The single technique that changed how clothing relates to the female body forever.

She freed women from the corset before Poiret ever did yet history gave him the credit anyway.

This episode traces her full arc: the under-financed 1912 house that lasted barely two years before the war shut it down, the rebuild at “les trois coquettes” on rue de Rivoli, her obsessive study of Greek vases at the Louvre, and the mathematical precision (golden ratios, dynamic symmetry, geometric pattern pieces) that she insisted was dressmaking.

We get into why she resented Poiret’s fame, why she called herself a technician rather than a designer, and how a nearly-forgotten couturier ended up shaping Miyake, Kawakubo, Alaïa, and half of modern fashion’s relationship to the body.

In case you didn’t know, the MET Gala theme was announced and for 2027 it will be all about John Galliano.

And also, in case you didn’t know, John Galliano has had a complex history in the fashion industry.

In 2011 he was convicted of racial abuse after a drunken (and drug-addled) rant he went on about how he ‘loved’ Hitler among other vile antisemitic remarks.

He was immediately dropped from his role as Creative Director at Dior (which he’d held for 15 years at that point). He went to court, paid a €6,000 fine, made a public apology and went to rehab.

Two years later his friend Anna Wintour (you may have heard of her) helped him get a 3 week residency at Oscar De La Renta which helped bring him back into the fashion world.

Then in 2014 he was named the Creative Director of Maison Margiela.

Earlier this year it was announced that he’ll be collaborating with Zara over a two-year contract and designing seasonal capsules.

And then today he was announced as the focus of the 2027 MET Gala.

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When I woke up this morning and opened Instagram to see the news I had to focus and refocus on the announcement.

‘Wait, why?’ I thought to myself.

‘Didn’t he just announce his collab with Zara not long ago?…How is this even in the same realm as the MET Gala?’

‘What about all his controversy and antisemitism? We just gonna sweep that under the rug?’

So naturally I scrolled through the comments looking for anyone who was feeling even slightly confused like me. But there was hardly anyone. Maybe 1 or 2 people out of 10 were reminding people of his checkered past, but most people seemed excited.

That he deserves this.

Which, naturally, boggled my mind.

I came to the conclusion that maybe, with the incident being 15 years ago, people might not remember or even know what happened. Despite it being well known among the fashion industry people.

So I made a post about it.

About his background, how he worked at Givenchy, the Dior, then the incident, then Oscar De La Renta, then Margiela. How Anna Wintour brought him back into the industry. What happened in the incident and what happened afterwards.

The I asked the question:

“Is 2027 the time to spotlight a designer who has a very problematic past when there’s so much political unrest?

Don’t get me wrong, Galliano is a generational talent. But why him and why now?”

Here’s me thinking 'Oh, once people realise, they’ll understand my confusion and hesitancy…’

But no.

The majority of people in the comments defended him, saying he shouldn’t have to pay for the rest of life about comments he made while he was drunk and drugged up. While he was struggling.

But if you actually read what he said in those videos, I’m not sure how you could mistake his specificity for drunken garbling.

So here I sit. Confused and bewildered again at the fashion industry and the world at how we can be okay with things like this.

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware of how talented John Galliano is.

Yes, he is a generational talent. But so was Coco Chanel. So was Paul Poiret. However that does not mean that because they have talent that they don’t need to have morals.

I’m always waiting for the ‘But you have to seperate the artist from the art!’

No, you don't.

You can hold both of those things at once and decide which weighs heavier on you.

If the talent outweighs the morals.

Or the morals outweigh the talent.

Each individual has a different set of criteria by which they move through the world. Some people want to stay ignorant, want to choose resolution and forgiveness. Which I understand, good on you and I’m glad it helps you sleep at night.

But I’m not one of those people.

And this is where I started thinking about The Matrix.

This iconic scene of The Matrix will forever live in my head, and today’s situation pulled it out of my memory rolodex (Am I showing my age with that reference?).

Morpheus gives Neo a choice.

The red pill or the blue pill?

The Blue pill: he wakes up in his bed and remembers nothing and he goes back to living inside the simulated reality of the Matrix.

The Red pill: he sees “how deep the rabbit hole goes”. Waking up to the real, harsh truth of the world, that humanity is enslaved and the reality he’s known his whole life is a computer-generated illusion.

I find as the world gets louder and louder with algorithms and junk and political unrest being shoved in out faces at every angle that our brains naturally want a quick fix.

And that quick fix is ignorance.

Ignorance is our blue pill.

In 2020 I left my stable job as a womenswear designer for a big department store so I could get off the fast fashion merry-go-round.

Up until that point I’d spent almost a year learning, reading, realising just how deep the fast fashion rabbit hole went.

And I couldn’t unsee it.

It meant the end of playing my role in that machine and a new, scary, unpredictable path into small business and self employment.

I chose the Red pill.

But I’m realising how many people have chosen, and continue to choose, the Blue pill.

Galliano’s story has three distinct parts:

1. His impactful work at Dior has captured the imagination of the world, and understandably so. He turned Dior into a billion dollar business and he championed theatre and spectacle and escapism.

2. His antisemitic and racist remarks reflect a deeper and more insidious layer to the fashion industry that is alive and well to this very day.

3. His reliance on, and addiction to, alcohol, sleeping pills and Valium as the only way to deal with the stress and workload of a Creative Director.

Number 1: Great, give him all the exhibitions in the world.

Number 2: Not great, in. any way, shape or form. This is a global, historical, ever-present issue that exists not just in belief systems but in production and manufacturing hierarchies within the fashion industry.

Number 3: Also not great. However this is not a unique experience for Galliano, this is an insight into the workload and work ethic culture within the whole fashion industry. It’s a reflection of capitalism and exponential, never-ending growth. Alexander McQueen took his own life a few weeks before his final, unfinished Fall/Winter 2010 womenswear collection. He had lost his mother a few days before and was under immense work and emotional pressure. Galliano lost Steven Robinson (his closest friend and creative partner) in 2007, and dates the start of his own addiction directly to that loss, by his own courtroom testimony.

Giving Galliano the MET Gala isn’t automatically the Blue pill.

Giving him the MET Gala without context, without history, without clarity…that’s the Blue pill.

I’m not cancelling Galliano. I’m just wondering why so many people don’t seem to care?

Me muttering under my breath: ‘Yeah, and feel free to remove some stuff while you’re at it too…’

This is edition V of the five part series of looking deeper into Homer’s iconic text, The Odyssey as part of the Readings Big Book Club. Read edition I, Homer Called Them Maids. Wilson Called Them Slaves here, edition II, The Language Men Couldn’t Read here, edition III “Don’t Stand Too Close” here and edition IV ‘The Homeric Mirror’ here.

This is what instantly came to mind when Sinon said this to Odysseus in the underworld after he finished giving him his messages.

My review of this film has been an interesting foray into the ways in which you can like and dislike a movie all in the same moment.

The first half felt like Nolan was flexing his signature Nolan-esque, Batman muscles. It was dark, unsettling, visceral and captivating.

The second half jumped into pure classic Hollywood movie magic where we finally see the “good guys” get the “bad guys”.

Everything in between was a story of a war hero who was suffering from PTSD.

And while that’s complex and interesting and devastating, we totally miss the humour, the sexiness, the Gods and the gigantic role that women play which makes The Odyssey so famous.

Let’s go section by section.

Our main guy, Odysseus:

I thought it was interesting how they focussed of the guilty, grieving and repentant version of Odysseus.

How the moral of the story was wholly focussed around his realisation that he broke the ultimate law of Xenia when he did the Trojan horse bit. And from then on he always strums his bow before shooting an animal as a warning because he feels guilty for never giving the Trojans any warning.

I must admit, I really did find myself drawn into these musical moments. It felt like such a great audio queue and re-alignment at different points of the film.

However, by focussing solely on this side of Odysseus we lost so much of him. His cunning, his other relationships, his humour and mainly his emotion.

Our wise warrior goddess, Athena:

I have a theory…bear with me.

I think they may have combined Athena and Cassandra into Zendaya’s character. In the sense that I think Nolan has borrowed the shape of Cassandra’s story, a priestess of Athena who has been assaulted and killed by the Spartans, and folded her into Athena’s character.

She could be the goddess of wisdom and strategy or she could just be a post-traumatic induced ghost of Odysseus’ memory.

Either way, I really felt the loss of Athena’s impact on the story.

The overly emotional (?) Penelope:

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all about female rage so I get the emotional moments that Anne Hathaway delivered for Penelope.

But I felt like it undermined just how strong and steadfast she was the entire time Odysseus’ was away. Almost to the point she was delusional that he’d be back at any moment.

I did however like how instead of her weaving the shroud for Laertes (her father in law) she was weaving the shroud for Ithaca itself. A symbolic burial garment for their dying civilisation.

Also, apparently Hathaway underwent extensive professional hand-weaving training so she could realistically operate the hand loom.

The scarred Helen:

This reveal really shocked me when I saw it. Lupita Nyongo’s face all scarred and portrayed as a victim of domestic abuse.

I always felt like Helen was almost untouchable, almost goddess-like, because of her beauty and power. So to see her like this gave me two reactions.

Sadness and resignation.

It was a sequence of these emotions because I understood what Nolan was trying to get at. Women are always the ones who pay the price of war and Helen has become another ruined canvas of a man’s own security. If he takes away her beauty, he takes away her power.

It had the intended effect but that doesn’t mean I agreed with it or needed to see it in this way.

The relatable witch, Circe:

Everything that Samantha Morton did on screen completely captivated me.

I think every woman watching her felt recognition in the way she conducted herself. The fear and the helplessness turning into rage and punishment now that she has the power.

Her moulding the men into pigs…wow what an experience of visceral, visual body horror.

It was amazing and terrifying at the same time.

But what struck me most was when she succumbed to Odysseus and turned the men back into humans while whispering ‘Return to your disguises. Return to your disguises.’ Incredible.

However…It’s such a departure from the poem.

Odysseus and Circe stay together for a whole year and actually have a child called Telegonus.

Homer describes Odysseus’ experience with Circe as pleasant enough that he nearly forgets to go home. It’s a very captor-turned-companion situation and I would’ve been interested to see that on screen. However this contradiction of the stock-standard hero story is not going to work for modern audiences because it creates too much moral friction.

MISSING CHARACTERS

Nausicaa and Queen Arete:

This was the main part of the movie I was so sad about.

I was waiting, WAITING, for this scene…the grovelling Odysseus, the clever Nausicaa, the powerful Arete…and it just never came.

This was my favourite section of the poem because it really solidified the power and connection of textiles and weaving as a form of communication. But it got cut from the film.

This was such a core narrative device and once again, it’s been cut by a man who perhaps didn’t understand its value and importance.

The secret language of women has been discarded. Again.

But I’ll get into the further as we go.

ALL the Gods?

I get it, it’s implied.

Calypso looking up to the sky is meant to symbolise some conversation with Zeus that we can’t hear. Odysseus ‘talking’ to Athena yet no-one else can see her. Instead of seeing Poseidon we see a very angry, tumultuous ocean threatening to take Odysseus and his men’s lives.

In a way I liked that the Gods were shown this way instead of being shown as actual ‘people’. It makes sense if you think of it as if you were a worshipper of them. You look for signs in the sky, the ocean, the people around you, superstition, symbolism, fate.

So I wasn’t mad about this creative choice.

COSTUME DESIGN

Athena’s white robes:

Usually when we see Athena represented in art she is in her full warrior kit. Plumed helmet, lots of weapons, maybe an owl. But in this film she is shown wearing a white piece of cloth that has been wrapped and draped around her body, her neck and her head.

To me the white represents purity but also a feeling of a ghost haunting someone.

This look of Odysseus’ grimy, blood spattered armour in shades of bronze and red juxtaposed against Athena pure, flowing, ghostly appearance reminds us that she is other worldly. Almost to the point that she is, and this is confirmed later, dead.

The white represents a funeral shroud. She’s a ghost walking through the graveyard of Odysseus’ mind.

The funeral shroud Penelope weaves for Laertes is specifically described by Homer as a stark white web or cloak (pharos) which is meant to be the final, honourable garment to wrap his body for burial.

By having Athena dressed in this stark white drapery, Nolan directly mirrors the visual concept of that famous funerary shroud.

Penelope’s jewel toned wardrobe:

As much as I wanted to, I just could not like Penelope’s looks.

Yes, the draping was beautiful.

Yes, her hair was kind of cool.

Yes, I understood that she was dressing up every day as if Odysseus was just about to pop in the front door.

It didn’t speak to me. But according to the costumer designer, Ellen Mirojnick, this was all on purpose.

Mirojnick didn’t want Penelope to rely on spectacle as a nod to her strategic mind.

The jewel tones were a way of signalling how powerful she was:

“the richer the color, the more powerful and strategic she was... a powerful strategist in a queen-like way”

With blue and red being the house colours of Ithaca.

How Penelope consistently wearing colour and adornment was to signal that she did not consider herself a widow in any way. This was her fashion rebellion against the suitors insistence that her husband was dead.

And the final scene where Odysseus is back and he strings the bow, she’s wearing a beautiful draped gown with a high neck and an elaborate metal neck piece.

“Her collar is protective. Her draping is very precise. It is your armor”

This is wonderful and powerful, but it still didn’t do it for me.

Agamemnon’s aura-farming helmet:

I actually posted about this on instagram the other day and the comment section went off. It was equal parts hilarious and scary.

I likened Agamemnon’s black, Batman-esque, horse-plumed, skeleton bedazzled helm to the modern day man’s mid-life crisis of buying a Ferrari. An act of overcompensation.

And the bros went off.

I get it, Agamemnon was absolutely a fearless, well known and well respected warrior (perhaps not by Achilles) in the Trojan war. However what is also well known is his arrogance, poor judgement, the Breseis debacle and how he sacrificed his DAUGHTER in the hopes he’d get some better sailing conditions.

And before you pull me up on it, Iphigenia was only sacrificed in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (458 BCE) and later traditions, not in any Homeric texts. But Nolan visually shows Agamemnon taking his and Clytemnestra’s crying daughter away to insinuate that he did, in fact, sacrifice her for better sailing conditions.

There’s been a lot of complaining about the armour of the soldiers saying they look flimsy and fake, but my guys…they had to make 5,500 costumes for all the extras. Of course they’re not real, metal armour.

I came across one of the artisans on Instagram (thank you, algorithm!) and it was the creation process of Telemachus’ armour by Rob Goodwin.

And guess what? It was made from leather.

As much as everyone hates that the armour looks “flimsy”, there’s actually a lot of evidence to suggest that leather was an important part of armour making back then.

The boar tusk helmets of the Mycenean warriors show that the boar tusk was mounted on leather patches. While these pieces were not necessarily battle-ready armour, they were vital to show the level of rank for high-ranking officers (think Agamemnon).

China (Shang Dynasty, c. 1600–1046 BCE): The earliest evidence of Chinese armour comes from the Shang dynasty and was usually made from shell or rawhide, with bronze reserved for helmets. So leather/rawhide was actually the primary body armour material, with bronze used more selectively.

Classical Greece (later, ~5th century BCE): the linothorax, a layered linen (sometimes leather-reinforced) cuirass, is depicted on 5th-century BCE vases showing Greek warriors and Amazons wearing it, evidence that organic materials remained standard well past the Bronze Age even alongside bronze.

I’m in awe of this leather craftsmanship, but also mildly confused as to why they tried to make it look like metal? In it’s original state, it’s so beautiful.

But hey, it also makes sense to make something comfortable for actors to move around in as well as the fact that Telemachus hasn’t really battled anyone before so probably only has ceremonial armour.

What I also noticed was the juxtaposition of the Spartan and the Trojan armour.

Interestingly the Spartans were dressed in dark, almost blackened bronze tones whereas as the Trojans were shown in white.

Yes, they may have looked like storm troopers but what this colour contrast said to me was that the Spartans were the ‘bad guys’ and the Trojans were the ‘good guys’.

So I liked the armour. And I actually loved Agamemnons whole look, it was badass.

Penelope’s Pin:

Another big loss in the film was the stripping of the Olive Tree Bed moment.

The moment Odysseus has returned, Eurycleia had told her it’s really Him, and she still doesn’t believe it. So she says he can sleep in the bed, but she’ll have it brought to him rather than him go to it.

But Odysseus knowing that the bed had been made around an olive tree loses his mind at the thought of her breaking it and moving it somewhere else.

And this is the final test.

Yet we don’t get it.

What it gets replaced with is a kind of amalgamation of two objects and two moments. The olive tree bed and the golden engraved pin.

In book 19 before the olive tree bed moment Penelope asks the beggar (secretly Odysseus) to describe what he wore so she knows it was him. He describes a:

“purple cloak of double folded wool, half fastened by a golden brooch with double pins that was elaborately engraved. In its front paws a dog held down a struggling dappled fawn.”

This was the cloak and engraved gold pin she gave to Odysseus in hopes of travellers being able to identify him and prove it to her.

Yet in Nolan’s film the design of the pin has been changed. It is now a depiction of Athena wrapped in vines.

Original engraving: A hunting dog pinning down a deer.

This could be read many ways, but here are the readings that speak to me.

1. A prediction of what the next few years of Odysseus’ life looks like. War, violence, hunting, capturing, killing.

2. A premonition of Penelope’s own situation with the suitors at home. Being forced into submission.

Film engraving: Athena wrapped in vines.

Nolan or his design team have elaborated on why the pin is Athena wrapped in vines, so here’s my interpretation.

1. It’s symbolic of human nature defiling the gods. How the lack of respect, hospitality and dignity constricts and destroys the purpose of the gods in their society.

2. It is a good luck token from a wife to a husband. Penelope’s way of binding him to her. To Ithaca. The vines represent the earth, home, his island.

3. Reflective of Odysseus’ own journey. A man of strategy and intellect (like Athena) being trapped and dragged down by the forces of nature (other gods).

Nolan has combined the gold engraved brooch of book 19 and the olive tree bed test of book 23 to create the vine-wrapped Athena pin. It is a recognition test.

The general lack of women on the screen:

Well, duh.

This has been the biggest and loudest criticism of the film and it’s totally founded.

I read another article that said the film absolutely failed the Bechdel test.

The Bechdel test asks whether a work features at least two named woman who have a conversation with each other about something other than a man.

This is part of a much larger, problematic pattern of Nolan’s work. That is, over his 28 years of filmmaking he’s done 13 films and not one of them has had a female protagonist.

Nolan’s women consistently occupy supporting, motivating, or victim roles rather than driving the plot.

And the Odyssey is ALL ABOUT women driving the plot. It is the story.

Then, in the one instance we do have two women talking to each other, it’s when Penelope pushes Melantho out into the blood-soaked melee of Odysseus’ revenge on the suitors.

It reduces the systemic, patriarchal oppression into a bitchy cat fight.

This scene is meant to replace the part of the book where Odysseus kills all the female slaves he thinks have slept with the suitors.

You know the part where he asks Telemachus to cut them down with a sword and Telemachus goes ‘Hey dad, I’ll do you one better. I’ll hang them…’ Yeah, that part. I get why that wasn’t in the film, it would’ve totally confused the audience despite it being true to the source material.

It’s almost like this is a dumbed-down , watered-down, male-centric version of The Odyssey.

It’s not asking much of us at all. It’s not asking us to sit with complexity or with characters who occupy the whole scope of morality.

It’s handing us a repentant, trauma-riddled soldier who fumbles his way home, sails off into the sunset and never looks back.

We’ve lost Helen’s gift of a hand-woven robe for Telemachus’ future bride.

We’ve lost the silent conversation in cloth between Nausicaa and Queen Arete.

We’ve lost the recognition token of Odysseus’ purple robes made by his wife’s loving hands.

But what we’ve really lost here is the secret language of women.

This precious, vital, symbolic language of ours that has been reduced to the static symbol of Penelope’s loom. An object sitting silently behind sliding doors.

Nausicaa, Arete and the island of Scheria represented what the film was arguing. The proper expression of Xenia, of hospitality, respect and dignity no matter the person.

And it was through the women, the cloth and that secret language that Xenia was initiated.

So instead, we return to the pin. Penelope’s pin.

It was an image of a goddess, given by a woman to protect that man that she loves.

Two women offering protection and a thread back home.

What did you think of the film? Let me know in the comments.

This is edition V of the five part series of looking deeper into Homer’s iconic text, The Odyssey as part of the Readings Big Book Club. Read edition I, Homer Called Them Maids. Wilson Called Them Slaves here, edition II, The Language Men Couldn’t Read here, edition III “Don’t Stand Too Close” here and edition IV ‘The Homeric Mirror’ here.

But buyers, designers, textile experts? Everyone talks about them. But the person who actually decides whether a garment fits, closes properly, and survives being worn? Almost invisible.

In this episode, I sit down with my friend and fellow industry veteran Debbie, a garment technician who’s spent her career being the bridge between a designer’s sketch and the customer trying it on in a change room. We get into what a tech pack actually is, why a 0.3cm measurement can cause a genuine crisis, and the emotional cost of watching manufacturing relationships get shifted offshore chasing cheaper margins.

We also talk honestly about the parts of the industry nobody glamorises: sizing and grading gaps for larger bodies, the blame that lands on garment techs when something goes wrong in store, and why working retail first is still the best advice either of us can give anyone wanting into fashion.

It’s a conversation about the unsexy, unseen decisions that decide whether a piece of clothing actually works and why that work deserves more credit than it gets.

Cover image is of Mildred Taniova colouring in the tapa designs with red pigment. Arara village, Collingwood Bay, Oro Province PNG, 2001. Photograph by A. Hermkens.

This week was the final lecture of Readings Big Book Club: The Odyssey and it was presented by Ika Willis who is the Head of School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

Willis began the session by talking about what drew her into the world of classic literature. She spoke of a magic portal that is created whenever we read a text, whether that’s Twilight or The Odyssey.

Specifically she spoke about how, in her initial studies in classic literature, that she was shocked when she connected so deeply with the texts she was studying.

How these texts, despite being considered ancient, felt so thoroughly modern and valid to her life experience.

She called this connection the magic portal. The power of literature to bypass time and space and connect us together through a shared human experience.

Willis spoke of her specific studies in Reception Studies and Reception History. Basically everything that happens at the receiving end of a text. What happens when we stop looking at a text as either a self-contained object and instead we look at its contexts.

How do people make sense and make use of this text? How does it show up in different places and how is it changed by its travels?

I think this is specifically important to texts which are translated from their original language into other languages. It’s not just about how different cultures relate to it over time, it’s about the actual imprint and effect translators have on the meaning of the text. How their personal bias and life experience moulds the delivery of the story.

There was one thing that Willis said that really made me pause. She called the new film adaptation ‘Christopher Nolan’s Emily Wilson’s Homer’s Odyssey’.

And that’s the best explanation I’ve heard so far, because it plainly states what we’re actually seeing here. Willis explained it as ‘stacking layers of dreams within dreams, like Nolan’s earlier film Inception.’

It highlights how important it is to go into this new film with a particular frame of mind. A lens to understand what we’ll actually be witnessing.

And it’s not just the new film, it’s also the text itself.

Even back to the oldest version we have which was written down in the 10th century BC. Technicallym when it was written, it was already thousands of years old.

“This book we have is no more the Odyssey than a photograph is a person. It is a snapshot, a single moment, a representation of a phenomenon that, like a person, unfolds in time.”

- Ika Willis

The original text that we’re trying to reverse engineer was already an anachronistic assemblage made by many mouths and many hands and many listening ears.

The impact and resonance of The Odyssey has shown up in an almost endless array of creative arts.

Kids books, operas, paintings, sculptures, ballets, stage plays, poems, novels, video games, albums and comics. From the most ephemeral of post pop culture and folk artefacts to some of the monuments of world literature.

But is it wrong to view the Odyssey with a modern lens? To try to imprint, or understand or compare the experiences in the text with our own lives.

“How can we not?” Willis argues. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Willis quoted Hans-Georg Gardamer, a 20th-century German poet, from his text “Truth and Method” with this fascinating thesis:

‘Literary art speaks to us. And our understanding is not specifically concerned with its formal achievement as a work of art but with what it says to us. Understanding is fundamentally relational. Only the person who allows himself to be addressed, whether he believes or doubts, understands.’ - Hans-Georg Gardamer

Gardamer believes that if we attempt to look at the past while removing ourselves from that analysis, we have given up our ability to find any truth that is valid and intelligible to ourselves.

We are not robots analysing the world around us purely on static data. We are living, breathing human beings who need to connect with the things around us to be able to understand them.

‘Historical understanding does not involve subordinating another person to our own standards and it is constantly necessary to guard against over hastily assimilating the past to our own expectations of meaning.’ - Hans-Georg Gardamer

This quote from Gardamer really stopped me in my tracks.

I find myself doing this a lot, especially with how Odysseus slept with so many different women within the Odyssey. Whereas if Penelope had done this she probably would’ve been murdered (like the other female slaves who, either by choice or by force, slept with the suitors and were subsequently murdered by Telemachus and Odysseus).

It makes me think:

Am I projecting my own standards and expectations onto this fictional character? Or am I just seeing a consistent double-standard that prevails throughout history.

This quote from Gardamer pushed me to examine my own biases when researching and digesting historical and literary knowledge.

But seriously, Odysseus…c’mon dude.

One of the most illuminating moments of the talk was when Willis spoke about how classicists study the text.

Most classicists use the Oxford Classical Text version of the text which is in Ancient Greek. They would have learned how to read Greek and would have been translating it directly from this book.

However, to a 3rd century Greek person, even the concept of a book, with it’s paper and it’s binding and it’s printing, would have been something so alien and science fictional to them.

As we now know, from previous sessions, The Odyssey is from a long history of oral poetry tradition. So really, we’re already studying it in an anachronistic way.

By understanding the text in this way means we’re required to use modern academic and interpretive techniques. Techniques that weren’t necessary or even invented at the time it was composed.

Every poet and translator across time has had their own unique reaction and recomposition of the text, and Emily Wilson’s translation is the clearest and the most direct for the modern audience.

Wilson said:

‘There is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent window through which you can see the original.’

This is the theme that keeps coming up with the online discourse about the film adaptation and Wilson’s translation. We need to remind ourselves of this every time we interact with the story, whether that is the Oxford version or Nolan’s new film.

Homeric retellings such as Circe by Madeline Miller and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood are both examples of artists creating a bridge between the past and the present.

Willis went on to quote Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘The Siren Song’ and before I share it with you I’ll share a brief tidbit of who the Sirens were.

The Sirens were the bird-like or mermaid-like monsters who were previously thought to have been Persephone’s handmaidens.

When Hades abducted Persephone, the handmaidens were punished by being turned into the Sirens. They were put on this island and lured men with promises of divine wisdom and secret knowledge.

Here is the poem:

I genuinely laughed out loud once the poem was finished. It’s a wonderfully ironic, lighthearted and funny jest at the fatal flaw of Homer’s men and perhaps men eternal.

The song man cannot resist is a song that casts them as the rescuer of a damsel in distress. That makes them feel uniquely powerful and deeply needed.

Willis then shared another beautiful poem with us, called ‘Penelope’ by Dorothy Parker in 1928.

Odysseus’s nouns are abstract or generic. He’s going to ‘ride the seas’ or ‘cut the wave’. There’s the sun, there’s the breeze, but it’s not a specific sea, not a specific wave.

Yet almost all the nouns in Penelope’s stanza are very concrete and specific. Tea, thread and bed.

Odysseus’ stanza is an A/B/A/B rhyme. Sun. Breeze. One. Seas.

Penelope’s stanza gets A/A, B/B. Rock. Knock. Thread. Bed. It’s more jingly, more associated with children’s rhymes and songs rather than higher poetic forms.

Then at the end we get brave and it connects with Odysseus’ wave and connects the stanzas.

The contrast between their versions of heroism is so impactful. Odysseus’ stanza has so much movement and action whereas Penelope’s stanza feels claustrophobic both in what she’s doing and within the rhythm of it.

And because Odysseus is out there eye-gouging cyclops and sailing the monster-infested seas, he’s the one being called brave.

Willis mentions that there’s several anachronisms in Penelope’s stanza. There would not have been tea or rocking chairs, nor would there have been neighbours knocking on her door. Parker is highlighting these things as a way of connecting Penelope to the modern woman.

A trans-historical form of female courage. Defending instead of attacking.

There are historical, institutional and material factors that create the dialogue that we’re having about Homer that brings us in relationship with Homer.

There’s something ironic about this text being spoken about on Wurundjeri land where knowledge and storytelling has been part of living in relation with country for 65,000 years. Something that makes the age of The Odyssey look pretty small in comparison.

Willis said that it should make us feel uncomfortable about our choice to interact with this text, whose presence on Wurundjeri country is inextricably bound up with colonialism and imperialism.

‘Without exception, the cultural treasures we survey have an origin which we cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And such a document is not free of barbarism. Barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from own owner to another.’ - Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

The association between the Odyssey and exploitation, exploration and conquest is almost as old as the poem itself.

Athenian rhetorician Isocrates used the Odyssey as a way to justify and to argue for the Athenian invasion of Asian Minor. And Odysseus is frequently invoked as an archetype of the maritime conqueror.

When did society decide that The Odyssey was the founding text of Western civilisation? Who gets to own Homer?

Willis went on to discuss a poem by Derrick Walcott called Omeros published in 1990.

Walcott is a poet from St Lucia and a black man. His work is an argument against the West appropriating Homeric texts for themselves and an arguing that Homer is for everyone. That Homer is for humankind.

The fact that the Odyssey is even known in Africa is a direct result of the triangular slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas.

In Walcott’s poem there are two fishermen named Hector and Achille who are fighting over a woman named Helen…sound familiar?

Willis mentions it was common in the Caribbean to name enslaved African people with names from Ancient Greece or Rome.

The island of Saint Lucia was historically known as "the Helen of the West Indies" during the 18th century because colonial control of the island frequently changed hands between the French and English who fought over the island.

In reference to this, Walcott sometimes personifies the island as if it is a character referred to as "Helen", symbolically tying the island to both the Homeric Helen as well as to the character Helen.

Unlike a conventional epic poem, Walcott divides the narrative between his characters and his own voice so that his epic has no main protagonist or "hero".

Walcott even inserts himself into the narrative and turns the story into a semi autobiographical tale.

Walcott talks about a philosophy and necessity of colonialism that grounded itself in the classical tradition to justify imperialism and slavery.

By using myth and history, Walcott speaks of the need to return to traditions in order to challenge the modernity born out of colonialism.

The ultimate question I’ve been left with is this:

Why is this one of the core texts of humanity? And why are we so enamoured with it?

Does the Odyssey speak to us? Or do we speak to it?

Willis believes that it is us who feed the narrative and it feeds us in return.

That every era, every culture, every person can look into the Odyssey and find an element of themselves within one of the heroes. Within one of the monsters. Within one of the choices.

This text is a narrative of character.

As Aristotle said “The Iliad is pathetic and simple. The Odyssey is ethical and mixed.”

And I want to leave you with the final insight Ika Willis shared with us.

It was a line from Wilson’s translation that has become quite famous as it captures not only Odysseus’ cunning and wily nature in a humorous way, but it also somehow captures the entire contradictory nature of The Odyssey at its core:

Thank you so much for reading my learnings from the Readings Big Book Club: The Odyssey.

I’ll be seeing the film this week and I cannot wait to share my thoughts on the adaptation.

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This week’s session was presented by Tom Hercules Davies who is a comparative philologist, in other words, a professional language comparer.

He began with showing us a famous artwork. A chiaroscuro painting by flemish artist Rembrandt depicting an aged Homer mid sentence, reciting and repeating lines of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Rembrandt instructions to the viewers of his work is not to stand too close.

This week’s session was about going into the fine details of The Odyssey and then zooming out again to compare it to the bigger picture. About understanding the complex layered narrative that the Odyssey truly is and that examining it too closely will only ever show us confusing brushstroke.

Homer asks us to step back and view all these layers at once.

Just like Rembrandt asks of us.

We started by zooming in on the unique sound of Homer.

Here was one of the lines he shared with us on screen. The bottom line are the Greek words and the symbols above are the syllables. The long and short pronunciation.

Because before this was a story we read, it was a story we heard.

The texts as we know them today were written down in medieval times. Before that they were sung by oral poets and performed to audiences.

So really, the true way to hear these stories is in Ancient Greek and with the correct musicality of the words.

Davies talked about how Homer has very specific musicality. Not emphasis or pronunciation, but musicality.

It wasn’t just about what sounded nice, it was about the poet finding a specific rhythmic melody so they could recite the story.

Almost all oral poetry was done by memory.

There was no text that they read from, no cue cards or teleprompters (obviously). It was taught by master to apprentice and then recited from memory in the moment.

So these rhythmic rules helped the poets to remember where they were and gave them a framework to work within.

The Odyssey runs 12,109 lines of dactylic hexameter, divided into 24 books. Estimates for a full oral performance land roughly around 20 hours, based on Peter Jones (who worked on the Penguin Classics translations).

Of course, this wasn’t recited all in one setting. It was a separated performance over multiple nights or it was a multi-day performance at festivals.

The version of the text we actually have is thought to have been fixed for performance at the Panathenaia in Athens, where rhapsodes performed in relay, each picking up where the previous one left off, across the multi-day festival.

That’s the model most classicists point to for how a text this long got performed as a complete whole rather than in fragments.

Another way these oral poets made sure they stuck to these boundaries was with epithets.

An epithet, in the Homeric sense, is a fixed descriptive phrase permanently attached to a person, god, or thing. Like “grey-eyed Athena,” “swift-footed Achilles,” “rosy-fingered Dawn,” and “clever/many-minded Odysseus”.

The funny thing is that even when Achilles is sitting still, he’s still “swift-footed Achilles”. Even if dawn isn’t rosy it’s still “rosy-fingered Dawn”.

These epithets exist because of the metrical demands of oral composition.

Each epithet is a formula sized to fill a specific gap in the hexameter line, letting an illiterate oral poet compose in real time without stopping to think.

“Polumētis Odysseus” (clever Odysseus) appears 81 times because it’s a reliable metrical unit, not because the poet is making a fresh character observation 81 separate times.

Interestingly Emily Wilson drops these epithets in her translation.

In oral poetry the audience is used to hearing them but in a written form they can feel very repetitive and clunky in a passage, distracting a reader from the core story.

Milman Parry, an American classicist, born in 1902, fundamentally changed how scholars understand Homer by departing from examining the Homeric texts and going straight to the Balkans to try and understand the greater art and tradition of oral poetry itself.

Perry travelled to Yugoslavia and studied living oral epic poets who were singers that composed long narrative poems on the spot, out loud, without ever writing them down.

Many of these oral poets were illiterate.

Perry found that when the poets were taught to read and write, their skill in the art actually decreased.

He also documented that no two performances of the same singer were the same. Each retelling was a new experience, for the singer and for the audience.

Perry argued that the Iliad and Odyssey show exactly this same fingerprint (the repeated epithets, the formulaic lines, the stock scenes) meaning Homer (whoever or whatever “Homer” actually was) was almost certainly working within this same kind of living oral tradition, not sitting down as a solitary literary genius inventing everything from scratch at a writing desk.

Gregory Nagy, a contemporary classicist and direct intellectual descendant of Milman Parry, argues that Homer’s text is fundamentally ‘multiform’. Meaning the poem exists as multiple valid versions with no original, canonical text that has survived from Homer’s time.

Davies summarised the implication of this as: there is no reconstructable original, and every reading is a reconstruction of a multi-form tradition.

Like Rembrandt’s painting of Homer, there isn’t one brushstroke to find underneath the layers, the layering is the painting. Just as the layers of each reconstruction of the Odyssey is the Odyssey.

We see this layering, this mismatch of realities, in the actual text.

Home describes bronze weapons being used for the wealthy, while the poor have iron tools when this was not an accurate reality for the Late Bronze Age people.

Davies describes it as:

“Two worlds superimposed on one another.”

This is an impressionist description of historical compression, of multiple eras collapsed into one image.

The story of Heracles in The Odyssey reinforces this technique. Homer wanted Odysseus and Heracles to interact so badly that he created a reality where, despite Heracles being in Olympus, the ghost of Heracles was in the Underworld when Odysseus went to visit.

Homer essentially, as Davies says, wanted to “have his cake and eat it too”.

He wanted Odysseus to interact with the hero Heracles while also acknowledging that Heracles is, in fact, in Olympus and that this is some bizarre ghostly projection.

So it’s not just anachronistic layering, it’s mythological layering.

Then comes the cross-cultural layering.

Towards the end of the text Odysseus is home in Ithaca still disguised as a beggar. There is one final contest that Penelope (or perhaps an Athena-influenced Penelope) creates for the suitors. An archery content.

The rules are simple. String Odysseus’ old bow and shoot it through a bunch of other arrows. Win Penelope’s hand in marriage and become the King of Ithaca.

Despite the suitors trying, no-one can string the bow. The old beggar, A.K.A: Odysseus in a disguise, gives it a go. And what do you know, he strings it in a second and shoots its home.

The interesting thing about this particular scene is that it’s not the only one.

The same contest happens in the Mahabharata.

The Mahabharata is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of ancient India (the other being the Ramayana). It’s an enormous poem, traditionally around 100,000 verses, making it one of the longest epic poems in world literature, roughly ten times the combined length of the Iliad and Odyssey.

In the Mahabharata Odysseus is Arjuna and Penelope is Draupadi.

It raises the question, how can two unconnected oral traditions land on the same structure. Was it shared inheritance, or something both traditions arrived at separately?

When Odysseus is on the island of Scheria, Kind Alcinous asks his blind bard Demodocus to perform at a feast.

Demodocus sings three seperate songs:

• Song 1 is about Odysseus and Achilles at Troy. Everyone loves this one, except Odysseus who pulls his cloak over his head and weeps in silence.

• Song 2 is an entertaining one about the affair between Ares and Aphrodite, and how her husband Hephaestus traps them both in an invisible net as revenge. Pure entertainment, a deliberate tonal break.

• Song 3 is at Odysseus’ own request. Demodocus sings about the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. Odysseus breaks down so publicly that Alcinous finally calls a halt to the song and asks him directly who he is, and why a story about the Trojan War affects him so deeply.

That question is what triggers Odysseus to finally reveal his identity and launch into the great first-person narration of his own wanderings (the Cyclops, Circe, the whole journey) that carries the poem through the next four books.

This scene is Homer showing us, in miniature, exactly the same instruction that Rembrandt gives about his own paintings.

A maker telling you how to receive their work, within the work itself.

Every criticism a modern reader has is only a criticism of the microscopic. The individual threads.

We need to be looking at this text as a woven cloth that has begun with one weaver and been passed to another, after another, after another. Creating a rich and multilayered creation by many people over many generations.

The Odyssey isn’t a hidden original hiding under all these layers. The layers are the Odyssey itself.

That is why this story has stood the test of time. Because it has absorbed time into itself.

Stay tuned for Part 4, coming next week.

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The one thing I was left thinking about after this session was: if women in the Odyssey are this complex, this powerful, this multi dimensional…why did it take us 2,500 years to notice?

Session 2 gave me the answer.

The women were saying everything, the whole time. It was just in a language that the men who were translating Homer couldn’t understand

This weeks session featured Prof K. Chong-Gossard, Associate Professor of Classics from the University of Melbourne, and my gosh, he was hilarious.

I think classicists are culturally known for being relatively dry in their presentation and interrogation of the classics, but there are a few who are able to deliver their knowledge in a way that is funny and in a way that sticks. Prof K. Chong-Gossard sits in the latter category.

He began the session by talking about the perspective structure of The Odyssey.

This isn’t a first person narrative where the protagonists view is biased and unreliable. This is a story told from many people, at many points in time and from many perspectives…mortal and immortal.

We get to hear what each character is thinking before they even speak which gives us a unique and deep insight into their inner workings. Homer gives us accounts that differ depending on the persons experience, such a Helen and Menelaus arguing as to whether Helen did or did not actually want to go with Paris to Troy. Arguing like an old married couple.

This single interaction creates a deeper, more multifaceted story but it also creates tension. It asks the reader to consider multiple realities. To consider that each character has their own version of what they believe to be true.

This applies directly to the women as well.

Over on instagram last week I had an interesting discussion in the comment section of my first essay from this bookclub. It was with a Greek woman who pushed back on the way modern feminist retellings handle Homeric women.

She argued that Homer already gives us multifaceted, complex and powerful women. And after consideration and deeper thought, I agree with her. This session proved it.

The three traditional roles assigned to the women in this text are that of Helper, Temptation and Monster. This session complicated all three.

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Then Professor K.O Chong-Gossard mentioned cloth. That’s when my ears pricked up and I really locked in.

When Odysseus washes up on the island of Scheria on his way home to Ithaca, he encounters young women playing with a ball on the beach. And while many of the women hide in fear of this naked, foreign man washed up on the shore, Nausicaa, the Princess of Scheria walks over to him and greets him.

Odysseus realises that if he wants to survive, he needs to convince this young girl that he’s trustworthy. So he begins complimenting Nausicaa. Waxing lyrical about her beauty, her common sense, her marriageability, all in hopes that she’ll swoon and offer her assistance.

And it works.

Nausicaa offers Odysseus some mens clothes that she was just washing in the water with her slaves. He accepts and she then tells him he needs to walk to the palace, go straight to her mother, Queen Arete, who will be spinning purple wool (yes, Tyrian purple) and ask for her help.

Here’s what he doesn’t realise.

Weeks before this interaction the goddess Athena visited Nausicaa in her dreams and convinced her to start doing her own laundry. Nausicaa woke up and realised she absolutely had to start doing her own laundry. And not just her own laundry, but that of her brothers as well.

She runs off to find her father, king Alcinous. He’s just about to hop on a horse and attend some royal counsel meetings when she stops him and insists that she wants to start doing hers and her brother’s laundry. Alcinous is mildly puzzled but agrees, and off he trots.

Back then, there were no ready-to-wear shops to pop into to buy clothes. Every single piece of clothing that every person wore in a household was made by the women of the household. The fabric was not bought either, it was woven, on sight and in the most public space.

Weaving wasn’t just a job for slaves, it was a job for everyone, including the queen.

An ideal ancient household was self-sufficient. The ultimate sustainable home. And women’s textile work was the foundation of this.

Nausicaa washes her brother’s clothes, that her mother has woven and made, and then offers them to Odysseus. She then instructs him to go to the palace, walk straight past the throne room where her father is sipping wine and sitting on the throne like a god and go straight to her mother in the Great Hall and ask for her protection.

Now, why would this work? Why would a complete stranger walking into a palace, bypassing the kind and going straight to the queen, wearing her son’s clothes encourage her to help him?

Because she would know. Queen Arete would recognise the clothes instantly. Because she would have woven them herself.

She would know that Nausicaa, now in charge of washing her brother’s clothes, would have given them to this stranger and sent him to her.

This is the language of women. A language encoded in cloth.

This is a conversation that starts with Athena, transmits to Nausicaa and is read by Arete. Three women conversing through cloth. In secret.

Another example of this clandestine language is in Book 4 when Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, goes to meet with King Menelaus and Helen (yes, that Helen).

No-one knows who Telemachus is. They don’t realise he is the son of their old comrade from the Trojan War, the man whose cunning and intellect gained them access into Troy and won them the war.

Helen is the first to recognise him.

Once they all realise who he is, welcome him and tell him what they know of Odysseus, Helen then drugs all their wine and begins to tell her own version of events from the Trojan War (I.e: The Iliad).

She explains that Aphrodite tricked her and made her go crazy. That, in actual fact, she didn’t want to go with Paris but Aphrodite made her.

Menelaus, however, tells a different version. He says that while she was in Troy with Paris, she tried to trick the Greek soldiers who were hiding in the Trojan horse by imitating the lamenting cries of their wives voices to force them to reveal themselves.

Homer presents us with both of their truths. He doesn’t force a true story over a false story. He asks the reader to consider both and to sit with the complexity, with the contradiction.

Professor K.O. Chong-Gossard noted that

“Menelaus is defined by Helen’s choice to leave him. He is not Helen’s husband, he’s just her current husband”

I loved this humorous insight into how Homer chose to position Menelaus.

While Telemachus is chatting with Menelaus, Helen goes off to her royal store room and selects the most elaborate robe she can find. She returns and presents it to Telemachus and explains that it is for his future bride to wear on their wedding day. And that, until that day, his mother Penelope, should care for it.

Penelope and Helen are first cousins.

This is a way for Helen to tell her cousin that she has met her son. That she approves of his character and gifts him a hand woven robe for his future bride.

Scholar Melissa Mueller, in Helen’s Hands (2010), argues that weaving and textile in the Odyssey are a coded means for women to communicate with other women. This session proved it.

In Book 23 we learn that Penelope doesn’t blame Helen, however she does use her as an example of how easily a woman can be deceived. She’s not condemning her cousin, she’s actually in solidarity with her.

Helen’s story informs Penelope’s actions. Penelope acts as she does because she did not want to be another Helen.

After the presentation, it was time for questions from the audience. One audience member asked whether it is a category confusion to think of a goddess as a woman.

Professor K.O. Chong-Gossard agreed that it is wrong to equate a goddess with a woman.

This is because while sharing a gender, they do not share the same values, the same life experience. An immortal and a mortal have very different life experiences and therefore values.

To mortals, infidelity, as we have learned from Menelaus and Helen, can start wars and kill many, many people. To the gods however, infidelity is entertainment. And as Chong-Gossard suggests, it mainly just provokes laughter.

Another question from an audience member was about how Odysseus key personality traits and skills are his cunning, his ability to outthink and manipulate his enemies. They asked whether Homer is assigning Odysseus feminine qualities or whether this is a modern reading.

Chong-Gossard said yes this is a modern reading of the text.

He elaborated that Odysseus is, by no means, a feminine man. He does end up killing the 108 suitors at the end of the story. But that, in fact, Odysseus has had to adapt his skillset in comparison to what was required of him in The Trojan War.

Brute force and violence would have seen him in an early grave, whereas knowledge, intellect and cunning allowed him to survive his journey and make it home.

The most important aspect of Penelope’s character is her use of survival tactics.

While Odysseus is away, not only is Penelope raising their son on her own, running an entire household and governing a whole island, she then has to deal with a bunch of suitors vying for her hand in marriage.

And not just a few guys wanting to marry her. 108 of them. For three years.

She avoids these men, almost entirely, by weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes.

Every day she sits in her room weaving this complex, detailed shroud for Laertes. And every night, she sneaks back and undoes her entire days work. For three years.

These suitors, these 108 men, think that three years is a totally reasonable amount of time to weave a shroud.

Why? Because it’s women’s work and they have absolutely zero knowledge about it.

Their ignorance becomes her weapon. Her only means for protecting herself.

Penelope does occasionally show herself to the suitors, but only through perfectly timed glimpses. Just enough to keep them around and to keep giving her gifts of gold jewellery. Of which she collects and, scholars hypothesise, uses to replace all the food and wine the suitors consume.

The accumulated trinkets also demonstrate her cunning. Something which, later on, Odysseus is very impressed by. Peas in a pod, those two.

The last example we receive of Penelope’s cunning is when Odysseus is back in Ithaca. He finally reveals himself to her, through the nursemaid Eurycleia telling her.

Penelope doesn’t believe that it is him. So she has one final test for Odysseus.

She says that Odysseus can stay the night, but that he must sleep in the corridor. She then offers to bring down his old bed so he can sleep on it.

At suggesting this, Odysseus is absolutely livid. And he has passed the final test.

Only the true Odysseus would know that his and Penelope’s marriage bed was carved from and built around an olive tree. To move it would be to destroy it.

Odysseus anger, his emotional reaction was proof of his identity.

At the realisation that her husband has finally returned, that she can finally let her walls down and feel safe, Penelope breaks down.

He held his love, his faithful wife, and wept. As welcome as the land to swimmers, when Poseidon wrecks their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves and driving winds; a few escape the sea and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine.

Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land So glad she was to see her own dear husband, and her white arms would not let go his neck.

The Odyssey, Emily Wilson translation. Book 23, lines 233 to 240

This excerpt was from Penelope’s perspective. About how glad she was to see her own husband.

Helene Peet Foley explains this as a reverse simile. It involves change or reversal of social roles in comparison. The inversion of sexual (gender) roles.

In Penelope finding Odysseus is alive, she is likened to the sailor who found the shore. Found safety.

This is such a beautiful passage because it shows the equality of their emotions. Of their love for each other.

This story is not just about the hero returning and reclaiming his family. It is also about Penelope getting her husband back.

Homer already wrote the women of his texts with complexity, interiority and power.

The problem was never Homer, it was the 2,500 years of translation choices, adaptation choices and critical choices that flattened what was always there.

Emily Wilson didn’t add a feminist lens, she meticulously removed centuries of male editorial choices.

Wilson didn’t rewrite Homer, she read him more accurately.

And cloth runs through all of it. Arete’s purple wool in the great hall, Nausicaa’s message in a garment, Penelope’s shroud unwoven every night and Helen’s robe put into her cousins care for her son’s future bride. All forms of communication.

Despite Telemachus telling his mother to be quiet and return to her work in the first part of the text, Penelope never stayed quiet, she just used another language. The language of cloth.

We just needed a woman to show us how to read it.

Stay tuned for Part 3, coming next week.

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With Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation coming out in July, I have collaborated with Readings to join their Big Book Club: The Odyssey. Over the next weeks I’ll be learning from different academics, authors and lecturers about all things Homer.

I’m especially excited because in session two they’ll be diving deeper into the stories of the women in The Odyssey. Penelope, Helen, Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa.

This all relates directly back to The Goddess Project. About how the most iconic text of the Western world has portrayed women and what it says about our society then, and our society now.

So here is what I learned from the Week 1 session: The Odyssey: The Original Hero’s Journey with Dr Seth Robinson.

The session started with Dr Seth Robinson explaining the structure of The Hero’s Journey and how The Odyssey was the template for classic Bildungsroman story. Well, if we’re being specific, the Iliad which is the precursor to The Odyssey, is more likely considered the first Western bildungsroman story. The coming of age story of Achilles and his role in The Trojan War, which then leads into the Odyssey.

Bildungsroman is a term used to describe a coming of age story format. The term comes from the German words Bildung, meaning “formation” or “education,” and Roman, meaning “novel.”

Robinson initiated the talk by discussing the reductive, culturally homogenising and gendered nature of The Odyssey.

How the “Disney-fication” of the heroes story has created a binary understanding of what a hero should be.

How heroes are so connected with being a good person, when in actual fact, a hero should just be the vehicle for the story because everyone is the hero in their own story.

I loved this observation because I think as a society we require so much of people we put on a pedestal. Whether that’s Odysseus or Taylor Swift. We require them to represent all the positive aspects of our society. Someone that our children can admire and look up to.

But it’s such a falsehood. Because we are multidimensional beings.

One persons understanding of the “right” thing is not the same as the next persons. Just as Odysseus’ journey in The Odyssey is not wholly “right” or admirable.

But I’m straying here. Let’s get back to what else I learned.

Robinson went on to talk about how The Odyssey being considered the “original story” is incredibly dismissive of other cultures. The Odyssey is absolutely an iconic text, but mainly for the Western world.

You have to realise that at that time in history, in Ancient Greece, it was all about conquest. About individuals, mainly men, leaving their homeland, conquering other lands, other indigenous cultures and bringing home knowledge and riches.

So when we look at The Odyssey we can understand how it is essentially the bible for colonialism. A guidebook, if you will.

The Heroes Journey story has a key structure. At first our protagonist is a reluctant hero, then they answer the call.

Then we meet key archetypal characters such as the mentor, the magical ally and the shadow.

In the case of the Odyssey, our mentor is Athena the goddess of Wisdom. She literally disguises herself as a man and friend to Telemachus (Odysseus’ son) and calls herself (or himself?) Mentor.

The way we use this word today comes directly from The Odyssey.

Our magical ally or allies, funnily enough, are all women.

We have Athena, the divine patron who engineers the entire return. Circe who gives him the knowledge he needs to navigate the underworld. Nausicaa who saves him from the beach and gets him to the Phaeacians. Ino who saves him from drowning. Even Calypso, who holds him captive, ultimately lets him go and gives him the tools to build his raft.

The women in the Odyssey are the ones with knowledge. The women are the ones who move the plot. The women are the ones who know where things are, what needs to happen next, and how to survive.

Next we have the shadows, the villains, the monsters, the obstacles. And this is where we need some nuance. Because we’re going deeper than good and evil here, deeper than clean binaries.

The concept of shadows, of villains, is about characters that represent the force of opposition. It’s about a character that directly represents the hero’s own dark side or unexplored self.

In that sense, Poseidon is the true shadow. He is the divine antagonist and a force that is actively pursuing Odysseus’ demise and destruction. This is because Odysseus blinded his son, a cyclops named Polyphemus.

We also have the suitors who are taking over Odysseus’ home in Ithaca and basically trying to get Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, to marry one of them. We also have Polyphemus, a cyclops that traps and eats Odysseus’ men when they’re stranded on his island.

Here’s where it gets more complex.

We have three key “monsters”. You may have heard of them. Scylla, Charybdis and The Sirens.

I actually first discovered them while I was watching the latest season of Percy Jackson. Highly recommend watching that show (or reading those books) if you want a fun, easily digestible version of Greek mythology.

Scylla

Scylla begins as an attractive woman who later becomes the victim of a punitive love triangle, and transforms into a six-headed monster living in the ocean. You know the one in Hercules?

Charybdis

Charybdis is the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia. So she’s a Daddy’s Girl and is basically just defending her father’s territory. Think of the worms in Dune, that’s apparently what Charybdis looks like.

The Sirens

The Sirens were originally human women, maids of Persephone who failed to defend her when she was abducted by Hades, the God of the underworld. As punishment they were turned into monsters. They’re usually depicted as mermaids who sit on the edge of an island, unable to move, but singing sweet songs to sailors passing by in hopes that they’ll come to them. In some versions of the myth the sirens are doomed to die if a mortal ever resists their songs.

Odysseus travels through a particular strait of ocean where, with Athena and Circe’s knowledge, he encounters these three monsters and defeats them.

With the knowledge he’s gained from women, he’s able to defeat other women.

However, these “monsters”, these inherently female characters, have not hunted down Odysseus to cause him harm.

They are merely defending their own territory.

While we think of The Odyssey as Odysseus’ story (well yes, it’s kind of named after him) we should actually look at it from the perspective of three characters. Three stories.

Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope. The family.

So let’s focus on Penelope, the Queen of Ithaca. Because her story, in a way, is an inverse of Odysseus’.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re happily married, you’ve just had a baby and your husband trots off to war. He’s gone, not just for a few months, but for 10 years. In those 10 years your son grows up without a father, you don’t have your husband and you’re also the queen of an entire island.

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That’s hard enough, right? Wrong.

Now there’s suddenly dozens of men in your household trying to convince you that your husband is dead and that you should marry one of them. They eat, and drink, and play games, and make a mess of your household, abuse your maids and tease your son.

It’s some sort of horror version of The Bachelorette.

But, you’re no ordinary woman. While your husband is famed for his cunning and wily nature, you’re both cut from the same cloth. For you, it’s less gouging the eye of a cyclops and more understated.

Penelope spends 10 years telling these men, these suitors, that she’s weaving the most epic piece of cloth and it’s taking so long because it’s extremely detailed.

She spends every day in her room weaving this beautiful cloth. Then every night, she creeps back to her loom and undoes all of it.

Somehow the suitors, knowing nothing about weaving, find this a totally reasonable excuse as to her absence.

So while Penelope is not out eye-gouging cyclops, sleeping with witches and sacrificing her men to sea monsters…she is defending herself with the only power she has at her disposal.

The power of weaving and of women’s sacred space.

Robinson spoke about how Penelope’s story, of protecting the home space, is a far more valuable lesson in today’s context. That Penelope’s wit, intelligence and charisma is what protects her when her husband isn’t there to do it for her.

Her trick with the loom is her only protection.

Over the last few months I’ve realised something about the act of translation.

That translation from one language to another is a unique and dubious art in itself.

The way an individual translates a text from one language to another is an act of attempted unbiased transmission, but actually always ends up telling us something about that person and the time they’re living in.

For example, Robinson showed us two versions of a passage in Book 22 of The Odyssey that I found so fascinating.

This is at the end when Odysseus has returned home to Ithaca and killed all the suitors. Now he has decided to kill all the maids who lay with the suitors. At least he tells his son, Telemachus, to kill them with a sword but Telemachus decides to hang them all because it’s a more pitiable death.

The first passage was from D. C. H. Rieu’s translation in 1991:

“…he took the cable which has seen service on a blue bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and the other over the round house, high up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when long-winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare…so the women’s heads were held fast in a row, with nooses around their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.”

The second is from Emily Wilson’s translation from 2017:

“At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar, stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground. As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap — They crash into a net, a bitter bedtime, just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

We see a distinct difference here in the word choices of the two translators.

Rieu calls the servants ‘women’. Wilson called the servants ‘girls’.

Wilson goes further still elsewhere in the text, choosing the word ‘slaves’ where older translators wrote ‘maids’ or ‘servants’. A deliberate choice she footnotes, refusing the softer words that obscure what these women actually were.

Even the difference of how their lives ended is described so differently. Rieu’s description paints the servants as deserving of their end. Whereas Wilson explains the visceral pain these girls went through.

We also have to interrogate the reality of this situation, albeit a work of fiction. These servants, girls, maids…whatever you want to call them, most likely had zero choice in whether they slept with the suitors or not. They were servants of the household.

This whole act towards the end of the book is something that has been overlooked for a very long time.

The hypocrisy and the misogyny of, not just this scene, but of many scenes in The Odyssey (and The Iliad) is so stark.

Emily Wilson has worked extremely diligently, as the first woman to ever translate the full text into English, to bring these realities to light. Not just as a work of fiction, but as a reflection of real women living at this time, and the experience of many women throughout history.

So, here’s the question I was left sitting with, if this is the primary text of Western civilisation, what does this say about our culture now?

Stay tuned for Part 2, coming next week.

“Up in an inner chamber of the houses she wove a double-layered purple cloth, and in it stitched elaborate designs”

The Iliad, Homer translated by Emily Wilson. Book 22 Verse 580

In the final chapters of Homer’s Iliad, Andromache, a princess of Troy and wife to Hector, is weaving her husband a protective cloth. She knows he’s fighting Achilles but instead of being up on the balcony watching the fight, she’s in her house, weaving for him.

“Then from the wall she heard keening and groans of grief. Her body trembled. She dropped her shuttle to the ground…”

The Iliad, Homer translated by Emily Wilson. Book 22 Verse 590

Andromache used the only power she had as a woman trying to protect her husband. She wove for him. Despite it being for nothing in the end, women have always protected their loved ones through making. They still do.

While listening to Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s ‘Women’s Work’ I had to pause on one particular excerpt.

Barber explains the importance of red embroidery in Slavic culture:

“Red embroidery in Slavic culture was generally located around the entry points of a garment, the arms, neckline and hem. This positioning was to deter demons from crawling in at the openings since demons were thought to cause illnesses, mental and physical.”

I shared this as a note here and it went completely viral.

The concept of women using creative arts for protection is a beautiful tradition that has a deep history in many cultures.

Coming from a textile design background, this is a topic that I’m really passionate about. I am hell-bent on learning more, not just for myself but to share that knowledge with as many people as I can.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I, as a textile designer, was asked to create “folk” or “boho” embroidery. As if it’s this monolithic style that only comes from one culture.

I always felt deeply uncomfortable creating any sort of tribal, boho or folk prints because I knew, even though I didn’t know exactly, that every inspiration image I was given was a symbol from someone’s heritage. And that me, placing it on a t-shirt to sit in a department store in Australia, felt very odd.

Cultural literacy is the antidote to cultural appropriation.

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So here are a few stories of protective fashion traditions that I’d love to share with you.

Before we understood that bacteria were microscopic, many cultures believed that physical, mental and emotional sicknesses were the direct result of demons entering the body.

We see this belief displayed in varying forms across every culture.

Barber documents in her incredible book ‘Women’s Work’ that in Slavic folk belief, demons were thought to cause illness, mental and physical, and they entered at the openings of a garment.

Red embroidery placed at those points was there to stop them.

When we say Slavic, we mean a vast sweep of the world, from Russia to the Balkans, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Belarus.

Not one culture, but a language family and a shared cosmology stretching across Eastern and Central Europe. The practice Barber describes was continent-wide.

This may seem like superstition now, but at that point in time that seemed like the most rational cause. It reads as a coherent system of how disease transmission worked.

I had a lovely follower reach out to me in my instagram DM’s and she told me about one particular Slavic textile tradition that is still well and truly alive.

In the Podillya region of Ukraine there is a textile tradition of creating a rectangular embroidered cloth, made of linen or hemp and with red embroidery thread.

The rushnyk.

A rushnyk is given to a baby at birth and it follows that person through their entire life. It’s there at christening, at marriage and finally, at death and burial. A person’s rushnyk is considered sacred and no one is allowed to just casually handle it.

When a child is sick, their rushnyk is laid beside them as a form of protection.

Honestly this story got me really emotional.

It reminded me of the power of craft and of hand work. Of someone, who loves that baby, spending hours and hours hand making a piece of cloth that will follow and protect them throughout their life, even if the person making it might not.

I think this makes us all think of those knitted sweaters and hand made quilts our grandmothers made us with a deeper appreciation.

Those pieces weren’t just things to keep you warm, they were physical transmissions of love and protection. They were from a long line of women who had done the exact same thing for their children and grandchildren.

The reason for the colour red being used as protection has both geographical and philosophical meanings.

In essence, red is the colour of blood. Of life force itself. But it also goes deeper than that.

The madder plant grew widely across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and into Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It’s the roots of the madder plant that make a beautiful red dye for clothing.

So while red is the colour of blood, of life force, it was also that the madder plant was widely available to women across all of these regions as a textile dye.

There were two other sources of red textile dyes. One was from snails (Tyrian purple/scarlet from sea snails) and the other was Kermes (from an insect). However these specific dyes and the colours they created were reserved for nobility, royalty and the elite due to the labour intensive process involved with extracting the dye.

Madder red was the people’s red. It was freely available to everyone and so this protective practice spread through the Slavic lands across Byzantine Egypt, through India and into Jewish traditions.

The same colour, the same logic and the same protective intentions.

In Chinese mythology there is a story about the Red Thread of Fate.

I remember hearing this myth from my grandparents (I’m half Chinese) and thinking about how beautiful and fateful it sounded.

The story is called Dinghun Dian. The Matrimony Inn.

Yue Lao, the Chinese god of marriage, walks at night carrying a book (a register of every marriage that will ever happen) and a pouch of red silk cords. He finds the two people destined to meet and ties a cord around their feet.

Now this was the part that really captured my imagination.

These two people who Yue Lao selected to be destined for each other are connected by a red cord. This cord can stretch, it can tangle and knot but it will never break.

Red is the most important colour in Chinese culture. While Western culture has brides wear white, in Chinese culture brides wear red. Red is worn to ward off demons and it’s especially dominant at Chinese New Year celebrations.

This same colour is used for both warding off demons and binding soulmates.

This is what red holds; a full range of human vulnerabilities. We fear illness, we fear losing the people we love, we fear death. So we cover ourselves in the colour of life force so we can somehow absorb it by osmosis and keep loss at bay.

Andromache weaving a cloth of protection knowing that this process is the only control she has over her husband’s life.

Women across continents and millennia creating sacred cloths to protect their children and grandchildren from illness, and themselves from loss.

Yue Lao tying a thread that can withstand distance and stretching and knotting but never break.

All in the colour of life force itself.

Before institutionalised religion, before praying and before modern medicine women were always finding ways to communicate love for their family.

This isn’t just pretty decoration, this is ancestral protection.

She Weaves Him Protection is part of the Goddess Project — a series tracing the history of draped cloth as political act, culminating in the Esther sewing pattern in August/September 2026.

If this resonated:

The Culture of Cloth podcast. First Makers: South and East Asia is out now. Find it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Goddess Project lives on Instagram at @veronicatuckerthelabel.

And if you know someone who makes things, share this with them.

The first: goddesses whose mythology is explicitly about weaving. Documented, primary sources, this is what the texts actually say. 
The second: goddesses that weavers chose. Figures whose domains of creativity, wisdom and skill made them the natural patrons of women at the loom, even though weaving isn’t the centre of their story.

Both categories are true. They’re just true in different ways.

In this episode I cover:

Amaterasu (Japan) — the sun goddess whose most significant mythological moment begins in a weaving hall, documented in the Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE)

Zhinu and Orihime (China and Japan) — the Weaver Girl of the Milky Way, a myth over 2,600 years old that travelled the Silk Road and became Japanese

Leizu (China) — the empress who discovered silk when a cocoon fell into her tea, invented the loom, and was eventually deified for it

Saraswati (India) — goddess of knowledge and the arts, and the patron weavers in Kanchipuram have invoked before beginning new patterns for centuries

Benzaiten (Japan) — who began as Saraswati in India, travelled through China, and arrived in Japan transformed

Dewi Sri (Java, Bali, Lombok) — the rice goddess in whose name women across Indonesia have always woven sacred cloth

You never find a god of weaving. Not once, across any of these traditions. Every time, in every culture, the act of making cloth belongs to the feminine divine.


The First Makers is part of the Goddess Project, a long-form series tracing the history of draped cloth from the beginning of time, culminating in the release of the Esther sewing pattern in August–September 2026.

EXCERPT 1 “A forecast should be a compass, not a photocopier. It should align people around change, but it shouldn’t produce identical answers.”

This is a line that should be printed and pinned above every trend meeting I ever sat in.

As consumers and shoppers we see this every day in stores. Like right now, I’ve seen the same ruched hem, pleather bomber jacket in about 4 different stores. All the same shape, just with varying price tags.

This is because brands get served similar trend forecasts. The problem is that they’re not interpreting those forecasts for their brand DNA.

You can think of a brand DNA as a unique fingerprint of every brand you know. This includes the customers’ demographic, value system, shopping habits, preferences, fit requirements, lifestyle choices, price bracket, colour palette and more.

Buyers, designers, textile designers all have to ask these questions when approving a design:

Does my customer like this length, this colour, this fabric?

Will she like how it sits, how it fits and can she wear it with her favourite jacket?

Does this give her reason to buy?

It’s essential for brands to run each design through their brand DNA to see if it passes all the tests.

I remember hearing stories from my buyers of their international buying trips. Of regularly spotting other buyers from competitor brands, of them fighting for the same samples to take back, re-spec and sell at the same time.

It all felt so homogenised. All this money and effort when they could have been investing in our design team and trusting us to do that work. But alas, what would a buyer be without their precious buying trip?

Read more

We get into what trend forecasting actually is (observed, invented, or accelerated) and how the answer changes depending on who's paying. We talk about cultural appropriation and why origin gives a trend its meaning, what happens when that context gets stripped out, and why the Prada sandal situation was an after-the-fact correction that should have been built in from the start.

We talk about AI. About what it can synthesise, what it can't feel, and why a forecast that looks right isn't the same as a forecast that is right. Tully's line on this one is worth the whole episode: AI doesn't have the magic ✨

We also get into the trench coat problem in Australia, why independent makers can use trend forecasting differently to the big end of town, and what it actually feels like to stand in a room full of planners and fight for a trend you believe in.

And we close with the Fashion Five: Tully's first childhood memory of fashion, her style icon, her favourite designer, and what makes her hopeful about the future of the industry.

The Culture of Cloth is hosted by Veronica Tucker of Veronica Tucker the Label, a label built around the Goddess Project, a content series tracing the history of draped cloth as a political act.

Find the Goddess Project content below:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veronicatuckerthelabel?igsh=MXkxNGNtNTVlZDUycQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/veronicatuckerthelabel

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@veronicatuckerthelabel?si=JvM1ZGgv9Uy-xyGl

I am an entrepreneur. I started my own business when I became disenchanted with the reality of working within the fast fashion industry.

I am a mother of two, beautiful toddlers. My time with them is my priority and I funnel most of my effort and energy into building them into strong, empathetic, capable and loved human beings.

And more recently, I am TradWife curious.

Saying you’re a feminist was, and sometimes still is, a dirty word.

The new dirty word, when applied to women, is calling someone a TradWife™.

It is a label that instantly diminishes and caricatures a woman’s want for traditional gender roles.

But here’s the pattern: Women reach for something, let’s say the first wave of feminism in the mid 19th century. They achieve the vote, a right to have a voice.

In both world wars, men left to fight and women ran countries. They became labourers, medical staff, you name it…they did it. Then when the men came back women suddenly realised that they were just as capable at jobs outside of the ones they had always been prescribed and unpaid for.

Then came the contraception pill in the 1960s. Suddenly women had control over their bodies. Before the pill, pregnancy was an eventuality of married duty. Now it was a choice.

Women entered the professional workforce en masse in the 1970s and 80s. Big, puffy sleeves, power suits, taking up space…just not at the same rate of pay.

Enter the Girl Boss era.

Fun fact, I sat next to THE GirlBoss™, Sophia Amoruso, while having dinner with a friend in Melbourne. This was right after she had sold NastyGal in February 2017 for $20 million.

Nasty Gal was the poster child for the Girl Boss era, and so was Sophia Amoruso. I bought her book and I pledged my allegiance to the Girl Boss hustle.

She was reporting 10,000% growth in her company and revenues of over $100 million. Then her company and her brand of hustle culture ended up shooting her in the foot. It became her proverbial fall from grace.

Sophia’s story, like Icarus’, related a tale as old as time.

When you push hard enough, something has got to give.

But the problem wasn’t her success or her failure, it was the reaching itself that goes from being admired and adopted to being admonished.

Before we go further, let’s define our terms.

A feminist, in its truest form, is not a bra-burning man-hater. Bell hooks described feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. Notably: not against men but against the system. The caricature (strident, humourless, anti-everything) was constructed precisely to make the word embarrassing to claim. To make women self-police.

An entrepreneur, in its truest form, is not the hustle mythology of passive income and endless optimisation. It is survival with creativity attached, it is what happens when the existing structures of employment don’t accommodate your life, so you build your own. The freedom is real and the cost of that freedom is also real: no sick leave, no paid parental leave, no one to cover when a child is unwell, no colleagues to distribute the cognitive load to, no separation between work self and home self.

You’re expected to work as if you don’t have a family, and be with your family as if you don’t have a job.

And a TradWife? That requires a little more unpacking.

So what exactly is a TradWife?

The TradWife aesthetic is a woman who has chosen to centre her life around the home and domesticity. Cooking, homemaking, child rearing, deferring to her husband as the leader of the family and documenting it perfectly online.

Think soft linen, sourdough cooling on a rack, children playing quietly, picking flowers in the garden and slow mornings.

That part sounds beautiful, right? Not the deferring to your husband as the one and only leader of the family part, but the sourdough sounds nice. So do the flowers.

It’s about harking back to simpler times. Where women’s roles were well known and based in the home. They were secondary to their husbands. Seen, not heard. Just like the children.

Here’s what the aesthetic leaves out.

It strips out everything that made women’s labour formidable and leaves only the things that photograph well.

You see the finished, cooling bread, but not the mind that knew all the measurements by memory, passed down from her mother and her mother’s mother. You see her flowering garden, but not the woman who knew which plants kept children alive through winter. And you see the soft, quiet mornings, but not the vigil over her sick children the night before.

Real, traditional domesticity was not soft. It was serious and it was the difference between whose family survived and whose didn’t.

It got classified as women’s work precisely so it didn’t have to be valued or compensated.

Running a home was and still is no simple domestic task.

Everything is management. Management of time, money, food, social lives, education, knowledge and emotions. Sounds almost like the job description of a entrepreneur or CEO, don’t you think?

Women have been entrepreneurs since the beginning of time.

Instead of a boardroom, they had their home.

They managed inventory, cooked with whatever they had available to keep their family fed, wove and knitted garments to keep their family warm and learned natural medicinal remedies to keep their family alive.

I know how similar it is because I do both. At the same time.

Managing comments on a post with a controversial topic is like managing the emotions between my warring toddlers.

Making do with the ingredients in my pantry is like making do with the fabric remnants in my studio.

Creating new clothing designs is like inventing games for my little ones to play.

Managing my inventory and sales is like budgeting the weekly groceries.

Motherhood and running a business is very similar. The skills are entirely transferrable.

The TradWife aesthetic is gentrification in human form.

It appropriates all the imagery, sourdough, weaving, washing linens, picking flowers because it’s aesthetically pleasing. When the reality of these tasks were in direct response to the fact you had to grind your own wheat and bake your own bread otherwise you’d have none. You have to know how to weave your own fabric or you wouldn’t have any clothes. You had to wash your own linens because who the hell else would?

In essence, this is about rich people cosplaying as poor people.

It’s all aesthetic with absolutely no risk. No genuine dependence and no absence of choice.

I reminds me of all the rich kids moving to Fitzroy (here in Melbourne) and dressing like homeless people because to them it was a costume they could try on without any ramifications. The fantasy is only available as a costume to those who can afford to take it off at any moment.

It erases and insults the millennia of women who had no other choice. Who made do with what they had and took pride in what they created from nothing.

If you’ve heard the term TradWife then Hannah Neeleman is its figurehead. Rather, her husband probably is and she’s his “muse.”

Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. A Juilliard-trained dancer who married the heir of the JetBlue fortune. Living on a 328-acre estate in Utah, pulling sourdough from a $20,000 Aga she’s named Agnes. Ten million Instagram followers watching her live the simple life.

Another book you may have been served on your algorithm is Yesteryear. The premise is a TradWife influencer (a protagonist so closely modelled on Neeleman that the comparison is impossible to ignore) who suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855, the very era she has been fetishising, without the creature comforts of the life she has carefully curated.

The fact that this book exists, and that Anne Hathaway signed on to its film adaptation before it was even finished, is a demonstration of the power of our haptic data in relation to TradWife content.

But why are millennial women connecting and interacting with it?

The GirlBoss era, while well intentioned, did us a little dirty. We were told we could have it all. Everything we ever wanted. We just needed to work hard enough, long enough and keep grinding through the exhaustion.

And then came the breaking point.

It wasn’t about finally having your dream career or earning enough to take that huge holiday, or buy those insanely expensive shoes you’ve always wanted. It was the fact that we had to do all of that on top of what we were already doing. On top of thinking about relationships, fertility, trying for a family, raising a family. On top of rising cost of living. On top of pushing against the patriarchy on a daily basis.

We had to work as if we didn’t have a family, and be with our family as if we didn’t have a job.

So we cracked.

TradWife is a symptom of the GirlBoss era.

After years of grinding, pushing through and constantly trying to optimise, prioritise and improve on ourselves…we’re exhausted.

So seeing a woman, in her softness, enjoying being with her children, being provided for, tending to her garden and things that give her joy, comfort and respite looks and feels so much like relief.

It’s not just rest that women are searching for, it’s a specific type of rest.

It’s the rest of being an 8 year old girl, with no responsibilities. Of having everything done for you. Your food, your clothes, your routine. And what do you get to do? Whatever the hell you feel like.

You can read for hours, draw til your heart’s content, make daisy chains and listen to all your favourite music.

The freedom of burden. The lack of responsibility.

The feeling of stepping off the treadmill is something that women are craving right now.

So when it’s shown to them through a little digital rectangle, they will stop. They will watch, they will wonder and they will sit in the slowness of it all. The softness, the respite.

This stopping, this hovering, it’s called haptic data. The scroll that slows without committing to a like or a save. That’s the algorithm reading it as engagement regardless.

The algorithm reads this pause, it notes it down and reports it back to the businesses keeping track of what is currently trending. It tells them ‘Women are watching TradWife content, they love it! That must mean they actually want to go back to this kind of domesticity, right?’

But it’s not. We’re pausing because we’re imagining what that type of life might feel like.

What if we gave away the hustle for a little house on the prairie?

What if I only had to focus on myself and doing the simple things?

What if I could go back to when I was little?

The insidious thing about this type of content is that it can be a gateway to religious conversion.

Feminism has always been associated with either total atheism or paganism - think witches riding on broomsticks and casting spells on unsuspecting men who say one misogynistic comment.

Traditional values, and in this case, the TradWife trend is embedded with religious doctrine. It reeks of it.

This types of content, this conservative, traditional content is not just aesthetic, it is deeply theological. It is built on a doctrine of gender complementarity. Of men as heads of the households and women as helpers and incubators.

Hannah Neeleman herself is a devout Mormon.

The interesting connection between Mormonism and content creation goes all the way back to the early 00’s and the Blogspot days.

I myself was deep in that space.

I followed 5+ bloggers religiously (haha, yes I know) who were also Mormon. Love Taza (also ironically a Juilliard trained dancer) and Sydney from The Daybook were my favourites. I remember them talking about how creativity, specifically online content creativity, is promoted within Mormonism. I guess you could view it as a modern day version of “spreading the good word”. So instead of door-knocking and pamphlet-giving, they were prolific bloggers who shared all aspects of Mormon life.

The conversion happens through repetition and normalisation.

That church is a part of everyday life, that prayer is what you do before you eat dinner, that reading the bible is the same thing as reading a bedtime story.

I would know, I grew up catholic. Irish catholic specifically.

Growing up going to church every Sunday, praying before dinner, reading the bible as part of daily school life was just normal to me. It’s what everyone did around me and I never stopped to think whether the words that were coming out of my mouth were things that I actually believed or even ever seriously interrogated.

I’ll be writing more about my own relationship with religion, and what I found when I finally started asking questions, in an upcoming piece for paid subscribers.

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Naomi Davis of Love Taza (also, ironically, a Juilliard-trained dancer, also Mormon) helped build this entire content ecosystem from the Blogspot days. And then one day she simply vanished and to this day nobody knows why.

So, how does watching a woman bake bread and pick flowers result in religious conversion. It doesn’t necessarily. But what it does do is make tech companies think that’s what we’re interested in.

This is the insidious part, not the religion, not the woman, but the algorithm.

Millennials are the last generation to have had a computer-free childhood.

The year 2000 came and despite our parents thinking the whole world was going to end, we were excited. And hopeful and ready to ride the wave of technology into our futures.

Then, that future came about.

We had a rare few years as the first digital natives. We Tumblr’d, we blogged, we MySpaced our hearts out. But soon enough things started to get dark. The novelty wore off and the impact of social media, online forums and the darkest corners of the internet were stark and scary.

Home ownership, once an exciting eventuality, got further and further out of reach. Job security became scarce. The climate, the cost of living and democratic stability.

Everything the world promised, the Y2K Microsoft ads filled with dolphins and rainbows, the promise of Spy Kids-esque tech, all dissolved and the reality felt disappointing.

So when we see someone, around our age, living a life free of tech, baking bread and picking flowers it reminds us of a beloved 90s movie. The final scene of Matilda where she finally finds safety and respite with Miss Honey.

Yet although it feels totally analog, the irony is that we’re watching it through a screen. And they’re making it for a screen.

We don’t see the tripods, the lights, the phones and the re-takes. The editing and the scripting. The filters and the uploading and the finding of the perfect caption.

It seems like a beautifully candid window into a simpler past. It’s not. It is actually a heavily orchestrated, edited and aestheticised piece of content.

The moments we hover, we watch and we stay are the moments the Big Tech Bros start writing down notes.

It’s the moment trend reports start to build, algorithms start churning and this kind of content gets pushed faster and wider than you could ever imagine. And suddenly, everyone is getting served this filtered snippet of rural life.

They see the watch rate, and they start drawing the wrong conclusion entirely. They start misreading our haptic data as us, as women, wanting to return to that life. But that’s not why it resonates with us.

And how can older, primarily white, men understand what women have been working through, especially since the GirlBoss era and its downfall? How we’ve been asked by society to not just push ourselves, educate ourselves, earn, buy and own everything we can…but to do it all while still fulfilling our traditional duties of motherhood, homemaking and domesticity.

They have never had to weigh up the cost of childcare against the cost of removing yourself from the workforce when you realise it’s actually cheaper and less destructive to your body and your mind.

They have never had to navigate the changes that physiologically happen to a woman when she is trying to conceive, maybe with a PMOS diagnosis (like myself — PCOS was officially renamed PMOS, Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome, in May 2026), then to become pregnant, perhaps experience a miscarriage only to go on to become pregnant again, carry a baby to full term and go through the life altering, brain altering, nervous system altering experience of birthing a child and becoming an entirely new person.

Of navigating post partum anxiety, depression, breastfeeding. The intrusive thoughts. The whole new body you’ve never met before, that feels like you’re an alien in your own skin.

These are just the tips of the iceberg of what women deal with and have always had to deal with on top of living their lives and surviving.

This whole part of our lives, this raw, visceral, painful and beautiful experience of being a woman is something that gets overlooked and downplayed.

The strength it takes to endure, to push through the exhaustion knowing that no-one else is going to do it, to comfort a crying baby when you’re feeling identical to them on the inside but you’re the adult now…you have to be strong and comfort them. The forgiveness and respect it requires to find acceptance and gratitude for your new body, knowing it will never be the same.

This is not softness. This is the definition of strength and endurance.

I believe this strength comes from all the women who came before us.

Of our matrilineal ancestors with their arms wrapped around us in the middle of the night when we’re rocking our own babies and feeling like we’re not enough. They’re there, whispering that we are and gently wiping our tears.

Every move women make, including the movement towards rest, is monitored.

Does this mean they want to be housewives?

Does this mean they want to be breadwinners?

Does this mean they want more children? Does this mean they want no children?

The TradWife trend is telling the Big Tech Bros something, it’s telling them that we want our old lives back.

But they’ve got it wrong.

We don’t want that back, why would we? The oppression, the lack of choice, the absence of bodily autonomy…hell no. What we want is a fucking break and the ability to enjoy things without being judged for them.

The glow of the TradWife aesthetic, what draws millennial women in, is not the domesticity…it’s the simplicity.

The slow, analog nature of living small with only our village as our village, not the entire globe through our digital device. The feeling of being provided for, of being able to take off our armour and be soft.

Women aren’t just tired of doing too much. They’re tired of doing too much and having it treated as nothing.

The TradWife aesthetic is appealing because it makes domestic work look important and beautiful and central. But the actual fantasy underneath it isn’t submission or softness or a return to prescribed roles. It’s a partnership where the labour is shared, seen and returned.

In my house, my husband washes his own clothes and I wash mine. We take turns with the kids’ washing and the home washing. I cook, he cleans. I look after the tidying inside, he does all the work outside. We swap when we feel like a change.

And we always, always thank each other for what we do. Whether that’s him taking out the bins or me picking up groceries. It’s about showing each other that we see when the other person is doing something. That it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

That’s not TradWife. That’s just a marriage where both people are paying attention.

What women who are scrolling past sourdough and flower gardens are looking for isn’t a return to domesticity. It’s that feeling of being seen in the work.

I’ve always loved building things.

I think it’s why my brain loves designing and patternmaking, because in essence, that’s building. Creating a garment from 2D to 3D is the same cognitive process as building a house.

So I love building flat pack furniture, fixing my son’s toy cars, creating elaborate pillow forts.

My husband loves organising things, categorising things, cleaning and tidying. It soothes his Virgo brain and I’m so glad it does because I genuinely couldn’t care less about any of those things

I deal with house spiders. Once I even extracted a wayward possum from the kitchen and gently placed it outside. My husband deals with anything involving security or the dark.

We play to what we enjoy and what our strengths are, and we don’t tear each other down if those things don’t fit into predetermined gender roles.

The whole notion of TradWife assumes a gender binary and a heterosexual household. A male provider and a female domestic.

It assumes that gender is rigid and binary and that the only relevant question is the role women want to play.

None of that maps onto queer relationships, non-binary people, single mothers and the household where it was never a choice in the first place, but an expectation.

TradWife is also a middle class fantasy, it truly is and it isn’t particularly viable for the majority of the world’s population right now. It requires a partner who earns enough money to support an entire family. Something that, in our capitalist society, demands a higher and higher income every year.

The aesthetic is a primarily white trend. The soft linen, the cottage, the flower garden. Not a bright colour or pattern in sight. It’s the visual language of a type of femininity that was always coded white and built on the backs of women who were never invited into it.

Black women, Indigenous women, women of colour, all people who for centuries have been the ones doing the labour. Choice had nothing to do with it, it was their survival. How they fed their families and how they made a living when further education and a career was withheld from them.

And while we scroll and pause and watch a blonde, white, thin woman pulling her sourdough from the oven and hanging laundry on the line, there are the women for whom this was never an aesthetic choice. It was their life.

From dawn to dusk they laboured, they cleaned, they cooked.

They dreamed of how different their lives would look if they had been born a man or, god forbid, had a choice, as a woman, to live her life however she liked.

When I see typical TradWife content my instant and visceral reaction is disgust and insult.

It disappoints me and makes me feel like we, as women, are regressing and we don’t even notice because it looks so pretty.

But then it hits me on another level…I see myself.

I bake banana bread with my kids every week. I put laundry on the line, maybe not in a pretty linen dress with the sun shining on me and in a field of wildflowers but I do it. I love my husband and enjoy seeing him happy and loved. I make my own clothes and wear pretty dresses.

And then the horror dawns, does that make me a TradWife?

Does that erase the strong woman my mother raised me to be? The mother that found a venomous snake in our backyard and did not hesitate to grab the nearest spade and chop its head clean off in front of both her teenagers.

Does that erase every moment I’ve chosen to hold my ground when grown men have tried to intimidate me?

Does that erase my intelligence or my activism or my innovative mind?

No. It doesn’t.

I have created my life in alignment with my values. Family. Dreams. Knowledge. Beauty. Power. Inheritance. Understanding and endurance.

This is not to say that religion or wanting to be cared and provided for is wrong.

It’s also not a requirement of modern women to be entrepreneurs or astronauts or scientists.

But historical knowledge is vital here. And what history tells us, again and again, is that women have always been secondary, vulnerable and commodified.

When algorithms misread our haptic data and serve this content to more people, it doesn’t just reflect culture, it actively shapes the future.

These signals get passed onto young men. Young men who are already feeling lost and undervalued in this modern age. They are being handed ready-made answers by older men who trade in certainty (Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan - the three big dogs of digital conservatism) and being told that women want this, women are happiest this way, this is the natural order.

An impressionable generation who don’t know how the algorithm is actively manipulating them are genuinely at risk of reversing the tide.

Being a mother of a little boy, this is devastating to watch.

Every day, every hour there is a learning opportunity for him. For me to actively shape his view of the world to take into consideration others perspectives, women’s perspectives, his sister’s perspective. It is an active learning process that requires constant vigilance, especially once he starts school.

And believe me, I will be doing my darnedest to take advantage of every possible learning opportunity.

The point is choice. We can’t control the Big Tech Bros monitoring our haptic data, we can’t force patriarchal men to understand our experience. But what we can do is choose and choose freely. In our own lives, privately.

Walk around with the audacity of a middle aged, white man. That’s my motto.

And no, we don’t want the old days back, trust me. What we want is a fucking break and to enjoy things without being judged by people who don’t even understand our life experience.

I am no longer TradWife curious. I have created my own life with what I choose as my values. I am an ever changing, ever learning, ever growing human being.

Once we realise women are human beings, we’ll all be better for it.

A woman is not a monolith. Womanhood is not monolithic.

The respect she displayed for the silk jersey fabric she was working with. How all the draped pleats seemed to have a life of their own, as if she were chiselling a Grecian sculpture from a hunk of marble.

I knew her work was reminiscent of Ancient Greek fashion. But what I didn’t know was that it went way further back than that.

The Goddess Project grew the moment I decided to ask that question. The one that acted like a key to a locked door. One that spiralled down, and down until a whole underground system lit up and I saw the pure breadth of history and how we relate to draped dress.

This project asks many questions, but these are the main three:

1. How do we relate to fashion? Do we wear it or does it wear us?

2. Why are women inextricably linked to the act of craft?

3. How has history decided to tell itself? And what is the true story?

While I’m still only about a quarter of the way into this project, my mind has already been cracked open and I have discovered my own multitude of prejudices and preconceived “truths”.

What we know, or “know”, has embedded it’s way into our knowledge through layers and layers of biased people and institutions. Every history ever written down has been written down by someone with specific interests, prejudices and subconscious biases.

Whether that is male archeologists finding skeletal remains of a warrior and assuming them to be male, when in fact, with modern technology and dental findings, we now know it was a female skeleton. A female warrior.

Or the geo-political warfare of the 19th century that utilised a hegemonic approach to categorise ethnicities into civilised and uncivilised, based on a constructed view of whatever ‘civilised’ meant.

But really it was this podcast episode I did about surname etymology that really cracked me open. Here’s an excerpt:

Old English had two occupational suffixes. Two ways of turning a job into a name. The suffix -er was masculine. The suffix -estre was feminine.

So a man who baked was a bæcere - which became Baker. A woman who baked was a bæcestre (bake-ster) which became Baxter.

A man who brewed was a brewere - which became Brewer. A woman who brewed was a brewestre (brew-ster) - which became Brewster.

A man who wove was a webba. A woman who wove was a webestre. Which became Webster.

Surnames were never only about the male lineage.

The suffix -estre is the linguistic fingerprint of women’s work. It survived because the work was so central, economically essential, that it had to be named.

But over time the gendered meaning faded and by the 13th century, webster was already being used for men as well as women, the feminine origin blurring. And then, as surnames became hereditary across England through the 13th and 14th centuries, these words got locked in permanently then passed to sons, and to their sons, through generations that had no idea what the name originally meant.

The women were erased in two stages. First from the word. Then from the memory.

Read more

https://www.instagram.com/p/DYsJxDcAeiW/?igsh=aWo3Y3Jybmt0ZGxx

The girl who loves a last minute trip. A new experience.

While many people have their go-to ice-cream flavour, I choose something different ever time. The wilder the better.

(For example, last week I had marscapone and chilli honey. Yesterday I had cookie dough and miso caramel - yum!)

I have this never ending hope that my next favourite flavour, designer, fabric, movie or song is out there. All I need to do is keep trying new things.

The downside in applying this mental framework to my business has been starkly mirrored back to me this week.

Last year I wasn’t able to create as much physical work in my sewing studio.

It was my son’s first year of kindergarten and we got sick. A lot. Specifically 16 time in 10 months.

It wasn’t just sniffly noses and grumpy kids. It was ambulances and week-long stays in hospital. It was learning what a ‘tracheal tug’ was. Nights spent simply watching chests rise and fall, counting the time in between and listening for how ‘wet’ a cough was.

It was a tough year to say the least.

That meant there was no time to be at a sewing machine, creating clothes and sewing patterns.

My world became our home.

My desk became the couch.

And my studio became my phone.

All I could do, between caring for my kids, was create content on my phone. I wasn’t sewing anything, which meant I couldn’t share my own creations.

I started sharing knowledge.

Things that are known in the industry but not necessarily common knowledge to the general public.

So I kept it up. I kept showing up, every day. Creating and sharing.

And it went bonkers.

My following jumped from 43k instagram followers to 181k in 12 months.

It made me feel like I was doing something helpful and productive while I was home caring for my little family.

But I’ll admit, I became addicted.

To the rush of making content that went viral. To watching the numbers grow, to the followers flowing in.

It was addictive, almost like a game.

That was until this week. With Shein’s acquisition of Everlane.

Everlane’s grab for more money, more expansive and more growth was ultimately it’s downfall. That’s not to say growth is bad.

It’s that growth for the sake of growth is not sustainable.

And it resulted in a virus like Shein taking it as it’s new host.

And while that is a morbid snapshot of where the industry is at the moment, it struck a chord with me.

While I’m certainly not a fast fashion giant like Shein, I have been using my brain like one.

The constant output, quick turnaround, optimum productivity and focussing on virality and numbers.

For me, this acquisition forced important questions to the surface. Questions I’d been needing to ask myself for almost a year. Questions that we all need to be asking ourselves right now.

In a situation that feels hopeless, how do we fight back?

How do we operate in a way that is sustainable?

And especially, when the world feels like it’s falling apart, how do we keep creating?

The women I’ve been researching as part of my current project, The Goddess Project, have inspired my new approach.

Millennia of women have worked at looms. Creating slowly, together with other women. No rushing, no shortcuts. Just existing and creating at their own pace.

Knowing that good things take time.

I’ve realised that it truly doesn’t serve us to operate at the level of these big players, it only serves them.

To fight back, we need to actually stop fighting and remove ourselves from the merry-go-round of consumption and productivity.

We have to trust that the people who value the same things will follow us to a quieter corner.

This is that corner.

I’ll be sharing here more often, with a deeper intent to give the topics room to breathe. Away from the flash-in-the-pan nature of Instagram. Thank you for being here x

Everyone is calling this a sellout. It’s not, it’s a successful infection. Shein is a virus.

Shein doesn’t want Everlane’s values, it wants its skin.

The fast fashion giant didn’t spend $100 million to acquire Everlane’s mission statement. It was about acquiring sustainability certifications without having to do the work, an all-access pass to the Nordstrom shelf space and the trust of the average American consumer.

The Everlane demographic consists of an older group of millennials, we’re talking people in their late 30s and early 40s, who find the concept of a $4 Shein dress ethically and aesthetically off-putting. They have disposable income, but only for brands who align with their values.

These are the millennials who know what late-stage capitalism looks like and have been actively spending against it for a decade. They’re Shein’s most valuable unreachable demographic. Until now.

As a result of attempting to compete and expand, Everlane has been sinking into the quicksand of debt.

In 2020 they took private equity money from L Catterton. The moment that happened, they were legally and structurally obligated to grow, not because they wanted to but because that’s what taking institutional money forces them to do.

Growth, expansion, competing, it’s all part of the contract. Money is meant to grow more money.

They brought in a new CEO and attempted to push the brand more upmarket. To compete with brands like The Frankie Shop and Theory that had that ‘accessible luxury’ offering. The idea was higher price points, higher profit margins and faster growth to justify the valuation.

But it didn’t work. The Everlane customer wanted what they had always gotten, and when it changed, they stopped spending their money. When there are no new customers being captured and you’re losing your existing customer base, that’s when everything starts falling apart.

Debt accumulated to fund the pivot. $90 million by the time they went looking for a buyer. A $25 million loan and a $65 million revolving credit facility.

Ethics and institutional capital were never going to work.

Everlane attempted to stay the course, and even tried to expand, but money-making always wins in the end.

If they’d never taken the money from private equity, stayed in their lane, catered to their existing customer base, they’d probably still be existing. Maybe not growing or even improving YoY, but they’d be here.

This hubristic attempt at growth, to expand beyond what they were, always ends in tragedy. The Greeks knew that, and so should we.

My first reaction when I heard this story was: surely the certification companies will revoke their certifications now that Shein owns them. Surely Nordstrom will drop the contract.

Surely they won’t get away with this.

It won’t. And the reason it won’t is more unsettling than the acquisition itself.

Nordstrom won’t drop Everlane, because in their minds, they’re not stocking Shein. They’re stocking an existing brand that has its place in their brand assortment and their customers’ wallets. The average Nordstrom customer will not know the difference.

Despite announcing it publicly, Everlane probably never achieved their much-wanted B Corp status. As they expanded, took PE money and spiralled into debt, this grab for the ‘certified B Corp’ badge went on the back burner.

But, even if they had completed it (B Corp is an ethical business certification run by a private nonprofit called B Lab) the B Corp architecture is designed to survive this kind of acquisition.

When a brand with B Corp certification gets acquired, certification isn’t automatically revoked.

The new owner has 90 days to notify B Lab and then a year to re-certify under new ownership.

If the subsidiary (Everlane) operates under a different name to the parent (Shein), it can certify independently. The parent never has to certify. Ever.

That means despite Shein’s track record it can still operate a subsidiary that is considered ‘ethical’.

This isn’t a loophole that someone has found, it’s how the B Lab system was intentionally built. And it’s built that way because the people who built it knew that, unfortunately, ethical business has to exist within the realm of capitalism, so they built the architecture to accommodate that rather than fight it.

Their original intention was a hopeful but, in the end, naive one.

They hoped that this loophole would serve as a Trojan Horse of ethical change.

That, instead of brands being punished when they got acquired by larger parent companies, they would be able to go in and change them from the inside out.

But money has a way of eroding good intentions.

Everlane tried to beat Shein at their own game. Bigger, faster, more profit. And in doing so, it became the perfect host. Weakened, debt-riddled and exhausted.

The lesson isn’t that ethical fashion is impossible, it’s that you cannot use the same framework as these big players. The only way not to lose is to refuse to play the game.