I’ve had one of those times when I don’t like anything that I make. Perhaps this is because I had resolved to make a couple of things for myself!
I spent a whole day making what turned out to be a great piece of fabric but when I made it up in my favourite skirt pattern and tried it on I didn’t like it at all. The moral of this story is : don’t try to wear stripes if your stomach is not quite as flat as it used to be the last time you had a stripey skirt ten years ago.
striped nuno fabric
Without darts, this would have been a great skirt, but given the non uniform nature of the stripes using the Nuno Felting technique, it was impossible to create the shaping in the waist without the neat, straight darts making the stripes look unpleasantly wobbly. I’ve resolved to make it into a size 10 gathered skirt that will look wonderful on the dummy but will no longer fit my size 14 hips!
Alber Elbaz in The Observer Magazine 17th May 2009
I did take some consolation from an article in The Observer Magazine about Albert Elbaz, the chief designer at Lanvin who told the interviewer - ‘My psychologist says dissatisfaction, it’s the engine that keeps me going. Seems that even the most successful designers are driven by the need to make something better next time.
But something else in the article really got me thinking about the whole issue of making clothes for ourselves. Elbaz, we are told, is ‘interested in designing the dress that a woman wears when she falls in love with herself.’ Whilst this may be a little over dramatic (how many items in your wardrobe make you feel that good?!) it is true that when we put on an item of clothing, especially something new, we want not only to like how we look but also to love who we are in it; we want to feel like the fantasy that we have of ourselves. The big question for me is whether it’s easier to find something in a shop that makes us feel like this, or whether it’s easier to make this wonder garment for ourselves. The do-it yourself route offers so many possibilities for perfection - the right fabric, the right shape, the right fit - but does it have the same ‘mystery’ (for want of a better word) that something ready made by someone else can offer? Do we feel the same about something when we know every seam and when every moment of hassle we had putting the zip in perfectly is still there in the back of our minds?
I talked about this to the fantastic group of talented women we had here in the studio over the bank holiday who were making jackets for themselves and we decided that there must be room for both buying and making, but we didn’t really get to the bottom of the relationship that we have with the clothes that we make ourselves. More on this when I’ve finished Kate Fletcher’s very interesting chapter about the importance of becoming makers of our own clothes in her book ‘Sustainable Fashion and Textiles‘. Watch this space.
