THEORY - CONTEXTS POSITIONING
- Tessa Wishart
- Oct 13, 2021
- 15 min read
TASK - Positioning your practice using contexts.
1. Outline the 2-4 Primary 'Contexts' identified and how you use them to inform your design practice.
(Themes may include cultural, social, political, historical, ethical, ecological concerns. Methods, contextual history)
The Body in Sustainability
Of most key ideas: Upcycling/Repurposing and Zero Waste
My collection concept:
I intend to develop a collection of primary garments, designed through patternmaking to be entirely zero waste. The final toiles from these garments will be repurposed and upcycled into secondary undergarments to support the primary collection. Methods of sustainability will also be taken: the collection will be biodegradable and as natural as possible.
Sustainability in fashion may be perceived as an ecological factor; also influenced by ethical and social concerns. These are to be addressed through process based design approaches: Zero Waste and Upcycling techniques. (Waste management and elimination solutions.)
As well as consideration of/ use of natural fabric choices for biodegradable design. (Eg less use of synthetic additions/notions - synthetic elastics, polyester threads, non-reuseable metalwork)
Methods and contextual history are explored and undertaken.
Waste developed in the toiling process: As someone working in small batch design/artisan individual garment development and construction, I couldn't help but see that the toiling process is the most wasteful part of the sustainability collections which I've been developing. Particularly, for me toiling process is split into early calico toiles (which sometimes can be cut for use in other smaller toiles) and final toiles made in fabrics similar to final garment, so as to get a good sense of the fabric weight and other details. These toiles are often kept but rarely able to be of any function, so this feels like the point in the artisan design development process which is most in need of addressing.
The Body in Craft
I'm to be using several crafting techniques including:
- Embroidery and Printwork - to portray visual
- Crochet
- Metalwork etching and cutting
In a sustainability direction, craft techniques include:
- Process driven sustainability solutions to create visual outcomes:
= Zero Waste Patterncutting Design
= Upcycling details. Patterns crafted with upcycling into undergarments in mind - existing seams and details from toiles may be featured in upcycled outcomes.
The Body in History
Zero Waste: I'm inspired by several historical sources and informal texts: such as The Work Woman's Guide which holds many visual inspirations - geometric cut low waste patterns used in historical wardrobes. History itself holds rich cultural references for zero waste design: garments such as kimonos, togas, kilts, saris and tunics may all be seen as zero waste or low waste, given that this cultural way of dress involved different manipulation of fabric to that which contemporary westernised fashion follows today.
Silhouettes: Irrelevant of zero waste, my collection and particularly its featured craft details will be informed by inspiration of historical silhouettes which have stood out to me. Particular details include corsetry, as well as bias cuts - which I can reference back to historical designers like Vionnet, widely considered to have had big impact in both bias cut clothing and low/zero waste.
Visual Influences:
My influences of theme and the idea of 'The Body in Cloth - exploring the relationship between clothing and the nude feminine form - is heavily inspired by historical (and more recent or contemporary) female nude artworks. These pieces have caused me to develop a lot of the visual mood tone in the garment designs within the collection.
(Fit and Silhouette) - Beauty ﹒Comfort﹒Confinement
Visual details, handcraft, adornment, making techniques, silhouette, fabrics and weights, are all inspired by this collection of key words.
Informal Texts
Have you used any informal texts to develop your project ideas? (Clothing, Artworks, Conversations...)
The Body Laid Bare (2017 Auckland Art Gallery Exhibition) - Visual and thematic inspiration
Curated by Emma Chambers and Justin Patron, featuring art from the Tate collection.
I saw the exhibition myself at the time, and the large variation of interpretation of the nude figure really stood out as visually beautiful to me. This interest was bolstered by the comprehensive art history class I took a year later, which began to deep dive into feminism in art.
Considering Bias in life drawing inspiration because of this collection:
Minnie Parker writes a really fascinating review of the exhibition, questioning the European focus of the curation and the lack of greater ethnicity nude form representation.
'According to what hangs on the walls the only bodies the show lays bare are white, able, and heterosexual.' (Parker, 2017)
This is a hugely important point which I hadn't truely considered until reading Parker's review: my own representation of the nude female form through artworks should be extremely careful not to show any particular bias or be developed at the exclusion of any groups within my theme of the nude female form. One way that I will approach this is by stripping the artworks/sketches/metal etches I'm sketching of any colour tone - my hope is that in being just metal etching sketches, or prints in cyanotype coloured blue or Van Dyke brown, any bias of skin colour is removed.
I do however think that there may be some reason to be concerned given that all of the artworks I've taken inspiration from within The Body Laid Bare exhibition fall into this category of European whiteness and able bodied/lower size ranges. My own sketches I've been developing to use in the etching samples I'm making have been taken from life drawing open source references websites, and I am striving to ensure there is a good sense of variation in forms.
I think in particular it would be hugely beneficial for me to examine some New Zealand artists, or try to broaden the range of cultures creating life art that I examine and am inspired by, before I end up creating artworks for printing on my final pieces.
Life Drawing Classes (Human View) in 2019
This class for me sparked in interest n life drawing and the nude artwork. An unapologetic interpretation of the nude form is explored - the classes were portrayed as developing an understanding of how to draw the nude body so as to help students better draw and express clothing on a body form. Exploring this relationship between the nude body and clothing has been something I've wanted to explore further since then.
(My life drawing sketches, 2017.)
More of my own artwork - Level 3 Paint Board
This body of work feels as though it moves through the same space that my graduate collection will: a feminism inspired commentation on my design ethos as an artist and fashion designer/craftsperson.
I remember making visual references to feminism artists such as Louise Bourgeois, and quotes are even featured in the artworks: 'I am not what I am, I am what I can do with my hands', 'Keep me together, do not abandon me, hold my bones together.'
Image of Garments - Silk Map Lingerie
(Undated) Crafted in WWII as a relic/symbol of wartime fabric economy constraints and societal push towards solutions such as lessened consumerism, repairing and reinforcement, and upcycling, these are made from a silk escape map for Countess Mountbatten
(This particular idea of silk map clothing has been modernised and copied: among several, by RAEBURN brand. This comparison annotation, as below, was the first step where I was inspired to develop my collection concept of using toile fabrics for upcycled undergarments.)
This sense of wartime fabric economies bears a direct correlation to the problems faced today in contemporary society and fashion industry in regards to sustainability and environmental concerns. Where economies in textile and fashion were once caused due to war, the current methods I am undertaking may be perceived to be due to the current 'war' against environmental degradation due to global sustainability concerns.
Other informal texts - WWII 'Make Do and Mend' Pamphlets
This societal push for economies through craftsmanship, repair and reinforcement, and upcycling measures - including ideas like unravelling knitting to make other garments and cutting large men's clothing into upcycled children's clothes
The Workwoman's Guide
(My analysis from weekly studio research)
Most particularly - the visual diagrams within the book.
An Analysis: The Workwoman's Guide
'By a Lady'
I've viewed this particular book as a source from a historical perspective displaying the geometric and inherently low waste pattern styles practiced historically in making conventional garments. Holly McQuillan (2020) identified as how zero waste is not a new idea, and has instead been practiced historically though many cultures, partially as a volume based garment practice, including in Grecian Styles, Indian Saris, Scottish Kilts. The practices in this book begin to become more complex with developed seam work, which allow for better practicality and better form for cloth to body relationship. This book demonstrates zero waste and low waste practices in a traditional and wearable way; as well as including many examples of traditional styles of handcraft; both of which I intend to integrate into my present work.
Hale, S. J. B. (1838). The Workwoman's Guide. Simpkin, Marshall and Co, London.
McQuillan, H. (2020) Zero Waste Systems Thinking: Multimorphic Textile-forms. PhD Thesis. Edited by L. Hallnäs. University of Borås. http://hb.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1478307&dswid=-429
Garment - Vintage Fan Lacing Corset
This corset I own is vintage and made (and buckles etched with logo) by CAMP: my research of this lacing technique for my making annotations tells me that CAMP was the significant brand in producing fan laced corset garments at the point when this technique was popularly used, after being developed in America by CAMP's founder Samuel Higby Camp in 1908.
My making annotations research (references below) tells me a lot about the purposes and functions of the fan lacing detail - namely to allow for women to lace the corset unaided - the garment is accessible and size flexible - but I've also just taken a lot of visual inspiration from examining the lacing techniques the romanticism of the overall garment. This informal reference, with it's size flexibility, tight lacing and details does really fit into my themes of beauty; confinement; comfort.
Corset and fan lacing research sites:
Holly McQuillan - Make/Use Database
This is a database I've referenced very often in my past and current works. The way that craft techniques are explained to support the sustainable practice is fantastic - for example the joining techniques like insertion embroider stitch, and hand painting along the zero waste seams to stop fraying at hime. Beyond that, virtually viewing the patterns at home, and McQuillan's option for printing the patterns on A4 to make at small scale and understand the construction is a fantastic practise.
McQuillan, H.(n.d.). A modular system for zero-waste fashion. make/use. https://makeuse.nz/
Formal Texts
What key academic texts have you found and how do they support/inform your contexts?
My own Theory II essay - 'Local Manufacturing and craftsmanship prospects within the NZ fashion industry'
The ideas I expressed in this essay link with my graduate work a lot, as it expresses my own perspectives on how handcraft, smaller batch design will have a role to play in the future of the NZ fashion industry. key points included how niche design quantities - (such as zero waste and upcycling, for my own purposes - increase the value of the product, how a better understanding of the value of local craftsmanship must be achieved for consumers to consider the garments valuable and of a better affordability for appreciation of artisan timeframes in craft. Other points include how social behaviour changes in regard to fashion consumerism and understanding of affordability of localised fashion based on transparency and locality is important.
'Having developed a better understanding of one's own handcraft, and supporting this with intuitive design and sustainability ethos, will serve to support and future garments as a competitive market product'.
In this I am starting to carve out the idea that development of craft locally should be important to the success of the niche product being perceived as valuable within the fashion community. Working so deeply in handcraft, detail based design and upcycling and zero waste design processes makes this text particularly relevant.
Timo Rissanen - From 15% to 0: Investigating the creation of fashion without the creation of waste
This text closely aligns with the zero waste practices I'm exploring, as Timo Rissanen is a zero waste designer. The title references the fact that on average, a conventional garment cut creates 15% of the fabric yield in textile waste. Rissanen explores methods of design innovation and zero waste whilst modifying existing garment manufacture practices.
Fashion and the Fleshy Body - Joanne Entwistle
Relationships between human body and fashion! Something I need to study further, but aligns amazingly well with my own themes of relationships between cloth/clothing and the nude feminine form and will be a great essay reference.
Evaluating Sustainability Through an Historical Lens: Clothing Conservation Efforts during WWII -
The methods of fashion economies and subsequent compromises leading to a frequency of upcycling practices is something I'm really wanting to touch on in my work. This section of text is very short (perhaps the start of a longer paper I don't have access to?), but I think that having a link to wartime Make-do and Mend practices and upcycling techniques in general will be important to allow me to talk about my own repurposing of toile garment textiles.
Cho, Sunhyung and Parsons, Jean Louise, "Evaluating Sustainability Through an Historical Lens: Clothing Conservation Efforts during WWII" (2016). International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) Annual Conference Proceedings. 41.
Nude: Art From the Tate Collection
Emma Chambers and Justin Patron 2017
Flesh and Form: Redefining the Nude in the Twentieth Century
I took this book out of the library post lockdown, and it's since been stuck in the studio so is inaccessible to me. But I found it valuable both to re-see the Tate collection of nude artworks which was shown in The Body Laid Bare' exhibition, and to view the composition and styling of the book as a lookbook inspiration. I also really liked Emma Chamber's essay on Flesh and Form: Redefining the Nude in the 20th Century. As I can't access the book anymore I don't have any way to re-read the text, but at the time posted my analysis of it below.
(My analysis, copied from studio weekly blog post research)
This book recounts and displays a large series of nude artworks and life drawings from the Tate collection, varying over different time periods and divided into several themes, some of which including historical, private, modern, body politics and vulnerable body. The book stood out to me as a source because this is the collection which was brought to New Zealand and I viewed personally in Auckland in 2017 as 'The Body Laid Bare'. The range and depth of subject matter in the artworks serves as strong inspiration for me and the work which I intend to develop.
From a more academic standpoint, the essay written by Emma Chambers about Flesh and Form has stood out to me most: Chambers examines the central practice of painting nude form through the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and the developmental change of political views of the appropriateness of portraying the feminine form, and the intentions which the given art may be intending to portray. The Naked and the Nude heading describes the differenced in portraying artistic form, as most famously defined by Britain's Kenneth Clark (1956): the naked may be defined as the undressing or undressed, yet personalised; while the nude only describes the entirety of the naked form itself, approached by the artist in view of only form and serene detail as an educational study or practice. Too overtly sexualised or individualised an image was defined by Clark as naked rather than nude: he discussed several historical artworks as being naked which has been subject to strong controversy for going against these traditionalised institutional standards, including Manet's Olympia (1863) and Matisse's drawings. (One of which in the collection being Draped Nude, 1936) Just as similarly, in 1870 British responded to Millais' The Knight Errant criticised it for nakedness given how the form was seen as too personalised: as being 'scarcely as chaste as unsunned snow', and naked 'because she evidently has been in the habit of wearing clothes.' (This artwork in question was later discovered by art historians using X-ray to have first been painted with the head and torso angled towards the knight in a more confrontational interaction, which was later altered to develop a greater show of modesty.) These beliefs significantly shifted through the twentieth century, as the practice of academic nude painting shifted into portraits which challenged the nature of the artistic male gaze, and naked artworks became inherently political and identity based, despite any level of explicitness.
Chambers, E. & Patron, J. (2017). Nude: Art From The Tate Collection. Art Gallery of New South Wales.
'Using design practice to negotiate the awkward space between sustainability and fashion consumption' - Holly McQuillan
Another fantastic text on the commentation of the dilemma of consumerism and fashion consumption in contrast to ecological concerns. McQuillan begins to develop several experimental techniques to suggest solution options.
Holly McQuillan PHD
I did several pages of analysis on this piece of work, and have summed it up cut from my weekly blog research below. McQuillan's abstracted practices of zero waste garment craft through collaboration with textile designers and weavers is more extended than my postgraduate work, but I've always found my own designs to align with her design ethos well.
Zero Waste Systems Thinking: Multimorphic Textile Forms
The following is an analysis and through process through reading McQuillan's PHD published text, as well as pulling out academic quotes to use as reference to support my own body of work through my proposal. (Form my readings, this is a series of collaborative textile explorations.)
McQuillan identifies as the cause for her sustainability practices a 'rapidly unfolding environmental crisis and dominant response in the fashion industry', in suggestion that the industry is aware of the need for a more circular, non-linear fashion economy and thus solutions are being explored and developed.
She identified the three sections explored in her work: Transition Design, Post-Anthropocentric Design, and Design as Future Making. She also follows paths of inquiry with consideration of how they link to work of designers such as Issey Miyake's A-POC, and other designers who explore weaving of shaped pattern pieces; moving into a space of whole garment weaving herself.
Through McQuillan's enquiry in aim of expanding a design methods base in the realm of zero waste design, she discusses 'micro-manufacturing contexts' and looks towards industry future proofing through new practices. She considers that the traditional cut-and-sew making style can be expensive, intensive and exploitive, time consuming and wasteful.
She mentions her previous work Make/Use, which is an open-source resource of zero waste patterns, available as a sense of 'social fabric' which moves into a more holistic space of garment construction and design at cut and sew level and beyond. Given that my own work will be more cut-and-sew textile based, this is especially relevant to me research base. I choose to continue to operate at this level as I believe that the traditionalist handcraft techniques that I wish to incorporate into the work are inherently sustainable, given how these are techniques that must be preserved. I should not be able to use these techniques as well if I moved into the more technology-reliant process space which McQuillan goes on to work at.
McQuillan asks questions such as Why Zero Waste? - Attributing it to environmental crisis. I feel that in approaching design in a more4 non-linear process, we have cause to step back and understand what areas in these linear processes are the worst cause of waste construction, and therefore approach these with a more considered sustainability strategy.
She also defines the circular economy, explaining how materials, especially materials in combination, can be particularly difficult to recycle > problematic. She also mentions the goals of large fashion conglomerates like H&M - these sustainability goals are formed without reference to the way that growth limits the effectiveness of a circular economy.
Her work is transitioning away from an anthropocentric design view. (Designing with humans being at the centre of importance.) A quote from Mathilda Tham and Kate Fletcher's Earth Logic, 2019, states how 'fashion should centre Earth and not growth'. The foundations for existing garment construction methods were developed in the context of a small scale cottage industry model which bears little resemblance to the context these methods are used in today. With this said, the relationship between technology and form is longstanding, when considering the analogue-style weaving loom technology McQuillan herself goes on to use.
McQuillan identifies how zero-waste geometric style garment design features through history - with Grecian clothing in draping, Indian Saris, Scottish Kilts. These are volume based shapes. She also considers that the foundation for the current tailor's matrix is made up of rectangular plots.
Flat pattern-cutting approaches may be replaced by flat or fully fashioned knitting, and less traditionally, fully fashioned weaving. McQuillan explains that the need for simplicity drove the aesthetics and fit of the open source resource Make/Use; as it was developed as a user centred approach. I think that where my own zero waste designs will differ and become interesting will be in a more visual inspiration (the female form) driving the aesthetics and fit of my own designs, as opposed to a need for simplicity. I hope that this will help to develop much more interesting and avant-garde forms using the same zero-waste cut-and-sew techniques to appeal to a slightly more specialised target market.
The way that my own style of zero waste design and production, as explored in my past work and through my ongoing graduate collection, may look if adapted to industry; may be an industry weaving size-specified lengths of cloth, to meet an industry-sized requirement for graded sized cloth requirements for a product range of graded zero waste patterns for garments.
Case Studies: On page 54, McQuillan underwent an experiment within a fast fashion brand to explore incorporating zero waste design. She worked with a patternmaking team in oder to attempt to make a pre-designed garment less wasteful, by economising the pattern cut-lay. In doing this, she was able to make a minimally wasteful version in which the fabric yield was reduced by 10%. However, the design was found to be less preferable and ultimately unused by the company, as the increase of seams and therefore sewing time was found to be a greater expense as compared to the expense saved in the 10% reduced yield of a comparatively inexpensive fabric. This, to me, clearly demonstrates as how a zero-waste process succeeding must begin in development at a design level, rather than only approaching a design afterwards at a patternmaking stage in an attempt to make it more sustainable. This is why my own design process is partially includes a Form Follows Process design function.
McQuillan's further work practically explores her work in fully woven garments, constructed in layers which may be cut and dissected to fold out in an origami style to add form to pattern pieces. This process using weave technologies allows her to confront and overcome traditional limitations of a conventional rectangular based angular tailor's block; such as that of a bodice pattern.
McQuillan then moves from this process into a space where she is creating fully woven amorphous tunic shapes with layering of pattern through complex weaving technologies , and then cutting apart layers of the design for dimension.
My overall view of McQuillan's work is that, through a traditional source of technology, the loom weaving (and division of many layers to create an accordion style fold-out dimensional garment) works at a level which is too complex in comparison to my own Design Based Approaches. My personal interests - waste management, zero waste on a cut-and-sew basis under a form-follows-process design style aims to embody my specified chosen theme visually;The Body in Cloth; through sustainable processes, rather than being entirely based on technology and textile innovation. However, I do still strongly align with McQuillan's observations of the importance of ingrained industrial change in the conventional fashion community, as well as a shift away from anthropocentric design.
McQuillan, H. (2020) Zero Waste Systems Thinking: Multimorphic Textile-forms. PhD Thesis. Edited by L. Hallnäs. University of Borås. http://hb.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1478307&dswid=-429
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