Velvets and Towels: Piled Fabrics from the Ottoman Empire to Manchester to New Jersey

Abstract: This article discusses the technical and historical relationship between piled fabrics in the Eastern Mediterranean, the United Kingdom, and the United States, focusing on the roles of materials and technology. It starts in the Ottoman Empire, where weavers in Bursa and Istanbul made linen towels with looped pile in a structure that may relate to silk velvets. In the mid-nineteenth century, a British ethnographer named Henry Christy observed women in the Ottoman Empire making towels with a texture unknown to him. He gave a piece of this fabric to his brother, the director of the family manufactory in Lancashire, who in turn passed it on to the mill’s chief engineer. In 1851, Christy’s Royal Turkish Towel won a prize at the Great Exhibition in London, and a patent was registered to its inventor, Samuel Holt. Holt was then lured to New Jersey by a group of investors and supervised the American Velvet Company, registering patents and continuing work with cotton terrycloth and silk velvet. This extended case study poses questions about the relationship between material and technology as well as craft and industrial production; it also investigates the structure of early modern terrycloth in the Ottoman Empire, based on five examples from The Textile Museum Collection.