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.
I went to see the exhibition of textile pieces by Rozanne Hawksley at the Ruthin Craft Gallery yesterday and would really recommend it. There’s a very good review of the exhibition in a-n magazine so I won’t offer much more here than a few personal responses. It’s a long time since an exhibition had such a powerful effect on me and though the reasons why are still rather disconnected in my mind, here are some initial thoughts.
Firstly, much of her work is about suffering and loss and as such is almost bound to have an emotional impact. The piece entitled ‘I will fly south .. for Matthew‘ begun in the year her son died of cancer aged 37 is incredibly moving. Like many of the pieces this one is made of tiny bird bones and a web of taut threads. It’s exquisite - so finely executed - and it is this careful placing of each bone and thread that, for me, contributes much to its power.
In the book by Mary Shoeser written to accompany the exhibition, this precision and attention to detail in Hawksley’s work is summed up by one of her students at Goldsmith’s College -
‘… she impressed on me the importance of precision when you are working, that a line cut in fabric should be as precise as a drawn line.’
I came away resolving to work with more care and to give time to line and thread after years spent experimenting with texture.
In many of the pieces she uses white vintage leather gloves. In one seried entitled ‘Continuum ‘a number of these are nailed to pieces of wood through the palm. The glove is slashed open and disorted - sometimes there is red fabric or dye in the gash. It was disturbing as well as moving (the palms of my hands feel strange just thinking about it) but, like much of her work what really struck me was the careful and exquisite execution - the tiny stitches on the gloves , the placing of each finger. In ‘Pale Armistice‘ made for the Imperial War Museum in 1991, again it was the stitching on the gloves that struck me most of all - the painstaking hours involved in their contruction and the care of the maker and sense of time passing that they carry with them as a result.
Pale Armistice
This attention to detail is something that so often we seem to have lost; we want to make something that can be finished in a day and then move on to something else. Almost every week I hear the same thing from people who come on a course desperate for some time to be creative - ‘I have to finish it today or I’ll never find time to finish it at all.’ I often find myself afraid to gives things time. There’s a voice in my head telling me that I’m not getting anywhere if I don’t keep producing. I’m going to slow down.
Many of the glove pieces are lighter, almost funny, certainly clever. This is a woman who must have the most incredible collection of fabric fragments, lace, beads, jewels, braid and bones. The photos of her attic studio are an inspiration in themselves - a vindication for all of us who have carefully stored boxes of treasures that will one day be perfect for what we are making.
The stories that she tells in the short film made for the exhibition made an impression on me too. She was in her late 40’s when she took a course which changed her life. Having told her second husband that something was missing in her life, that there was something that she needed that she couldn’t find, she said that this textiles course with David Green was like someone giving her a key and opening a door and saying ‘look, here it is.’ Wow! What a course. What a testimony to the fact that it is never too late to begin a whole new thread in our lives.
