Body of MA Dissertation 2

...please begin at the beginning here. Also to reiterate from yesterday: this piece is © 2006 Kimberly Hall. Do not copy, steal, or reproduce without permission. If you're interested in my work, please drop me a line. Thanks.


Landscape print from my MA collection All Stories Have Endings at Central Saint Martins, 2006.

NARRATIVE
The way time and change enable a subtle type of communication in dress lends itself to the creation of narrative, both personal and cultural. Stories are told through the wardrobe. In fact, narratives are found in everything we touch, they are countless. No society is without them, they exist like life.

“Like a language, narrative is a means of communicating. The selecting and sequencing of events to construct a meaningful story can be homologous to the selecting and sequencing of words to form a meaningful sentence.” The book Landscape and Narrative investigates how narrative is present in objects and events, specifically landscape architecture. The authors suggest viewing narrative in its archaic sense, as a way of knowing and representing the world. It is a learning tool as well as a method for remembering. (Potteiger & Purinton: 1998: p.4)

According to Potteinger and Purinton, there are four main components that construct a narrative:

1. framing the narrative (the set-up)
2. agency, events and character (there must be at least 2 events (beginning and end), characters or agency is what allows events to occur)
3. time, story and narration
4. sequence, plot and spatial form (this is the reason things happen, storyline) (Potteiger & Purinton: 1998: pp.42-45)

All four of these elements can be found in the process of dressing, or rather as we tend to construct the way we live our lives as narratives, dress is the essential element that allows us to perform these narratives convincingly. Clothing is essential to framing the narrative, it’s integral to creating the set-up and mood; it can also allow us to feel like we have agency or adopt certain characters; clothing can mark time; and finally clothing is sometimes a signal or remembrance of events’ occurences.

“There are important distinctions between reading landscape narratives and narratives as spoken or written texts....The viewer enters at different points, is free to pause, take in the whole image, inspect it’s parts, or review. This changes the traditional relationship between author, text, and reader where the author exerts control over the telling.” (Potteiger & Purinton: 1998: p.10) In considering narrative’s place outside of traditional texts it’s important to realise how much more of a role the reader commands due to the different approaches one may make. The idea of open narrative comes from contemporary theories that emphasize the necessity of the role of the reader in producing meaning—the idea is used often in art and design, but not always recognised in storytelling. Closed narratives are commodified, author controlled, and scripted whereas open narrative is participatory, reader interpreted, and non-scripted. (Potteiger & Purinton: 1998: pp.188-9)

“Instead of an author’s having control of meaning, readers play a significant role in reworking and producing the meaning of a text. In addition, a text, a book, a building a garden, or ‘the self’ are sites of the intersection or layering of other texts. They become intertextual.” (Potteiger & Purinton: 1998: p.33) This phenomenon is very visible in regards to the narratives developed in clothing. The wedding dress, discussed by Susanne Friese in Through the Wardrobe, works as a liminal object, moving a woman from one social sphere (single) to another (the married state). The meaning of the wedding dress is not made until it is worn by a bride. (Friese: 2001: pp.53-66)

WEARER, OBJECT, MAKER
Then is it only the wearer that can make meaning in a garment? Or does the maker imbue new garments with any meaning or story? Many couturiers have tried to connect to their client by using names instead of numbers to identify dress styles. Examples such as “Do you Love Me?” by Lucile (Troy: 2003: p.93) is the beginning of a narrative for the client to connect with and “Aviatrice” by the House of Worth (Foster: 1999: p.116) presents a character for the client to identify as while she is wearing this design.

Vionnet’s label was an attempt at an even more personal connection between maker and wearer by carrying the imprint of her right thumb. Vionnet once said, “I wanted to dress women well, and the idea of the anonymous clientele was the opposite of what I had in mind.” (Troy: 2003: pp.323-333) This feeling seems pervasive among earlier couturiers. Hubert Givenchy relates, “Balenciaga always told me, ‘Hubert, the most important thing when dressing your clients is to be honest.’” (Thomas: 2005: p.168) Perhaps the strength of the relationship between the maker and the wearer was enhanced in the past by the intensely personal qualities involved in fittings and made to measure clothing.

That the distance now seems to be growing between the designer and the wearer could be related to the current focus on selling an image as opposed to really developing garments to their full potential as they were during what is arguably the heyday of high fashion, the first half of the the twentieth century.

ALL STORIES HAVE ENDINGS
My collection has 6 designs in 3 garments, two dresses and a jacket, that evolve over time into another 3 garments. In each one hides another that will emerge eventually. For my materials, I employed dissolvable thread of different strengths in order to change the shape and volume, natural dyes of red cabbage and tumeric that fade in either sunlight or with washing and reveal a digitally printed landscape underneath, and heat transfer printing on rubber that slowly blurs, discolours and fades. My visual inspiration for the prints come from landscapes and travel, while for the shapes of my garments I looked at the underpinnings of fashion through history, that is, images of undergarments.

I aim to synthesize the four components of fashion and dressing I identified above: communication through clothing, the essence of fashion being time and change, the power of narrative, and the connection between wearer and maker through the object. In approaching these four themes, I looked at a variety of examples to help me establish my method.

I was inspired by the Surrealist interest in “...the celebration of Paris as a kind of habitat. They explored the secret side of the city, the random encounters made with it and the personal significance of its public places” (Antony & Henry: 2005: p.19) and contemporary psychogeographers “...protest against the blandification of the organic urban landscape by transnational corporations. They also seek to record, celebrate and reclaim the forgotten, neglected and overlooked environments of the city.” (Antony & Henry: 2005: p.23) I started from these viewpoints to explore the way we wear clothes, specifically exploring personal significance, the forgotten, neglected and overlooked elements in dress. I began with a series of questionnaires exploring attitudes about dress, followed by performances/ experiments that included wearing a shirt ‘til death do us part’ (figure 3) and wardrobe swaps. I found that garments existence through time is essential to their meaning even though it is often a buried element not immediately recognized by the wearer. This idea influenced my approach to deconstructing fashion—not revealing the architecture of the garments, like Martin Margiela, but in revealing the passage of time through print and dye techniques.


Figure 2: ‘Til Death Do Us Part Left: My marriage shirt day one. Light: Marriage shirt after 6 weeks of continuous wear


Figure 3: Paperdolls based on wardrobe swaps & shares, left: me & Kelsey, right: me & Carmela.

I also investigated fashion therapy. In a project at a California state hospital in 1959, the California Fashion Group helped each young woman in the mental health ward design and make a dress for herself to renew her pride in herself and improve her self-esteem. (Horn&Gurel: 1981: p.149) The artist Ann Chamberlain used ceramics in a similar vein (figure 4). In both Inheritance and Romper con el Pasado she encouraged people to write their hopes, dreams and fears onto pieces of pottery which they then smashed to pieces and put back together again. (Potteiger & Purinton: 1998: p.22)


Figure 4, Romper con el Pasado Project by Ann Chamberlain

Going back to 1813, an excellent example of textiles used as therapy is object T6-1956 from the collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, commonly referred to as Elizabeth Parker’s Sampler (figure 5). Nigel Llewellyn says,

The tone of T6 is, of course, confessional and repentant; in exchange for the work and craft of her stitching, Elizabeth Parker gains in spiritual strength as she fashions a narrative about her weaknesses. Through its capacity to act as a constant reminder or memorial of her sin, the textile releases the efficacious power of memory to help shape the future and support a victim of ignorance and patriarchical abuse. (Llewellyn: 1999: p.66)

The process of embroidery, and the intense amount of time it takes to embroider, allows Elizabeth Parker to change herself. The idea that textiles are such a powerful tool, especially through the use of narrative, connected my ideas across several of the concepts above.


Figure 5, Elizabeth Parker’s sampler

In an early attempt to bring several of my conceptual ideas together I developed a set of wool gloves that the wearer felts on her own hands and then gives as a gift. I hoped to encourage an emotional connection between people through the object, as well as the possibility of creating narrative in an object that changes over time in the hands of the user.


Figure 6: Samples from All Stories Have Endings. Left, cabbage dyed silk, top to bottom: unwashed, 3 washes, 10 washes. Right, transfer printed latex, 1 day after printing on the top 4 weeks after printing on the bottom.

Another idea that helped shape my collection is the development and improvement in the chemistry and materials of textiles.

In textiles, could it be the case that modernity manifests in the efforts from the mid-nineteenth onwards to invent in laboratories synthetic dyes that did not fade when exposed to sunlight, that did not bleed when rinsed or boiled in water, that held their colours for year after year? Later textiles were made synthetically, crease-proof, tear proof, denying time’s passage, the wear and tear of movement—though never so much that they become indestructible! (Leslie: 2005: p.172)

That textiles in the past would have had more visible markers of the passage of time due to the ingredients and science available at the time made me consider that using ‘bad’ or discarded techniques might be useful in bringing hidden notions to the surface (figure 1). This is what led me to work with natural dying. I found red cabbage and tumeric to be excellent fading dyes and matching them with the long lasting digital printing techniques allowed my prints to emerge with wear.


Figure 7: Detail of the button closure from All Stories Have Endings collection

I also looked at traditional construction techniques to see what they might contribute to the narratives locked inside garments. For example, Western women’s clothes are traditionally buttoned right over left because women were buttoned into their clothes by someone else, while men’s went left over right because they buttoned themselves into their own clothes, and people are generally right-handed. (Horn & Gurel: 1981: p.86) Mixing this up would probably only be noticed by the wearer, but I hoped it would become a subtle symbol in my dresses that recognises one of the changes to modern life (figure 6).

Christopher Breward says that the next wave of fashion claims to be “a rejection of the consumerist ethos and an exploration of the potential of the environmental or the formal limits of clothing,” He says that while this may not help the economic base of the fashion industry, it does continue the notion of ‘spectacle’ that has dominated fashion since the 1350s. (Breward: 1994: 235) My collection fits this prophecy in its attempt to put the needs of the wearer ahead of composing my collection based on marketing or selling an image. I hope the wearer finds herself an integral part of the narrative in my garments, so much so that the collection is not complete without her.

links and bibliography here....