'The Nature of Fashion' by Carry Somers: An Exclusive Book Extract

The following is an extract from Carry Somers’s new book 'The Nature of Fashion' (Chelsea Green Publishing September 2025) and is printed with permission from the publisher

Weaving is knowledge

Peru • 4200BCE

The Levant, Anatolia, Papua New Guinea... It’s no coincidence that some of the oldest textile remnants emerge from the first cradles of agriculture. As people settled in one place, those early societies discovered the luxury of time: to observe nature’s rhythms, to develop their skills, to experiment with plant fibres, ultimately turning them into cloth. With the emergence of complex social systems, textiles took on a crucial role: supporting economies, facilitating trade, upholding beauty, reinforcing beliefs, symbolising power. From birth to death and onwards into the afterlife, textiles wove their way into the fabric of civilisation.

This connection is perhaps most evident in Peru, another early heartland of agriculture. At Huaca Prieta on the country’s northern coast, archaeologists unearthed textile fragments and twined fibres dating back eleven thousand years. Among the world’s oldest surviving cotton textiles, they display complex, colourful designs, revealing early domesticated cotton in hues of red, white and brown, alongside the earliest-known example of indigo-dyed cloth. But these textiles were more than adornment: they were knowledge encoded. The repetition of patterns across various samples, the directional shifts in twining to create texture, and the presence of motifs like the condor all point to a sophisticated community-wide design system. The history of Huaca Prieta is not just one of archaeological discovery – it is a story spun from innovation and creativity, and the intrinsic understanding that to weave is to know.

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Each new era is birthed by a pachacuti, a cataclysmic event in which the world heaves itself up and rebalances. In this place where the beginning endlessly begins again, the line between history and myth becomes blurred.

According to legend, the people of the first age knew nothing, not even how to make clothes. Although they could twist fibres, they still dressed in leaves. In the second age, people began to work, tilling the fields, building irrigation ditches, yet they still did not know how to make clothing, wearing animal skins instead. The people of the third age learnt to spin and weave. When they went into battle, it was cloth and clothing they wanted as the spoils of war. Everyone in Huaca Prieta is happy they are living in the third age.

In their fertile coastal home where the glacial meltwater of the Andes flows out to sea, the inhabitants of Huaca Prieta have more time than those living elsewhere. Because their society has no high-class rulers to serve and appease, it gives them ample opportunity to innovate and experiment, to develop technologies, craft tools, paint motifs and create exquisite cloth. They don’t even need to fight battles anymore; why would they when they live in continual reciprocity with the world around them, trading the fruits of the sea for roots and grains from their neighbours in the mountains? The rich coastal silt provides perfect conditions for cultivating their native cotton, which grows like the rainbow in brown and orange, cream and yellow, green and mauve. Their cotton has always been naturally colourful, but now its shades are deeper, more muted; selective breeding has helped make nets and lines less visible to fish. And while they were modifying the plant, they lengthen edits fibres to make it easier to spin. So, while the men go fishing with their brown cotton nets, dried gourds attached for floats, the women sit down to work in the shade of the huarango trees.

A woman is preparing tan-coloured cotton bolls for spinning, teasing out their fibres as if funnelling clouds. The light-as-dust threads will provide a pleasing contrast to the indigo steeping in her dye vat. Yet she is not content with just the one fibre – this is Huaca Prieta after all, a place where conventions are challenged and boundaries pushed. She selects several lengths of wild chivovine and plies it with the indigo-dyed cotton. Then, tying her backstrap loom to a huarango trunk, she makes herself comfortable on a mat on the ground. Using two weft yarns, she raises one over the warp and pushes the other one under; twist and repeat. As she works, she moves her body this way and that to create tension in the vertical threads. It’s slow work, but she has all the time in the world.

What people do in life is reflected in death. Women are buried with their colourful textiles and looms, while their menfolk make do with fishing nets, pelican feathers and other paraphernalia from their maritime pursuits. These gendered grave goods join them in the dark pyramid at the centre of their world. Bonfires burn on its slopes through the night and glittering sparks rise up to join with the stars. People imagine life will go on as it always has: their sons will fish, their daughters will weave and everyone will thrive with maize from the mountains and fish from the sea. So it has been, so it always will be. The people of Huaca Prieta cannot foresee the great pachacuti when time and their world will overturn once again.

His name is Felipe Guamán Pomade Ayala, born of the sky and the earth, the condor and the puma. In his epistle, he portrays the people of the third age as multiplying like sand on the seashore. The pure people, he calls them, illustrating his words with a drawing of a couple outside their hut, the woman holding a spindle, the man toying with a ball of yarn like a yo-yo. No, the people of Huaca Prieta cannot anticipate the chaos of conquest, but Guamán Poma sees it, believing the final cycle of the last sun has already begun. Turning the page, he depicts two armies preparing for battle: one, the Spanish conquerors, unleashing brutality and discord; the other, the Indigenous awka pacha runa, warriors of the earth, their resistance as fierce as the invaders advance. Awka means warrior, but it has another meaning too: someone who is unbending, unwilling to change their ways or face the consequences of their actions. In this collision of immovable forces, Guamán Poma sees chaos just over the horizon.

Yet there is hope, for a pachacuti is a liminal space, a transitional period in which the balance between human beings, earth beings and spirits is disrupted. A time flush with potential. If only people would tune in to planetary rhythms and listen to Pachamama’s slow-beating heart, they could restore balance to this upside-down world. After all, there is no finality to an ending if it heralds a new beginning.

The Nature Of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives by Carry Somers (16 September 2025, Chelsea Green).

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