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Three wire-wrapped pin heads, pre-1532, from Zeeland. 36.3 magnification, Dino-Lite microscope (TRC 2728a-b and TRC 2021.2735a).Some medieval Christian theologians allegedly debated on the question how many angels could dance on a pin head, and I always thought such a discussion would have been a bit of a waste of time. Yet over the last few years I have become fascinated with pins and pin heads! The handmade pin heads, for example, associated with a textile linked to Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as a pin cushion from 1826 were subject of an earlier TRC Blog.

I ‘knew’ that up to the 18th century pins in Europe were handmade, rare and expensive. Hence, I assumed, the English term ‘pin money’, namely the money given by a husband to his wife to spend at the New Year fairs on buying pins. But I have long suspected this knowledge was far too general and just recently a donation by a friend of the TRC, Sytske Wijnsma from Wormer in the province of Noord-Holland, has left me wondering even more about this subject.

A few days ago, on a sunny Saturday morning, I hopped onto a train to Leiden to reconnect with Gillian Vogelsang after far too many years. She used to be my mentor on all things textile when I pieced together my MA thesis on Mongolian attire at Leiden University. I fondly remember mornings spent at the TRC photographing and cataloguing the latest batch of clothing that had come in as a donation. Just as clearly I remember the TRC’s ever pressing issue of not having enough space for about everything. That appears not to have changed much, as Gillian points out when welcoming us to the TRC’s premises at Hogewoerd 164. The TRC was still housed at the Volkenkunde Museum when I was around, and yet, it eerily feels a bit like coming home at the Hogewoerd!

The Good Growth Company supports yak herders in Mongolia.

I was accompanied by Mandar Jayawant, founder and CEO of the Good Growth Company, which he set up together with Nick Keppel-Palmer. Recognising the need to address the environmental devastation caused by conventional fashion industry supply chains, Good Growth Company has made it its declared aim to regenerate depleted places. This sounds complicated, but it doesn't have to be. According to Mandar and Nick it actually needs simplicity rather than complication. They believe that instead of using complicated production chains for the trend-hungry low-cost consumer, the Good Growth Company wants to create products that put the local natural environment first. In other words, Good Growth Company replaces the question of what the consumer wants, with the question of what a given region can provide or needs to regenerate and then to develop products from these materials.

Yaks in Khangai region, Mongolia ( Good Growth Company 2019).To drive home this concept Mandar points to the desertification of the Mongolian steppes as a result of herders having turned away from the traditional production practices and herd compositions to a single-minded focus on cashmere goats. Desertification in Mongolia is a direct consequence of consumer/retailer dictated production. To turn this around the Good Growth Company commits to buying everything herders produce — cashmere, yak, camel, and their coarse as well as their fine fibres. For a community of herders in Arkhangai province in Mongolia this means income options from all of their yak fibres while not long ago there were none.

Making good on this promise, Good Growth Company has now become the proud owner of a large consignment of fine yak underhair (wool) and of coarser yak guard hair. There is no shortage of ideas of how to use the fine underhair - a fibre of cashmere quality that has caught the attention of the sustainable fashion crowd in recent years. But the no-waste policy of the Good Growth Company goes beyond this and challenges the company to come up with innovative fabric and design ideas to create value for the coarser yak hair which is conventionally treated as waste to be discarded.

The last few weeks we have been writing about the clothing of the Taliban leaders and how they want Afghan women to dress; dress is everything, and the TRC in Leiden has been studying dress in all its aspects for many years. Dress is, as stated in the title of this blog, a statement of who you are or want to be.

Well well, yesterday I saw three of our leading politicians coming together to discuss the formation of a government, some six months after the last elections. Some urgency is advisable, one would say. And what did I see? I saw our acting Prime Minister Mark Rutte in a kind of 'casual' outfit that he probably regards as suitable for a Saturday afternoon; I saw our former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sigrid Kaag, in an outfit that she probably wears when gardening; and then Wopke Hoekstra, the political leader of the Christian Democrats and acting Minister of Finance, wearing a T-shirt that, and I am being charitable, does not really suit him. 

From left to right: Wopke Hoekstra, Sigrid Kaag and Mark Rutte in fantasy casual clothing. Dutch politics in its sartorial glory Copyright ANP.

So how do these outfits make the statement who they are and who they want to be? I suspect that the three discussed their clothing at length on Friday night. "Do we put on our normal everyday wear, or shall we try something different?" The result is clear. The message is "We are all buddies". We can only hope that their discussions were more fruitful than their combined sense of dress. Anyhow, politics are often compared to a theatre, and there you are!

Willem Vogelsang, 19 September 2021

All archaeological textiles fascinate me, but there is one group that I find particularly interesting: old Coptic textiles. The embroidered images on these textiles seem so joyful to me, so full of love for life: dancing people, cherubs, early Christian symbols, fertile plants, gods and goddesses (including Bacchus, the god of wine and ecstasy). The human images usually have big eyes, and are chubby and always look a little lopsided to me. I think this indicates a fine disdain for perfectionism, despite the fact that the weavers, spinners and embroiderers involved were eminently skilful and accomplished. I also like the fact that these images represented a highly multicultural society, reflecting Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and other influences from international trade.

Fragment of a Coptic textile with an embroidered design of a clavus and a pendant, probably from a child's tunic. 6th-8th c. (TRC 2011.0460).

The last few weeks we published various blogs about the garments worn by Taliban men and about the dress that they 'suggest' Afghan women to wear. As for the latter, we noted that the niqab and abaya, now promoted by the Taliban as 'Islamically correct', is Arabic in origin and distincty different from the traditional, all-enveloping burqa that was enforced by the Taliban leaders upon Afghan women in the 1990s.

We indicated that the niqab and abaya set was introduced in Peshawar and other parts in the Pashtun-dominated Afghan-Pakistan borderlands in the 1980s when many Arabs flocked to the area to help the Afghan Mujahedin against the then communist regime in Kabul and their Soviet backers. One of them was Osama bin Laden.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (left), and Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani (right). Photograph: The Times.

Among the items in the TRC Collection there are a range of handbags and purses, as well as a couple of what are called miser’s purses and yesterday we were given seven more. But what exactly is a miser’s purse?

Basically it is made up of a long, flexible tube with two rings. Apart from miser's purse, this accessory has various names including ring purse, string purse, long purse, and finger purse. In the Netherlands it was known as a kousenbeurs ('socks' purse'), and in France as a bourse aumônière. It was fashionable in many Western countries for both men and women from the latter half of the 18th to the early 20th century. They were sometimes hung over a belt, on other occasions stored in pockets or within other bags.

Joshua Reynolds: 'Mercury as cut purse', AD 1774. A boy, representing Mercury, is holding a miser's purse in his left hand. Courtesy Faringdon Collection Trust.

Following our earlier blog about the Taliban in Afghanistan going global, here a photograph of students in Kabul wearing Middle Eastern hijab; a long way from the traditional all-enveloping Afghani and Pakistani one-piece chadari or burqa enforced by the Taliban when they were in power between 1996 and 2001.

Have a good look at the photograph: all of the women wear the Saudi-style abaya and niqab, rather than the burqa with its mesh-like mask in front of the eyes, which became iconic for Taliban controlled Afghanistan in the 1990s.

As discussed earlier, in this instance the three-piece 'black burqa' takes precedence over the traditional one-piece 'blue burqa'. It may be no coincidence that the mother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the acting Taliban Minister for the Interior, originates from the Persian Gulf.

The photograph was taken last Saturday,

Gillian and Willem Vogelsang

Afghan female students in Kabul, Saturday 11 September 2021, with Takiban flags. The women are wearing Saudi-style abaya and niqab, as propagated by the new Taliban rulers (QURESHI AFP).

A friend of the TRC Leiden, Ann Cable, came to the Hogewoerd a few days ago with some donations for the TRC Collection, including African textiles and garments that belonged to her parents – her father was a senior British diplomat who served in different countries.

A mokorotio straw hat (1970s, Lesotho (TRC 2021.2623).