Textiles

Two risks dominate textiles, and both are capable of destroying an object rather than merely altering it. Light fades dyes irreversibly and weakens fibres, and keratin-eating insects consume wool, silk and fur outright. Humidity matters too, but for most textile collections it is a distant third.

Light

Textiles sit in the more responsive categories in every classification scheme, and dyed textiles in the most responsive. Both the colour and the fibre are affected: dyes fade, and the cellulose or protein of the fibre itself is weakened by prolonged exposure, so a faded textile is also a more fragile one.

The damage is cumulative and irreversible, which makes it a budgeting problem rather than a threshold problem. Light exposure budgets covers the arithmetic, and the practical conclusion is always the same for textiles: illuminance control helps, but rotation is the lever that changes the answer by an order of magnitude.

For a permanent display of a significant textile, the honest options are a facsimile with the original shown occasionally, or an accepted rate of loss stated openly. There is no lighting technology that avoids the choice.

Pests

Wool, silk, fur, feather, hair and skin are food. The webbing clothes moth and the carpet beetles are the main threats in European collections, and their larvae do the damage while living hidden inside the material.

The consequences for practice:

• Monitoring traps in every textile store, checked monthly, recorded numerically.
• Quarantine and inspect everything incoming before it enters a store. Loans returning from elsewhere included.
• Sealed enclosures rather than open shelving wherever possible.
• Regular inspection of the material itself, because adults in a trap indicate larvae somewhere, and the larvae are in the object rather than in the trap.
• Freezing as the standard treatment for most textiles, which tolerate it well.

Cast larval skins, webbing, frass and grazed patches are the evidence to look for. A single cast skin persists for years, so it indicates history rather than necessarily a current infestation.

Support and storage

Textiles have no rigidity of their own, so gravity is a slow structural load. Anything hanging is being stretched, and anything folded is being creased along a line where fibres will eventually break.

Flat is best where the object fits: in a drawer or a shallow box, interleaved with unbuffered acid-free tissue, with no more than a couple of items in a stack.

Rolled for anything long: face outwards on a padded roller of generous diameter, covered, and stored horizontally on supports at each end rather than resting on its own circumference.

Folded only when nothing else is possible, with rolled tissue padding inside every fold to give it a radius rather than a crease, and with a schedule to refold along different lines.

Hanging only for garments robust enough to take it, on a padded hanger shaped to the garment, and never for anything with weak shoulders, heavy beading or an unstable structure.

Costume with beading, metal thread or applied decoration is a special case, because the decoration is heavier and stiffer than the ground fabric and will tear it given time under load.

Enclosure chemistry

Wool and silk are protein fibres and are damaged by alkaline conditions. Buffered board and tissue, which carry an alkaline reserve, are therefore the wrong choice for them, and some dyes shift colour in an alkaline environment as well.

For a mixed textile store, unbuffered neutral pH tissue and board throughout is the simplest correct answer. Acid-free boxes and tissue covers the specification.

Climate

A moderate, stable range suits textiles. Sustained damp brings mould and encourages the damp-associated pests, and very dry conditions make fibres brittle and increase static, which matters when handling fragile material.

Because the light and pest risks dominate, a textile store that is stable at an unremarkable value and thoroughly dark and sealed is in better shape than one held precisely at a target figure with the lights on and no traps.