Woven Memories

Do you have specific memories or feelings associated with fabrics? Fabrics are the base material of clothing, furniture, curtains and many other objects. Many types of fabric exist, varying for example in heaviness and smoothness. We not only wear them and sit on them; the outspoken features of fabrics also make them suitable as adjectives in languages (someone can be “woolly” and something can be “silky”). In this story, I will look at the way satin, alpaca and velvet symbolize the character of a specific person or location in Combray, the first part of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.