Weaving is one of the oldest surviving practices in the world, with its history firmly rooted in the Neolithic period when the creation of woven textiles exploded, with most households producing their own cloth. Since then, weaving has influenced history and culture around the planet, becoming an indispensable skill connected to family traditions, farmed fibres and local production — spanning to modern times when the loom became mechanised during the Industrial Revolution. This issue of Talking Textiles focuses on woven fabrics and their origins, since both students and designers everywhere have taken up the loom as their most important instrument. The loom is of course a tool for weaving, but it also becomes an object of veneration and reflection, a self-sufficient work of art, a modernist ready-made or a recycled found object in the deserted, pandemic-stricken streets. The multiple fruits of these looms are collected and savoured in these pages and become a token of the contemporary revival of Arts and Crafts in textiles, fashion and interiors.