Vi ricordate i costumi di Master and commander? Rachel Dickinson per lo Smithsonian Magazine ci porta a scoprire il piccolo laboratorio tessile Thistle Hill Weavers, nel centro di New York, che produce tessuti per l’industria cinematografica.

Rabbit Goody, che ha fondato il Thistle Hill Weavers nel 1989, gestisce questo stabilimento che si distingue per la sua abilità straordinaria nel riportare in vita il passato attraverso i tessuti. Produce tessuti per film e programmi televisivi, case storiche e aziende di arredamento o abbigliamento di alta gamma. La sua specialità? Tessuti che replicano fedelmente le trame, le texture, il peso e il colore dei materiali tessili storici.

Thistle Hill Weavers, founded by Rabbit Goody in 1989, makes textiles for movies and television shows, historic houses, and high-end furniture and clothing companies. What sets this little mill in Central New York apart from every other cloth manufacturer in the country is Goody’s remarkable ability to re-animate the past: No one else produces short runs of textiles that so faithfully replicate the weave, texture, weight and color of historic fabrics. If you’ve seen “The Gilded Age” or Cinderella Man, you’ve seen Goody’s work in action. The majority of Thistle Hill’s income comes from creating more contemporary fabrics for interior designers and architects, and from the work Goody does with historic houses, such as Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia. Yet many of her favorite jobs have come from Hollywood costume designers seeking perfectly rendered, historically accurate textiles to recreate items like Abraham Lincoln’s shawl for the movie Lincoln or much of the colonial-era clothing seen in the 2008 mini-series “John Adams.”

Goody ha iniziato a tessere da adolescente, affascinata dal processo e, dopo essersi laureata in antropologia culturale ed etnomusicologia, ha tessuto a mano sciarpe da uomo in cashmere e seta per venderle alle fiere e poi fornirle direttamente ai negozi di New York. Più tardi, come capo del programma di arti domestiche e curatore dei tessuti al Farmers’ Museum di Cooperstown, Goody divenne un’esperta dei primi tessuti americani e ha anche fondato il Textile History Forum. Nel 1989 comprò i primi due telai e fondò il Thistle Hill Weavers, che come prima grande commessa ottenne l’incarico di riprodurre i jeans per le rievocazioni della Guerra Civile.

Today Thistle Hill Weavers employs seven people whom Goody has trained to run the nine mechanized shuttle looms dating from the 1890s through the 1960s, plus archaic-sounding equipment like a warp winder and a quiller—all necessary to transform big cones of thread into beautiful pieces of fabric. Goody’s workers generally arrive with no knowledge of weaving; she teaches them everything they need to know.

Negli ultimi 25 anni i tessuti di Thistle Hill sono stati utilizzati per gli abiti di film come Master and Commander di Peter Weir, Non è un paese per vecchi dei fratelli Coen e Noah di Darren Aronofsky.

Modern Daily Knitting pubblica il resoconto di una visita alla tessitura Thistle Hill.

More people are discovering the appeal of small runs of fabric carefully designed and woven on early 20th-century equipment. This cloth remains the product of a human mind, hands, and knowledge. If textiles can be said to have a soul, Thistle Hill’s certainly do—even though that very idea flies in the face of Rabbit’s approach to her work. “When people ask me what I do, I say I’m a weaver by trade because that tells people that this is not a craft. It’s not a hobby. I’m not an artist. I’m a tradesman. To me, a tradesman has both the understanding of the process and the ability to work with the equipment to come out with a finished product. Coming out with a finished product is the goal. Not being artsy fartsy. We don’t get paid unless stuff goes out the door,” she says.