July 10, 2025 · AlabamaSOUTHERN CULTURES: HISTORY, COMMUNITY, AND POWER
In Winter 2024, Natalie and the Project Threadways team collaborated on a guest-edited issue of Southern Cultures, a quarterly journal published by the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill, focused on the theme “The Future of Textiles.” Purchase the full issue here.
Introduction
History, Community, and Power
by Natalie Chanin and Olivia Terenzio
What is the future of textiles? Read news headlines, from business to environment to fashion, and you would be justified in pointing to the movement of nearly all textile production overseas, where supply chains are opaque and workers are often exploited; the prevalence of synthetic and toxic materials; and the massive and devastating volume of waste produced by the fashion industry. You might note the triumph of artificial intelligence over individual creativity, or 3D printing over skilled craftsmanship. Where quilts were once treasured and passed down, and jackets were mended or repurposed, today’s consumers purchase and discard fiber goods impulsively. Simultaneously, many of the pieces we acquire are completely alien to us; we know nothing of their provenance, the process by which they were created, or the people who oversaw their construction. Waste, labor abuse, environmental destruction, knowledge loss—these are all realities facing the present-day textile industry, but they are not the only stories.
We have long believed that a different way forward is possible—one that mends the ruptures between seed and shelf, maker and wearer. This issue aims to highlight some of the scholars, artisans, entrepreneurs, and creatives who dare to imagine and reimagine it.
The question of textile futures has circulated in our minds over the past year, as we have considered the future not only of our organization, Project Threadways, but of the industry, artisan craft, supply chains, and local manufacturing. Project Threadways is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that records, studies, and interprets history, community, and power through the lens of fashion and textiles. From raw materials to finished goods, we seek to understand the impact of textiles on our community, nation, and world. After all, every textile story is necessarily a global one. As historian Sven Beckert writes, “The empire of cotton, and with it the modern world, is only understood by connecting, rather than separating, the many places and people who shaped and were in turn shaped by that empire.”
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In these pages, you will find stories that thread together the past, present, and future of textile production, asking questions about where we go from here. Historian Elijah Gaddis takes us to the Loray, in Gastonia, North Carolina, which was once one of the largest textile mills in the country and has since converted into trendy loft apartments. He considers how contemporary adaptive-reuse projects negotiate economic and narrative uses, selling industrial character without accounting for the people and events that once animated the building. Chip Hughes recollects his time fighting for workplace reform with a group of labor, civil rights, and public health activists, whose campaigns have had a lasting impact on social advocacy and worker justice. With documentary photographer Rinne Allen, writer Maurice Bailey and geographer Nik Heynen detail their project to reintroduce indigo, a heritage crop, to Sapelo Island to generate economic development and provide a new future for Gullah Geechee descendants. Folklorist Emily Hilliard interviews weavers at Berea College about the history and evolution of the Student Craft Weaving Department, where new initiatives include gender-neutral baby blankets and a natural dye garden. Ecologist and researcher Makalé Cullen explores the marine present and future of cellulose fibers as the textiles of fast fashion, connecting the South’s off-shored manufacturing with waste around the world, from Gulf Coast to Gold Coast. Conceptual artist Libby O’Bryan writes of Sew Co., the working sewing factory she founded with the mission to preserve sewing skills using a new model for worker agency. She describes the project as an “experiment in cultural ideals, values, and worth,” opening an exchange about labor, craft, and consumption. Fashion designer Marwan Pleasant tells of making beautiful, intricately beaded suits as part of the Black masking Indian tradition in New Orleans, and the role of craft in honoring and evolving culture. Along the way, you will meet Fibershed affiliate organizations in the South who support and champion local farming, spinning, dyeing, weaving, and making, all to design a better fiber economy.
Appropriately and deliberately, subjects range widely, though we are interested in the places in which they intersect: labor, community, identity, and power. Each author is mindful of context. They position their art and research within a network of producers, makers, and consumers—global and local. Meanwhile, they interrogate the relationship of their own work to past and future, examining what it might reveal about each.
Textile metaphors remain ubiquitous in our vernacular, despite our dislocation from our own fibers’ origins and processes. We “hang on by a thread” and speak of “moral fiber” and “social fabric.” Staunch beliefs are “dyed in the wool.” The prevalence of these metaphors testifies to the ways in which, as Beckert writes, textiles shaped our world by ushering in an era of uncontrolled capitalism. Consider, however, as the journalist Virginia Postrel has, that we use aphorisms such as “on tenterhooks” or “frazzled,” unconscious of their relationship to textiles. “We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing out fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language,” she writes. “Surrounded by textiles, we’re largely oblivious to their existence and to the knowledge and efforts embodied in every scrap of fabric.”
The essays in this issue suggest that the tears between textile histories and futures may be mended. When the people who make textiles, and the act of making itself, become visible, it is impossible to separate the material from the human. It is our deepest hope that, through these stories, we may inspire and facilitate conversation with makers, thinkers, and consumers who will shape a new future.
Read the full essay on Project Muse.
