The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair

Author:Kassia St. Clair [Clair, Kassia St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Textile & Costume, History & Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, General, history, art, Fashion, Epub3, design
ISBN: 9781631496363
Google: VweLDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Published: 2019-11-12T23:38:06.453520+00:00

Plus Fours at 28,000 Feet

Because it’s there.

George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, New York Times, 1923

On May 1, 1999, a body was found high on the north face of Everest. In itself this was not unusual: the world’s highest mountain has reaped the lives of over two hundred mountaineers and Sherpas in the past century. Most lie where they fell: buried under snow or stone-piled cairns if they’re lucky, prominently displayed like grisly sculptures on increasingly busy paths if not. (The body of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber, has been nicknamed Green Boots by the many climbers who, since his death in 1996, have stepped over his neon-clad remains to reach the summit.) The body found on this occasion, however, was different.12

He lay—face down, head uphill—in a pile of scree at 26,760 feet. Strong wind had stripped the layers of fabric from the back of the body, and sun and time had scoured and bleached the exposed flesh as white as the surrounding snow. The arms were outstretched toward the peak, gloveless fingers gripping into gravel, as if to halt his slide. The muscles of his back, still defined, stood out still with the effort. Gravel had gathered around the body and frozen marble-hard, immuring it in the mountainside. One hobnail-boot-shod leg lay outstretched; the other—terminating in a bone-pale naked calf and heel—lay gently crossed over the first, scraps of thickly knitted sock caught between them.13

It was the boot that gave the team of seekers a clue as to the age of the body. Hobnail boots hadn’t been used much after the mid-1930s, and no climbers, that they knew of, had died this high up between 1924 and 1938. The murmur of the boots and tattered clothes, made from natural fibers, gave way to a shout of certainty as Tap Richards, an American mountaineer, leafed through the thin layers of fabric still intact at the nape of the neck: a laundry label neatly sewn to a shirt collar: G. Leigh-Ma . . .14

The last man to see George Mallory alive seven decades previously and live to tell the tale was Noel Odell, a fellow mountaineer. He wrote on his return with pride and perhaps a little envy that on June 4, 1924, Mallory and his twenty-two-year-old climbing partner, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, climbed from Camps III to IV in a mere two and a half hours, pushing themselves and their new-fangled oxygen equipment to the limit in preparation for the final assault on the summit. Although the weather conditions had been unsettled, it promised to be perfect for their climb to the summit on the 8th—Mallory told Odell so in a note delivered by a porter the day before, apologizing for having upset his cooking stove as they left Camp V. (It had rolled off down the mountain, leaving Odell to chew a chilled dinner and breakfast.) His final sighting of the pair was at 12:50 p.m. on the day of their bid to be the first men to climb Everest.

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