Ephemerality - Fragile fabric

"While textiles can be described as tentative and provisional in character because of their ephemeral qualities and consequently the temporal meanings that have been attributed to them, they are not physically brittle in the sense that they do not break if dropped...Textiles can be both ephemeral and durable, withstanding years of wear, laundering and changes of use from curtain to patchwork quilt... Textiles' ability to withstand and adopt to changing conditions, and still manage to retain vestiges of their original form, is not unlike the resiliency of contemporary identity. Yet their ephemerality is also a feature which figures importantly in the particularly adaptable character that makes textiles analogous to the provisional nature of the contemporary sense of self-identity."

Judith Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Cultures of Everyday Life, Berg, Oxford 2000, p.132