• 1 Graham, Thrift, 2007, p. 5.
• 2 Bernasconi et al. (eds.), 2021; Krebs, Weber, 2021; Hilaire-Pérez, 2017; Denis, Pontille, 2022.

1In 2007, anthropologists Nigel Thrift and Stephen Graham called for historians and humanities scholars more generally to reconsider the “multifarious activities of repair and maintenance” as “not just secondary and derivative but pivotal,” indeed “one of our chief means of seeing and understanding the world.”1 Yet, the practices linked to making things last have only recently elicited the interest of historians and sociologists.2 If we accept that dysfunctionality or decay are fundamental constituents of material culture, then ensuring the durability of materials as much as the activities aimed at maintaining things in use and fending off dissolution are crucial aspects of the material world. Studying them or engaging with them may be also important ways of understanding the world in which historical actors lived. Because ensuring durability is key to a society’s relationship to its resources – be it because they are felt to be scarce and need to be used sparingly, recycled or salvaged or because these practices themselves depend both on the resourcefulness and the material resources at the disposal of given historical actors — studying practices of durability places the historian at the intersection of a host of interlocking historical questions, such as resources, resourcefulness as well as the various – and often gendered – ethos of thrift constructed by different societies at different times. It interrogates the way a given society deals with its resources, what technologies are deployed to manage them and within what cultural and social constructions the management of resources is framed. In turn it sheds light on the types of sources we harness to understand the past.

• 4 Appadurai (ed.), 1986.
• 5 Pennell, 2010. See also the exhibition on repair in Africa: Speranza, 2007.
• 6 Garcin, 2017, p. 92.

5Through preventive conservation or direct interventions, conservators-restorers are experts of durability. They are also first-hand observers of the historical practices deployed by men and women of the past to make things last. Many objects in museum collections bear the marks of their past lives as useful objects. To take the example of textile and dress artefacts: stockings are darned, hems have been let out or taken in, stains scoured, waistcoats altered to allow for a portlier figure, or patches added to conceal a hole or reinforce an area where a tear had appeared. These marks were once seen as blights on the artefacts felt to jeopardize their supposed aesthetic “authenticity” as well as their displayability in exhibitions. Anthropological approaches to objects and increasing attention of historians paid to their “social lives” have contributed to changing museum practice in this matter.4 Stains, signs of wear or repair on museum objects are now increasingly seen as part of the rich historical record archived by artefacts, sometimes even the topic of exhibitions.5 Rather than blights undermining the perceived quality of an object, they are now increasingly seen as part of the history it tells. Instead of erasing these traces, textile conservators are increasingly attentive to preserving these marks in their treatment.6 Maintaining a subtle balance between respecting the integrity of the object — soiled and torn as it might be from its life as a worn garment for instance — and stabilizing it, ensuring it does not deteriorate further and can be passed on to future generations is the narrow path textile conservators must tread. Given this specific expertise, what can the combined perspectives of a textile conservator-restorer and of a historian bring to our understanding of the intersection between resources and technology which practices of durability interrogate?

• 7 Garcin, 2010, p. 78; 2020.
• 8 Fennetaux et al. (eds.), 2015; Fennetaux, 2015, 2022a, 2022b.

6This article is born out of the belief that although the work of historians and of conservators-restorers differ in many obvious ways, their combined perspectives nurture each other to offer irreplaceable insights into the cultural, economic and social constructions underpinning material life and, in the context of this article, into the particular intersection between textile resources and resourcefulness, durability and the material economy that characterised western societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the authors is a textile conservator in the musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris whose work on collection items over the years has enabled her to gain expertise on the material practices of the past.7 The other, a historian interested in recycling and mending practices in the early modern and modern periods (particularly in the British Isles), spends part of her time not only in archives but also in museum storerooms studying artefacts.8 In this paper the authors use their respective expertise and approach to reflect on resources, techniques and resourcefulness in relation to textile durability in Europe as they can be teased out of the close reading of both texts and textiles over the eighteenth and nineteenth century period.

• 9 Perzanowski, 2022; Woodward, 1985.
• 10 Hilaire-Pérez, 2013.

7If we consider resources to be variables and techniques to be adaptive practices responding to the availability and material properties of resources, different societies can be said to achieve different levels of durability for their goods, depending on the particular juncture each material economy establishes between resources and techniques. The care and effort invested in making artefacts last, despite breakage, wear and tear is a long-standing constituent of human societies with examples visible on artefacts from the pre-historic era and well documented practices of repair and pragmatic repurposing all through the Renaissance and early modern era.9 Whereas in the West the so-called consumer revolution of the 18^th century has often been seen as the advent of a different material economy based on disposability rather than repair, close textual and material reading of sources and archives tells a different story.10 Despite growing consumption, the eighteenth century remains very much part of the traditional material economy in which materials are valuable enough that various practices are used to make them last through various practices and gestures. Close observation of artefacts made over several decades of practice as a textile restorer however points to the second quarter of the 19^th century as more of a watershed moment when the traditional material economy of reuse was superseded by a different juncture between technique and resources. Relationship to durability changed in the process. These empirical observations will here be illustrated by a selection of material sources taken from the study collection of the musée des Arts décoratifs which itself derived from the textile and dress collection of the Union française des Arts décoratifs assembled by François Boucher (1885-1966) in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Initially comprising of about 60,000 pieces, the collection has been in the care of the musée des Arts décoratifs since 1981. A representative sample of the collection has since been turned into a study collection to be used by textile restorers as reference. The material evidence presented in the current article derives from examples taken from this study collection. Like the UFAC collection as a whole, the study collection illustrates middle to upper-class sartorial practices rather than plebeian or very elite ones.

• 11 International Council of Museums – Committee for Conservation, “Definition of the Profession,” §2.1 (...)
• 12 Ibid.

8In order to contextualise the points to come, let us start with a brief presentation of what the job of a textile conservator involves. Conservators’ expertise and training being material specific, a textile conservator deals with textiles in whatever shape or form this material can be encountered in museum collections: as dress and fashion naturally but also on dolls or other toys, as tapestry, as furnishing fabric on furniture, as liturgical vestments, as military uniforms, flags or banners, etc. They also deal with textiles from a vast chronological range spanning several centuries and from different geographical areas, in the case of the collection of the musée des Arts décoratifs, from the Antiquity to the very contemporary period and mostly from Europe although with a share from the Middle-east and Asia. Whatever the material they specialise in, however, the mission and ethics guiding conservators-restorers are the same. In 1984 ICOM-CC (International Council of Museums – Committee for Conservation), the international professional body for conservation, defined the role of conservators-restorers as follows: “The activity of the conservator-restorer (conservation) consists of technical examination, preservation, and conservation-restoration of cultural property.”11 Several aspects of this definition relate to durability with the task of “preservation” — described as the “action taken to retard or prevent deterioration of or damage to cultural properties by control of their environment and/or treatment of their structure in order to maintain them as nearly as possible in an unchanging state” — and that of “restoration” — described as the “action taken to make a deteriorated or damaged artefact understandable, with minimal sacrifice of aesthetic and historic integrity.”12

• 13 Ibid.

10Prior to the two types of actions undertaken by conservators-restorers (“preservation” and “restoration”), the ICOM-CC definition insists on the crucial first stage consisting of careful first-hand observation of objects in their care, called “examination” and defined as “the preliminary procedure taken to determine the documentary significance of an artefact; original structure and materials; the extent of its deterioration, alteration, and loss; and the documentation of these findings.” This must take into account the “documentary nature of an object,” and is aimed “at understanding the object in all its aspects,” so as to enhance “our ability to decipher the object’s scientific message and thereby contribute new knowledge.”13 When conservators start work on a piece, the first stage for them is to study it closely, to understand how the piece was made — what its materials are, which techniques are being used, why and how. This important stage will guide the process of conservation. Over time this material close reading of artefacts which precedes and accompanies treatment aggregates into cumulative knowledge. Because their work focuses on one material over many centuries and media, their expertise also enables them to have an overarching vision of shifts over time. A textile conservator has hands-on access to the changes in the way textiles have been made, what uses they have been put to and what techniques are being implemented both to produce textile artefacts and to make them last. Combined with the perspectives and questions of a historian, this precious expertise is particularly helpful to track changes in the way technology and resources variously intersected at different times in history and in different contexts.

• 14 The first commercial synthetic fibres, that is fibres made through chemical synthesis, were rayon i (...)
• 15 Woodward, 1985. On paper making, see Hunter, 1943; Hills, 1988.

11All textile fibres being organic before the twentieth century, the first thing that should be stressed is that survival of extant textile objects such as whole garments rather than fragments remains rare before the sixteenth century, at least in western Europe.14 This is due to a combination of factors, not least climate and the accidents of history, but also the constant recycling of textiles in the early modern period. Garments made of wool, hemp, nettle or linen, which were the fibres used in Europe until the later adoption of silk or cotton, are therefore more likely to have been made into ropes or paper rather than to have survived intact.15 In this light, the greater survival of later artefacts in museum collections — the overwhelming majority of textile collections in museums date from after 1800 — may be interrogated. Is it solely due to the more recent date of the objects (they have had less time to deteriorate)? Is it due to their greater plentifulness in an age of increasingly massified consumption of fashion and dress (there were simply more textiles manufactured and nineteenth-century dresses made)? Is it linked to the greater durability of their material constituents? Or rather is it due to the lesser degree to which textiles were being recycled at that time period?

• 16 On England, see for instance Weatherill, 1988.
• 17 Fairchilds, 1993; Weatherill, 1988.
• 18 De Vries, 2008, p. 145.

12The so-called consumer revolution of the eighteenth century has sometimes been described as leading to a loss of durability in materials affecting textiles just as it did other materials — breakable china and earthenware dishes gradually replaced pewter ones in households, just as worsteds, draperies and lightweight cottons started superseding hardwearing woollens in people’s wardrobes.16 More fragile and friable, these materials have been seen as leading to shortened lifecycles for objects.17 Jan de Vries argues that this loss of material quality went hand in hand with the triumph of form and style over material — fashion and its renewal becoming more valued and valuable than the constituent materials of objects. He captures this shift when he writes: “In both ways — physical and stylistic — the depreciation of goods was speeded, and the user necessarily became more a consumer and less an heir.”18

• 19 Lemire, 1991, 1994; Fontaine (ed.), 2008; Stobart, Van Damme (eds.), 2010.
• 20 Strasser, 1999.
• 21 Roche, 1994, p. 137.

13This reading of the shorter lifecycles of objects in the eighteenth century however should be somewhat nuanced. Rather than heralding the triumph of novelty and disposable consumer goods, the so-called consumer revolution of the eighteenth century was built on long-standing practices of recycling, second-hand reuse, as numerous scholars have shown..19 Repair, mending and making things last within households, whether rich or poor, was part of this dynamic.20 As Daniel Roche insists for the labouring classes, even as they gained increased access to a diversity of textile goods, garments became lighter and less long lasting. This, in turn, led to increased consumption — as well as to an increased need for maintenance and repair: “The textile revolution had made itself felt in the wardrobes of wage earners; silks and cottons were gaining ground, and helped to slim down the silhouette. People were lightly clad but what they gained in diversity, they lost in solidity, so that it was necessary to buy more and fight against wear and tear.”21 Care and active practices of durability were not the preserve of poorer consumers however.

• 22 Manchester Art Gallery, Tradesman’s bills inv. 1955. 187/26.
• 23 Lady Arabella Furnese, “Personnal Expenditure of Lady Arabella Furnese, 1714-1727” (Account book, K (...)
• 24 Dowdell, 2017.
• 25 Letter of George Washington to Robert Cary & Company, dated 28 Sept. 1760, in Writings of Washingto (...)
• 26 On altered clothing in the eighteenth century see Baumgarten, 1988, 2002.
• 27 Fennetaux, 2015.

14Numerous notations about maintenance and extending the usefulness of garments can be tracked in private accounts and artisans’ ledgers in British archives for instance. Paying for the services of tailors and dressmakers, well-off households had them replace worn out parts in outfits to prolong their lives – with parts sustaining the most wear such as linings, cuffs, collars or the seats of breeches being most often mentioned in archives. In 1772, tailor Robert Johnson for instance received payment for “cleaning a stone-coloured suit and making new cuffs and collar” and “cleaning a French grey suit and repairing them & seating the breeches and making a new collar.”22 Sometimes, more substantial interventions were implemented with pieces being altered or “new made” — often to keep the outfit in the latest style. During a visit to upscale Bath in May 1724, fashion-conscious Lady Arabella Furnese paid the sum of 10 shillings “for new making up [her] white stuff mantau & Pettycoat.”23 Garments seldom remained unchanged, sometimes going through a series of transformations and refashionings along the years.24 Fabrics such as silk or wool having to be sent to be professionally cleaned, garments were often new made on the occasion, sometimes going through complete overhaul such as in 1760 when Martha Washington, the wife of the future president of the United States, sent “a green sack to get cleaned or fresh dyed of the same colour, made up into a handsome sack again would be her choice but if the cloth won’t afford that, then to be thrown into a genteel nightgown.”25 The constant refashioning of existing outfits was characteristic of a time period when the price of a garment was embedded in its cloth rather than its making up. Right through the eighteenth century, fabric was an elastic and malleable asset that could be variously deployed and realised as occasions demanded. The plasticity of materials, the “cascade of uses” they were put to, which we read about in written archives, is everywhere visible on artefacts in museum collections which carry the physical traces of multiple uses such as unpicked seams, altered styles and sometimes pieces having obviously been made from others (Fig. 1).26 Textile possessions were in a state of constant flux: shaped into a woman’s sack back gown one day, a piece of worked silk could morph into a fitted dress the next, or be altered into man’s nightgown or later be turned into an ensemble of matching shoes, petticoat and stomacher for a young girl.27 Because it was the cloth and its material characteristics (how much yardage there was, but also how well it would take the dye, how worn out it was…) that dictated what could be done with it, every effort was made to preserve it and make it last.

• 28 Anne Brockman, “Household Accompts of Anne, Wife of Sir William Brockman (d.1742),” London, British (...)
• 29 Grisell Baillie, 1911; Hayden, 1988.
• 30 On turning, see Charpy, 2014.

15This took the form of regular scouring but also re-dyeing and calendering such as when aristocratic Anne Brockman in 1704 paid “4s for washing and callendring a calico sute” or Lady Grisell Bailie paid “for cleaning and dyeing the camlit gown” in 1702.28 Calendering, a finishing technique used on woollen cloth and later cotton, gave fabric a smooth finish through the combined action of heat and pressing. When cleaning, new dyeing or calendering was not enough to spruce up the appearance of a textile, a garment could be “turned” such as when Lady Grisell Bailie paid “for turning my poplin gown” or Elizabeth Jervis paid her dressmaker for “turning my scarlet gown and sleeve linings” in 1753.29 Turning garments consisted of picking a garment apart and turning its fabric inside out so that the faded or worn side would be against the lining and the unworn side would now be facing outside.30 This excluded some non-reversible fabrics such as brocaded damasks or velvets but was particularly adapted to wool.

• 31 Fennetaux, 2022a.
• 32 Richmond, 2013, 2016. See Aude Barthe-Monié, Raccommoder, rapiécer, repriser. Les pratiques de répa (...)
• 33 Mayhew, 2010, p. 150.
• 34 One of the many examples of the persistence of the practice is provided by the family papers of Emm (...)

16If turning was commonplace among the elite in the eighteenth century, when we move to the nineteenth century the practice seems to have been increasingly seen as something done out of necessity rather than something that was routinely done by all. This did not mean by any measure that repair and other practices of durability disappeared in the nineteenth century.31 Vivienne Richmond has done extensive work on the role of darning in school curricula for girls in the Victorian period and other research is underway on late nineteenth-century practices of repair.32 If repair persisted, its mode and implementation adapted to the changed material settings brought about by the industrial period. In his 1851 survey of the London poor, Henry Mayhew identifies turning to a practice of the previous century, linking this evolution to a shift in the quality of fabrics. He specifically identifies the lesser durability of woollen cloths as a factor. He says turning was more common “in the last century […] when woollen cloth was much dearer, much more substantial, and therefore much more durable.”33 Mayhew’s assessment might not be entirely reliable since there is evidence of the persistence of turning well into the twentieth century.34 But it draws attention to the impact of materials and resources onto practices suggesting a reversed parallel between durability and repair. Instead of things needing more care and repair because they are less durable, on the contrary the more durable a fabric, the more reusable and recyclable it may be. A more fragile fabric, one that wears more, becomes also often less reusable — and sometimes more difficult to repair. This ties in with observations that can be made in the conservation studios of museums where the changing material qualities of objects in the industrial era at times make it difficult for conservators to work with some artefacts, sometimes even making it impossible for them to conserve or “stabilize” them.

• 35 This decline in the durability of materials interestingly is not restricted to textiles and is also (...)
• 36 On the notion of affordance see Hodder, 2012.

17Against the grain of any teleological reading of “improved technique,” textile artefacts that have survived from the early modern period show material qualities that are generally superior to those of objects made in the nineteenth century.35 Material sources — in museums and archives — repeatedly illustrate this point. Early modern textiles are solid and stout. If they have survived until today, they are usually in good physical condition, their materials chemically stable. Eighteenth-century silks are often pristine and crisp, linens and cottons hold their own — except where wear and tear from the useful life of the object has taken its toll. Unless they have been eaten by moths, woollens are strikingly thick and substantial (Fig. 2). Derived from repeated observations made on artefacts over years of dealing first hand with textile objects, this empirical assessment concurs with what we read in written archives. The economical use of textile resources we see at work in household accounts — as well as on artefacts themselves — was not necessarily forced by scarcity. Museum collections as we know tend to focus on better quality pieces in general and thus represent the consumption of the upper echelons of society rather than the poor or needy. Repair, alteration and recycling on these pieces were not forced by economic necessity. Neither were they solely due to an economy of thrift but also, importantly, to the durability of materials whose physical properties allowed for such prolonged usefulness. The specific affordance of substantial, durable textiles informed their market and cultural value as well as their use and multiple re-use.36

• 37 Hacke, 2008, p. 5; Bonnet, 2013, p. 43.
• 38 Bonnet, 2013.

18This means that what has survived is often paradoxically much easier to conserve than sometimes later, more recent pieces which are frequently more fragile, in some cases even beyond repair. One striking example is that of silk after the introduction of the weighted silk finishing process at the end of nineteenth century. Part of the processing of silk involved “degumming” which led to a loss of weight as well as of the feel, heft and texture of the fabric, what people in the textile trade call its hand, the way the fabric drapes. To regain this weight after degumming, various techniques had been attempted until it was discovered that imbibing silk with metallic salts such as tin and lead was particularly efficient. At a time when draped heavy silks were fashionable and silk was sold by the weight, silk manufacturers not only used the process to restore lost weight but to artificially increase the weight and volume of their goods. Successive baths in a series of chemical solutions (stannic chloride in the shape of ammonium chlorostannate followed by an alkaline bath for instance, later a process referred to as the ‘dynamite’ method combining tin phosphate and silicate) increased weight by up to 150%.37 But the metallic salts also irreversibly impaired the qualities of the fibres, leading to rapid deterioration. Breaking up, physically cracking, over time even falling to pieces and totally disintegrating, weighted silks are now impossible to conserve (Fig. 3).38

• 39 “The superiority of the merchant over the craftsman was a specific feature of the old clothing econ (...)

19Although an extreme case, this example is useful in undermining any teleological vision of technology as improvement. It manifests instead that the industrial revolution witnessed in Europe, which saw a shift to quantitative production, sometimes led to lesser rather than improved durability of materials. This went hand in hand with a shift in the relative values of cloth and fashion or style. As noted by Daniel Roche, the pre-eminence of material over shape and of the cloth merchant over the dressmaker in the subtle hierarchies of values and cultural importance was turned on its head in the nineteenth century when style and shape started getting the better of cloth.39

• 40 Berg, 2002; Berg, Eger (eds.), 2003. On the sometimes dramatic drop in prices of goods in the ninet (...)
• 41 “À quoi bon s’efforcer de nettoyer ou de teindre par les moyens les plus parfaits et les plus inoff (...)
• 42 Charpy, 2014, 2002; Albert, 2021.

20The shift in Europe’s relationship to durability was not solely grounded in new patterns of consumption (people consumed at a quickening pace because prices had dropped) but also in new standards of production with materials becoming less expensive partly also because they were less durable.40 Of lesser value, textiles became also less reusable and repairable — not only because it was more economical to make a new garment rather than remake an old one or repair it but because the fabric did not always necessarily allow for reuse as much as it used to. As noted by Amédée Jolly in his report on dyeing and finishing at the 1900 Paris universal exhibition: “what is the point of using the most perfect and least harmful techniques for cleaning or dyeing when every day we see the fabrics to be redyed or reconditioned so poorly woven, overstretched or burnt out with finishes right from production stage? […] But novelties are quickly and cheaply made, that is with the idea of creating products which look good but are not meant to wear well. What will become of this paradox? Will poor production ever reach a limit? We hope so as much for the sake of dyers and cleaners as for that of clients. Both fall victim to contemporary ideas. They are the victims of evolutions which are far from tending to perfection and are the slaves of an industry whose improvements consist of creating short-lived goods.”41 The proliferation of “short-lived goods” noted by the author in turn paradoxically fuelled an expanding market for lesser-quality, damaged second-hand clothing which became increasingly associated with the poor and the working class rather than middle-class respectability.42 If the phenomenon impacted the market downstream, it also affected techniques of assembly, marking a departure from the particular juncture between technique and resources that had prevailed in the early modern period.

• 43 On the construction and assembly of eighteenth-century clothing and the idea of adapting stitches t (...)

22This slightly haphazard look on the inside often contrasts with impeccable finishing and embellishment on the outside. What may look to some like crude workmanship however is actually a particularly efficient adaptation of technique to resources at a time when the price of a garment lay mostly in its fabric. Cloth being an asset which was only transiently made up into a given garment before it could be made into another, having seams on a garment that could be easily undone aided disassembly and reassembly. Some seams were thus not meant to be permanent but, on the contrary, to allow for future restyling and refashioning.43 It made sense to undo at least some of the seams of a garment before it was redyed, if only for the dye to take more evenly and allow for a more uniform result — futureproofing in the process potential later uses for the fabric. In fact, early modern needlework manifests a strikingly neat adaption of technique to purpose. Women’s gowns used often robust, quick and efficient stitches that could, if needed, be easily undone for the garment to be taken apart, scoured or fresh dyed — and sometimes reassembled into an altogether different style as we see mentioned repeatedly in written archives.

• 44 Mauss, 1950, p. 371. See also Sigaut, 2003.

23Far from being poor or negligent workmanship, raw fabric edges, solid stitches swiftly done with little concern for aesthetics as long as they did the job they were supposed to, supported the flexible use of cloth the material economy depended on. Eighteenth-century needlework offers a perfect example not only of Marcel Mauss’s definition of technology as a “traditional efficient act” but also of technology as resource: a neat fit between resources and technique being used.44

• 45 Krebs, Weber, 2021.
• 46 On the sewing machine, see Rogers Cooper, 1968; Burman (ed.), 1999. See also the recent PhD on the (...)

24When moving to later pieces — and especially pieces from the mid to late nineteenth century —, a noticeable shift seems to appear that signals a different relationship to resources. Instead of fabric being a malleable material morphing and adapting to various body shapes, various styles, various wearers or indeed various uses, it was made up into a given garment, made to a given shape, often to a given size, and meant to remain more or less unchanged afterwards. Clothes were made to potentially be adjusted in size — with generous enough seam allowance for instance in anticipation of a changing figure — but not to be completely restyled and its fabric reused for a different piece. Instead of the “cascade of uses” described by Heike Weber and Stefan Krebs, artefacts seem to have been made for a specific, determined use.45 This does not mean that alterations and adaptations were not made later. Thrift and practices of repair persisted as we saw. But at the design stage, garments seem to have been meant in anticipation they would remain in the form and shape in which they were first made. This is visible in the stitching used, which is generally very neat, regular and firm. Unlike eighteenth-century needlework that was sometimes meant to be only provisional, nineteenth-century stiches are there to stay. The increased neatness and regularity of stitches is not solely due to the gradual introduction of the sewing machine from the 1850s.46 Hand sewing of the same period is itself remarkably regular and standardized (Fig. 6). Although the circulation of machine stitching may arguably have had an impact on perceptions of good stitching and on standards of regularity to be achieved by hand, many instances of hand stitching predating the introduction of sewing machines (Fig. 7a and 7b) illustrate the shift is not altogether based on technology. We would like to argue instead that the visible shift in stitching used manifested an altogether different relationship to resources from the beginning of the nineteenth century, among at least upper-middle class and elite consumers whose garments are mostly represented in museum collections.

• 47 On the colour revolution of the nineteenth century, see the recent ERC project “Chromotope” (https: (...)

26Looking at construction techniques over time shows a definite shift in the intersection between resources and technique. Despite the advent of the so-called consumer revolution, close attention to objects shows the eighteenth century remained very much part of the traditional material economy that had prevailed until then. Cloth remained both valuable and valued. It was taken care of, made to last and put to different uses. Relationship to durability changed in the industrial era. From being an ulterior motive for makers who made resources last by resorting to techniques that futureproofed later usage, depending as they did to do so on materials that were themselves stable and durable, durability changed to being an aspect of the making of artefacts which related more to form and technique with cut, construction and stitches thought of as being permanent. Interestingly the same stability and permanence underpinned the development of dyes that happened contemporaneously, with aniline dyes seemingly solving the issue of fugitive colours on textiles.47 In all these cases however stability was short-sighted. The processes might have guaranteed stable, durable results, but they often jeopardized rather than aided the long-term durability of materials or pieces and their adaptability for future reuse. When alterations or repairs were made on nineteenth-century pieces, as they were, they happened against the grain of assembly techniques that designed stability into their very construction.

• 48 Fennetaux, 2022a; Barthe-Monié, Raccommoder, rapiécer, repriser. Les pratiques de réparation des vê (...)
• 49 On quality as a constructed rather than an intrinsic qualifier of goods, see Riello, 2020.
• 50 Ibid.

27Although traditional accounts of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution often imply that increased consumption marked a departure from early modern practices of durability, close analysis of surviving textile artefacts invites a more nuanced vision. Not only do eighteenth-century garments bear numerous traces of reuse, repurposing, restyling, efficient use of resources and techniques as well as down-to-earth repair, but they also manifest how they designed future uses into their very constructions. Repairs, alterations, darning or patching carried on well into the industrial period, manifesting the persistence of a material economy where making things last remained a key concern of actors.48 However the material qualities of fabrics and the techniques employed to turn them into garments show a shift in the relationship to resources that happened in the second half of the ninteenth century. The care and repair of textile goods, the particular ethos of thrift which prescribed that a good housekeeper would not let anything go to waste and make the most of resources by salvaging bits and pieces in ragbags, darning stockings or mending ladders in knitwear held similar sway than in the eighteenth century. Looking at fibre quality, types of stitching, seam allowances, or techniques of finishing used on surviving artefacts however gives historians access to a changing juncture between resources and techniques which the industrial era brought to western societies. Whether or not garments were then in practice altered and modified, the long social life of textile goods stopped being designed into clothes at a time when industrial production seemed to make resources limitless. This corresponded to a change in definitions of quality, a descriptive that is relative and historically constructed as we know.49 Instead of quality being perceived primarily as an intrinsic element of the material constituents of textile goods equated with their durability, the industrial era displaced definitions of quality to foreground other criteria among which novelty and cheapness.50 The move from long-term textile durability embedded as it was in solid, stable fibres itself integrated into forward-looking techniques and design solutions integrating future ‘cascades of uses’ to a more short-sighted pursuit of durability in the sense of permanence and stability of shapes and materials which characterized the late nineteenth-century textile economy is hardly visible in written archives. Household management books in the nineteenth century cast thrift and making things last in much the same virtuous terms as they did a century before. Objects however speak volumes about changing practices and techniques, as well as the evolving material qualities of some of the resources available to historical actors — aspects which are almost impossible to gage from the written record.

• 51 Sennett, 2009.
• 52 Latour, 1993; Descola, 2015.

28As Richard Sennett has stressed, words often fall short of gestures. They frequently prove inadequate to convey embodied knowledge.51 How then is the historian to excavate and capture the particular intersection between material resources and technology if not by turning to objects themselves? The material qualities of resources — fibre quality and resilience, density and strength — are made tangible in the objects themselves. Artefacts are often the only repositories of the practices, the skill and resourcefulness deployed to adapt technique to resource. Looking at artefacts as archives of past resources as well as of adaptive techniques harnessed to use these resources sheds light on the particular juncture between resource and technique actors of past societies empirically devised, which they seldom if ever put into words. Tacitly adapting to the affordance of particular textiles, their plentifulness or cost, techniques of assembly seen on surviving artefacts manifest shifts in material economies hard to detect in other sources. At a time when dualist visions opposing the scientific, objective, supposedly detached vision of the scholar to the subjective, embodied engagement of practitioner is coming increasingly under strain, mind and matter just as objects and subjects are seen as profoundly and importantly interconnected.52 The authors hope that the tentative weaving together of their expertise contained in this article will foster other similar collaborations. It hopes to illustrate what we stand to gain as historians by engaging with the past not just with our minds but also through our senses: feeling the grain of a fabric, its density, its heft or crispness, observing the hurried efficiency of stitches, or, on the contrary, their almost obsessive neatness and regularity.