This is astonishing but true. One of the more fascinating aspects of this is that it puts a strong pin in the idea that oral transmission is foolproof and highly reliable. Old women were repeating stories about an industry that existed, produced seemingly magical fabric, and which was essentially dead by the 19th century due to newly rich middle class people wanting it to be available at a price they could afford.
Fairy cloth, cloth so fine it could be shut up in a nutshell, but was warm and comfortable, was altogether real, immensely expensive, and required a near-army of women to harvest the fibers and process them into the cloth. It was demanding, painstaking work, and the families that produced the cloth did not receive nearly the wages of the middlemen hawking it to sultan’s daughters and the wealthiest of European aristocrats.
There have been some recent attempts to revive it, but the plant used centuries ago is kindasorta lost and the current efforts are inferior and there is no certainty that they can figure out how to grow the right kind of plant and also relearn or reinvent the necessary weaving and processing skills in the longer term.
There is so much like this, because the beautiful things of the past required a lot of work and infernal machines cannot replicate this work. I think it is not bad that you can find re-enactors painstakingly describing and giving examples of how people lived in the 18th and 19th century on video or streaming media. But it is bad that we haven’t accepted the amount of manual labor involved in making the beautiful things of the recentish past enough to reclaim and restore some of those old glories.
The Practical Conservative: Civic-minded Natalism 