Sewing is a means to an end for me. Let me shock you now: I don't particularly like to sew. It is my day job and all, but I like the creativity, the problem solving...but sewing is a means to an end. It is a technical skill anyone can learn, my repertoire of skills happens to include hand sewing. That's all.
In this life, my great grandmother was a pretty proficient seamstress, and she was around until I was 13. She was young, when clothing mattered, in the 19 teens. She was poor, so she learned to sew by hand. My grandmother was a tailor, as in an actual, honest to God, belonged to the Union, mens wear tailor for Nieman Marcus. She was one of the first women in the US to achieve that, and in the 1950s no less. I had other relatives who worked as seamstresses and for several generations. My dad's grandmother worked as a seamstress, made some of the nudie suits, worked as a seamstress on movies (and made Davy Crockett's fringed jacket for Disney at one point) and made patterns for Hollywood Patterns and was a designer for Catalina swimwear, back when that was cool. Sewing is as part of this life as any other.
So when I got curious, both my g-grandma and my grandma gave me an 1866 Ladies Almanac ad on sewing machines, that had the time for machine and hand sewing. Then told me to meet it. Now, it's only been like recently (I'm stupid sometimes) that I figured out this was for civil war garments...not like modern ones, but I have spent a lot of time meeting those specs.
I did a bit of living history and recreated a Viking dress from hand, bone needle and all. I think people think of life in terms of old Greek statues: all white and pristine. Life isn't really like that and people are people regardless of the year. We light bright and pretty things, and always have. Dying has gotten much easier, but life has always been in color. So I was never surprised by it, and we find a lot of color in ancient times but we're not always taught that. (And as an aside, I don't wear black but bright colors all the time, so I might be biased.)