Can something belong to us all – just by virtue of the fact that we are human beings? If anything has a claim to that – it is the Paisley motif, which has woven its way in and out of human history like no other pattern. This episode traces the history and some of the many appearances attached to this lovely shape, from its incarnation as a tree of life in Ancient Babylon to an emblem of America’s Wild West or the Swinging Sixties in London.

 

Paisley has many names and even more meanings. It is the sleeping dragon of patterns – retiring under the hill for decades of slumber before being re-purposed by new cultures and new generations to signify something different. It belongs to many hands and no one, in particular, can lay claim to it, making it one of the truly global patterns. Listen to some of the journey of this nomad in this episode of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles.

 

You can see pictures of the textiles we talk about in this episode, a full script and a list of further resources on the Haptic and Hue Website at https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-3/