheapest it's ever been in human history (this is a fact, not a debate), for the longest time, clothes were one of the most expensive things you could own.

Part of what makes clothing so cheap today is that a lot of the initial work - such as planting, harvesting, processing, and weaving the fibers - can be done automatically. While the actual sewing still takes human hands, the spinning and weaving part does not.

People collecting clothing is a very recent thing in human history. If you own multiple outfits, you are more "clothes rich" than most human beings in the past ever were. It's like spices. They're ubiquitous now, but were once a sign of wealth and prestige.
The Lendbreen Tunic is made of undyed wool in a twill weave, no fastenings, and is clearly well-worn. But here’s why I chose this garment specifically. Because textile historians recreated it using the technology of the time, which is *fascinating.*

They started with an old Norwegian breed of sheep, and pulled the wool naturally rather than shearing, which would have changed the fiber qualities. In total, they gathered 2.5kg or roughly 5.5 pounds of wool.

Then they had to spin all this wool into thread. And no spinning wheels! The technology of the time was a drop spindle. They gathered 10 expert hand spinners and asked them to time themselves. It took 11 hours to spin 50 grams (about 1.75 oz). For all that wool, that's 544 hours.

(At this point, the researchers did turn to technology and used machine spinning because that's a lot of time and expense.)

Then all that thread had to be woven into cloth. They got an expert hand weaver (no shuttles!) and used a vertical loom. Working at peak capacity, she could weave 2-3 cm per hour (a maximum of around 1.2"). That worked out to 160 hours of just weaving.

Then, of course, it had to be sewn but that took a lot less time. What was interesting though is that the makers used 3 different stitches, which indicates expertise, deliberateness, and care.

So what is the total of all that hand labor?

760 hours.

760 hours to weave a plain tunic with no embellishments or fanciness at all. Just up a straight up t-shape. At the time this garment was made, the value of that labor was 380,000 NOK.

In US dollars, that's almost $38,000.

(Yes, I know the currency conversion isn't exact.)
That is an ASTONISHING amount of labor. For exactly 1 item of clothing. It is mind-boggling. I'm over here feeling like my head will explode if I think too hard about it. We have no real point of comparison for that type of work today (except maybe, haute couture, sorta kinda).

For me, the Lendbreen Tunic shows just how expensive and time consuming clothing was. And that's what I love about this topic. It's not just clothes. It's history and economics and math and technology and humanity. We're the only animals that wear clothing. It's a story of us.

But I do wonder how the person who lost it felt. I'd have been pissed as hell.

Sources:

https://t.co/r3sjz7YWZT

https://t.co/3hdDxBvGAw

https://t.co/prCBj5snUX

@lingerie_addict has a really cool thread on ancient fashion over on twitter.

Those source links are here

cambridge.org

Youtube

ucl.ac.uk

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