Fleeced

Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy.

Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fibre, has a long relationship with war, both in supporting it and causing it. Wool’s strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, along with contrived shortages in the 20th century, have driven consumers’ transition to synthetic fibres. These synthetic fibres have enabled fast fashion, and now both fibre and cloth are global contemporary pollutants.

Fleeced argues that the 19th century advent of large-scale sheep pastoralism in the southern hemisphere and the industrialisation of the woolen textile industry in the northern hemisphere allowed, at least in part, the huge armies of the 20th century to exist. World War I represented a fundamental shift in the scale of armies and the nature of the wars they fought. The demand for wool to outfit the tens of millions of men and women involved in fighting or supporting the war effort grew beyond what could be accommodated by any nation’s normal supply. The contrived wool shortages during this war had a lasting impact—nations facing supply chain difficulties began searching for substitutes, which led first to the semi-synthetic rayon and ultimately to the plastic fibres such as polyester and acrylic that dominate today’s fast fashion world.

Each chapter of Fleeced begins with a surprising object, document, or image that delves into this fascinating and previously untold history. Change is not necessarily progress. Fleeced explains how competition for wool in wartime helped create our current unsustainable and environmentally disastrous reliance on petrochemical fibres.