Textiles come from plants and animals. My 300 count cotton sheets were once prickly tufts swaying atop tall reeds in a field somewhere in India. In my dresser are sweaters that long ago were permanently attached to the skin of a lamb. The lamb probably sat in poop once or twice, and the wool that made my sweater touched many bad things.

It’s normal for them. They sit where they please.

But still. It was a $50 sweater and I sure hope it was sprayed down at least.

I have a leather belt that was either the a) armpit or b) shin of a cow before it was a belt. It holds close to my hips and prevents the slippage of my pants, but I can’t help wondering if maybe there isn’t an option c. Why does not my belt indicate from which cow body part it derives?

Mind you, I don’t question the quality of this two-inch wide piece of a dead animal. It was a gift from my cousin, who commandeered it for me from my uncle’s leather goods store. He’s bought and sold leather most of his life, so I’m sure he knows a good belt when he steals one. Still, many of the steps this thing went through between the cow’s waist and mine are not particularly appealing:

Fleshing
Hair removal
Liming
Deliming
Bating
Pickling
Fatliquoring

Hair removal alone takes four to six hours. Fatliquoring sounds bad, but it’s really just a procedure to get the moisture out of the hide.

Anyway, this is not some vegan save-the-animals-they-have-feelings rant. I have no problem with covering my naked skin with the dead, pickled skin of a cow. She would eat you too, if she could. Remember that.

Thankfully, these days all the foul stuff is done in a climate-controlled (I hope) factory far, far away. By the time you walk into my uncle’s store to purchase a briefcase or a leather umbrella the worst you may have to deal with is a grumpy Argentine who is impatient for a mid-day nap.

But a few hundred years ago, turning animals and plants into clothing was a very different proposition. Historically, tanning (the process of turning animal pelts into leather) was a horrendous occupation. Most tanners were poor, and they lived and worked in dirty, unhealthy conditions. Hair removal still had to happen, but without modern chemical techniques the best way to do it was to soak the pelt in urine (first they’d let the urine sit for a while till it became ammonia). Or, if your neighbors had some reason not to give away their urine, you could just let the pelt rot for several months, and then scrape the hairs off with a knife.

And then, if you could afford to, you’d slap on a few buttons and maybe a pocket or two, and put the whole urine-soaked, putrefied thing on your back.

Now, things are much better (of course, some people still prefer to do it the old fashioned way). If you’re lucky, the clothes you’re wearing aren’t made of plants or animals at all; they’re some inscrutable assortment of long-chain synthetic polymer molecules (p(- R- O – CO – C6H4 – CO – O -)x).

Polyester is a Middle Eastern fabric; it’s made of petroleum. You can find lots of it (crude oil) in the open-air markets of Baghdad and Kuwait. But making it into a t-shirt involves a fair bit of acid and melting.

So, you have some choices: kill a large, dirty animal and either a) cut off all its hair and put it on your back or b) cut off its skin, soak it in urine/acid, and put it on your back. Or, you can buy a few barrels of crude ($40 a pop), mix in some terephthalic acid, simmer and sew, and then head out to the disco.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 20th, 2004 at 9:02 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.