#history-of-rope

#history-of-rope

"The trade of frankincense is something that's well over 6,000 years old," says Anjanette DeCarlo, an adjunct professor at the University of Vermont. "Traded on the Silk Route into China and also, of course, brought into Europe, so widely used across the ancient world, right up till today."

Visually striking and intricately crafted, the traditional armour and weaponry of the Kiribati islands in the Pacific Ocean were built from coconut fibre, human hair, sharks' teeth and porcupine fish. Yet, fearsome and lethal as these objects were, the people of this remote archipelago weren't especially warlike, as British colonists had long assumed, but were instead part of a ritualised style of combat intended to keep violence between clashing groups to a minimum.

Knitting is the perfect activity to calm the body and soothe the mind during a high-pressure event like the Winter Olympics. Once you internalize your stitch pattern, you can just zone out and focus on how the yarn feels between your fingers, and for those EMDR girlies among us, knitting also counts as bilateral stimulation. Since diver Tom Daley went viral in 2021 for knitting between events at the Tokyo Olympics, he's become something of a knitbassador for the craft,

In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed.

Fashion and dress in Mesopotamia - clothing, footwear, and accessories - were not only functional but defined one's social status and developed from a simple loincloth in the Ubaid period (circa 6500-4000 BCE) to brightly colored robes and dresses by the time of the Sassanian Empire (224-651). Styles changed, but the essential form and function remained the same. As in any civilization, the upper class and nobility wore more expensive clothes of higher quality.