Textile is any cloth or fabric made by weaving, knitting, or otherwise combining threads or fibers together. Your T-shirt is a textile, woven from cotton threads. Your winter sweater is a textile, knitted from wool. Even the parachute that safely lowers a skydiver to the ground is a textile, carefully constructed from strong synthetic fibers.

For thousands of years, creating textiles was one of humanity's most important skills. Ancient civilizations traded textiles across continents. Chinese silk, Egyptian linen, and Indian cotton traveled thousands of miles because people valued well-made cloth. Before factories and machines, producing textiles required enormous time and skill. A single piece of cloth might take weeks to make by hand.

Today, textile manufacturing is a huge global industry. Modern textile mills can produce thousands of yards of fabric quickly, using everything from natural materials like cotton and wool to synthetic materials like polyester and nylon. The textile industry makes the clothes we wear, the carpets we walk on, the curtains in our windows, and even the strong fabrics used in car seats and medical equipment.