The number of hours it took to create the thread, let alone weave it into the fabric that you need to make the shirt and then cut it and sew it was immense. A twin sheet is 29 miles of thread out of 200 thread count. And so that would have taken a 59 days just when they at the indian, at theindian spinning rate. If you take, this is a different fibre, but if you take the speed at which a european women spun using spinning wheels, that would have been 65 days they spun wool. Cotton is actually harder to spin. But to get the general concept, you can see the the comparison.
Author and journalist Virginia Postrel talks about her book The Fabric of Civilization and How Textiles Made the World with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Postrel tells the fascinating story behind the clothes we wear and everything that goes into producing them throughout history. The history of textiles, Postrel argues, is a good way of understanding the history of the world.