Textile poetics often focus on the female body and female textile production. But globally, textile labour is not exclusively gendered as female. Nor is textile labour necessarily a route to empowerment, as the craftivism discourse of the past decade has proclaimed, or the tranquillity well-being marketing frequently advertises. This writing moves into the future to consider textile production by men portrayed by German author Andreas Eschbach’s first novel Die Haarteppichknüpfer (1995), translated in English as The Hair-Carpet Weavers (2005).