Seamlessness

Yeseung Lee

Description

Taking the concept of 'seamlessness' as her starting point, Yeseung Lee offers an innovative practice-based investigation into the meaning of the handmade in the age of technological revolution and globalized production and consumption. Combining firsthand experience of making seamless garments with references from psychoanalysis, anthropology and cultural studies, Lee reveals the ways that a garment can reach to our deeply superficial sense of being, and how her seamless garments can represent the ambiguity of a modern subject in a perpetual process of becoming. Richly illustrated and firmly rooted in the actual work of creation, this daringly innovative book breaks new ground for fashion research.

 

Foreword

Claire Pajaczkowska

The Seaming

Chapter 1: The Skin Ego

Chapter 2: The Garment Ego

Chapter 3: Auratic Objects

Chapter 4: Here and Now

Chapter 5: Seaming Hands

Chapter 6: Seamless?

Chapter 7: The Toile Ego

The Seam(less)

References

Index 

Sujets

• General officer
• Fashion
• Design
• General
• Mode (habillement)

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 04 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783206445
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Cover image: Courtesy of Yeseung Lee
Indexer: Silvia Benvenuto
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN: 978-1-78320-642-1
ePDF: 978-1-78320-643-8
ePUB: 978-1-78320-644-5
Printed and bound by Gomer Press
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
To my mother, my father and my brother
Very special thanks to
Tristan Webber
Wendy Dagworthy
Claire Pajaczkowska
Jonathan Faiers
Susanne Küchler
Christine Guth
Cathy Johns
Amy Rollason
anonymous peer reviewers
In memory of Louise Wilson
Contents
Foreword
Claire Pajaczkowska
The Seaming
Chapter 1: The Skin Ego
Chapter 2: The Garment Ego
Chapter 3: Auratic Objects
Chapter 4: Here and Now
Chapter 5: Seaming Hands
Chapter 6: Seamless?
Chapter 7: The Toile Ego
The Seam(less)
References
Index
Foreword
Claire Pajaczkowska
A ll design is an exercise in seamlessness. Architecture extends the human relationship of body in the enabling culture to make good the deficiencies of nature. Furniture is a form of ambient assisted living as chairs enable us to sit, with ease, off the floor, cutlery to enable the transition of food from hearth to mouth with minimum waste and embarrassment. Vehicle and product design have both perfected the art of the aesthetics of seamlessness, by engineering casings that appear to have no joins.
Yeseung Lee’s study of seamlessness in fashion invites reflection on the meaning and function of this aesthetic. Seamlessness is a unique book. Written by a designer, about the experience of making, it reveals the fashion designer’s embodied encounter with materials. Through descriptions of the workshop experience, the designer explores the meaning of seamlessness as a design feature. Writings about the meaning of making with materials, from the perspective of makers, are rare. Rarer still are writings with parallel illustration in the form of images, drawings, photographs, reproductions from note and sketchbooks. These parallel texts are made and designed by Lee herself, giving readers the opportunity to understand the process and methods of a fashion designer at work.
To explain a little about the originality of this book we should first compare it with existing literature of fashion and design. There are many books about the meaning of fashion, though it is customary for the makers to be considered authorities only on technique, and for critics and historians to be considered authorities on meaning. In a quiet and lucid act, Yeseung Lee proposes that the fashion maker and designer can be both author of, and authority on, the meaning of fashion, clothes, adornment.
There are many writings for, and about, fashion as an industry of commerce, manufacture and trade. The industry of fashion merchandising and marketing employs hundreds of thousands of graduates each year, and many millions in its globalized production chains. The scale of the fashion industry as an economic force has generated studies that conclude that the meaning and value of fashion lies in its function as a major contributor to world GDP and industrial power. However, this commercial dimension of fashion design as a creative practice is only one dimension of its meaning to the design culture. Studies of fashion as an industry can provide knowledge that leads designers to make ethical choices about sourcing materials, about sustainability and employment regulations. However, there is another, equally materialist, world in which the designer works. Where can the designer look to find out more about what it means to work, creatively and by hand, with materiality of clothing?
New information technologies have transformed the dissemination of knowledge. Online publishing too has generated a new culture for fashion writing. The voice of the blogger, characteristic of genres of fashion journalism, is familiar. It is part of the kind of writing that Roland Barthes calls the 'systéme de la mode' , a discourse of knowingness about the codes of fashion.
Another genre of writing about fashion emerged from what was once the academic discipline of the ‘history of costume’. Historians of dress write texts published in scholarly journals often to support a curatorial practice, to analyse an archive or museum collection, or accompany a museum exhibition. In this sense, these texts are about a retrospective analysis of conventions of dress in society. Historical scholarship is mostly written for, and is addressed to, academic colleagues, and this kind of writing is rarely written by, or for, the fashion designer. The garments that have been collected in archives tend to represent only a tiny fraction of what people have made and worn in the world.
Similarly, the texts by sociologists of dress often establish a specialist field of academic practice that views fashion from ‘the outside’, with a concern for scholarly objectivity rather than with curiosity about the universality of the subjectivity of clothing.
Written with a mode of address that is directed to other scholars within their specialist fields, the writings of historians and scholars ‘of dress’ rarely include the voice of the experience and thoughts of makers.
Yet fashion is fascinating to so many precisely because it is ubiquitous in a world that is interested in the idea of modernity. Clothing is fascinating because it is universal. Making clothes from materials is a practice extending back to prehistory, and yet is a contemporary and everyday creative practice. This is the central aspect of the work of the designer. Fashion design includes a repertoire of skills extending from the post-industrial techniques of pattern cutting, to an aesthetic and personal style of craftsmanship and taste, expressed in choices of fabric, material, colour and form. The fashion designer, then, is the site of an interaction of social systems, cultural codes and idiomatic subjectivity. But where is this represented? Writings about making fashion have included scholarly studies of celebrity or auteur, ‘signature’ designers where interpretations are interspersed with interviews with, or quotes from, the autobiographical writings of the designer as artist.
What are the alternatives to these conventional forms of fashion books? What kind of book might tell us what it is like to be a maker? What kinds of writing enable scholars to learn from the makers themselves? Which books will enable makers to satisfy their curiosity about the studio and workshop practices of other makers? What kinds of data can be made available to all who want a more in-depth knowledge of the way that art, craft and design all interact in the work of the creative practitioner?
The book you hold in your hands is a unique text. It is a book about the making of garments, written by a maker within the flow and the process of making. It is a book written from within fashion thinking, and is about the knowledge of making. It is a book about the way that knowledge derives from sensory, embodied experience of materials and how this experience is an important dimension of the meaning of materials and artefacts. This book may be the first in a new genre of writings by makers, about the kind of knowledge that is implicit within embodied thinking. Without creating artificial distinctions between the ‘theory’ and the ‘practice’ of fashion, this is the first book by a maker of garments that sets out to explain to all what it means to be making garments.
Neither an instruction manual, nor an autobiographical study, this book sets out to show that the activities of designers can be understood as ways of knowing, ways of thinking as well as what John Berger called ‘ways of seeing’. Whereas sight may objectify, by holding artefacts at a focal distance, the optical perspectives of the maker and the wearer are more close-up and haptic. This simple fact has some significance for philosophical perspectives on knowledge. The optical metaphor has been used for centuries to understand the relation of a thinking mind to its object of knowledge, with the idea of distance being a condition for objectivity and ‘impartiality’ or truth. Lee’s work invites us to consider the truth value of what we hold close.
Lee has worked as a professional designer for years, and her employment in the business has supported her study of fashion practice. This book, on the ambiguity of seamlessness, emerged from the doctoral project that Lee initiated at the Royal College of Art following her Masters course at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design. The question, for Lee, was that of understanding couture itself. When understood, literally and metaphorically, the act of sewing seams, couture, is not only an object of study for historians but also is an act of profound social and cultural resonance. The maker, in the act of making, sewing and seaming, thinks about the meanings of the work she completes and she shares this with us. Wondering why the process of clothing, tailoring, designing and making has such silent, and yet universal, significance, Lee embarks on a journey of exploration that takes us all into a fascinating world of travels, travails and travaux .
From her initial undergraduate studies in chemistry, Lee learned a humility that comes from respecting the complexity of matter and materiality. The scientists’ dream of finding syst