Hiking in Frocks

by Catherine BagnallIntroducing a new recurrent feature on artists' and designers' projects is New Zealand artist Catherine Bagnall's poetic recounting of her performances in the wilderness….

Paradise valley, 2009

Two years ago in white - out conditions, sometimes thigh deep snow and freezing winds I crossed Oturere Crater in the pale blue bridesmaid dress and a yellow fur hat. (1) The Emerald Lakes had frozen over and lost their edges to an almost unperceivable perfect grey. In the whiteness I had a solidity that the mountains lost to the snow. With my yellow fur hat and pale blue against the white, I felt I had links to Russian princesses.

The day before my heavy red gown with pink detailing and sparkly sequined cardigan shone out against the snow but I was so cold I didn’t know what I felt. The weather overwhelmed everything but my huge skirt billowed out and flapped loudly and sounded curious up there. Last year I climbed Mt Arthur in an old white brocade wedding dress. It collected the weather and mud and became heavy , I also carried a possum fur muff. In Paradise Valley I swirled around in a pale blue tutu and last week I wore a brown dress with a long tail and a white dress with a hood and satin ears high up on an alpine plateau.

As an artist and a lecturer in a fashion school, my practice draws on aspects of performance through which I explore issues surrounding pleasure, and think through the problematics of making visual my relationship to ‘wilderness’ landscapes – more precisely some areas in the National Parks of New Zealand. In my work I am hunting for sensations, new ways of finding and feeling pleasure and clothing has been a large part of this experiment. For the past several years my practice has involved undertaking long walks (tramps) in remote parts of New Zealand during which I experiment with the wearing of both artefactual and inappropriate clothing: old wedding frocks, my grandmother’s clothes, garments that I have made with ears and tails attached and so on. In these walks I strive to become something ‘other’ than what I think I can be, to transform into something else – a bird, a fox.

Fur Muff, 2009

This idea of other, of transformation or metamorphism is part of a literature canon dating back to Ovid’s great poem Metamorphoses. Marina Warner suggests that this tradition of fiction is integral to not only feeding our imaginations but functions also as part of our understanding of theories of self and models of consciousness.(2) She explains, using the example of the double or monstrous alter ego, that such metamorphosing potential works paradoxically as not only a threat to personality, but the double “also solicits hope and dreams for yourself, of a possible becoming different while remaining the same person, of escaping the bounds of self.” (3) Warner further suggests that metamorphoses happen at points of intersections, between boundaries. Metamorphosis is engendered by border-line conditions; it is cultivated in-between. If margins and borders are conducive to such transformations, then clothing may be an especially productive site. As a kind of transitional frontier, it marks the boundary between self and non-self through its physical and psychological operations. Clothing can embody powers of metamorphosis; it can be a tool for ‘becoming something else.’ The transformations that dress enacts may be large or small, fantastical or ordinary, monstrous, disciplined or liberating. I thought these were useful ideas for exploring the visible elements of femininity in wilderness landscapes and the complexities of my relation to the concept of nature. A lot has been written about clothing in an urban context and very little about clothing in the wilderness landscape.

“Expansive! now there's a word I love, it spreads all over the beating heart of the romantic sublime, defines it, now you're talking my language,” writes my friend Jane who is an art historian and writer and a recent collaborator. “To me, transformation is more idea than phenomenology and I just couldn't feel it - though I could see it - wonder what that says about our different approaches?.....and the clearing, how can that expand?” she writes. Jane and I are still discussing a project we undertook together where we travelled to Paradise Valley a remote spot in the isolated central South Island of New Zealand. Together we went; Jane with her moleskin notebooks, pencils and recording devices and myself carrying a lot of clothes and a camera. We went to see if we could put into visualisation a feminine sublime in a New Zealand wilderness context and I was also experimenting to see if I could transform into something ‘other’ using clothing and exploring what a female pleasure in looking might feel like.

In Paradise Valley we spent seven days in a small rodent filled one room hut with no power or running water surrounded by beech trees and huge mountains. The nights were so thick and dark that we peed only metres from the door in the dewy grass. We had gone with the intention of walking but instead we spent our week there sort of trapped, or at least not leaving a small clearing that the trees outside our hut opened onto. In Paradise Valley Jane asked me what I thought about the concept of the self in relation to feeling. I had been reading Barbara Vinken and thinking around her idea that the division between being and appearance constitutes one of the major conceptual articulations of fashion. I was thinking about what ‘being’ actually means, looks like or feels like. I decided that it was feeling that was important. I can’t imagine a self without feeling. Feeling the wind and enjoying the feeling of feeling. I was and still am curious to see if looking could be an agent for feeling.

My desire to effect what artist Roni Horn calls ‘an intensification of being’ is an ordinary human goal to be sure. Roni Horn also travels to ‘wilderness’ locations in Iceland for her projects. She is hunting for a space outside gender somewhere where she says pronouns don’t detain her. I dress up in a hyper-expressive collection of mostly dresses and I think I am hunting for a heightened sense of being, of feeling pleasure as a female – in fact a middle aged woman in the bush. My clothed body moves through and sits still amongst the beech trees and alpine tussock grasses. In the process of performing with these elements, I strive for a union between my body, textile and natural world and, of course failing, I try again and leave behind a trail of art works. It is in these works of video and photos and writing that I seem to be reflected back at myself as part landscape, part animal and part garment.

Jane asked me why I chose to take the clothes I did to Paradise Valley. Soft pinks, pale blues and white against green that I find sensual. I thought a lot about the colour of the clothes I took and how they would look against the Southern Fiordland forest and about their textures. I chose pink trousers and a thick satin white skirt and red Yoji dancing shoes. A pale blue sequined tutu for twirling in and an old petticoat to add volume and rustle to the skirts. A possum fur muff for the pleasure of feeling fur - sticking my hands into fur. A hooded jacket and a thick cable knit jersey for warmth and layers. I like looking and feeling warm and lumpy. A dress I had made with pink ears and a tail to explore becoming animal in. My beautiful Martin Margiela long, three- fingered wool gloves. And finally my old man black wool pants. I had worn them a lot; they’re too big, with a huge baggy bum; I know they look bad but I feel good looking bad. And they’re warm. I filled our hut with my clothes and laid out they were an extraordinary mixture of colours and textiles with links to the past and potential possibilities.

Barbara Vinken has called fashion a poetological activity that thematises itself and has performative power, one that represents a relationship between the designer and those who wear the clothes. (4) The performative power of clothing interests me and here I see a connection or blurring of boundaries with art. Both have the potential to shift and question how we see ourselves in relation to our environments – or to what we can become. In my brown dress with a tail I don’t become a tailed animal and the gap between me and tailed animals is wide. But I do feel a huge respect for animals and like them I need also the forests and clean air to live.

White dress with tail, 2011

Of course one does not need to dress up to feel the awe and respect I feel for these vast areas of landscape that do not need me. But I feel such a joy in dressing up in the mad clothes I have made and found and being in the forests in these garments gives me a sense of happiness and well being that I sometimes struggle to find elsewhere. I take these sensations back to my house and my partner, my back yard, and my cat glow. Kate Soper argues that we need new ways for finding other pleasures and desires and “alternative outlets for ‘transcendence’ that are not provided by Western Industrialist consumerist culture …. which …. remove us from a natural simplicity or immanence, rather than return us to it,” (5) if we do want to maintain a world that both humans and non humans can happily and healthy continue to live in. She argues that even if could we continue to exploit and consume as we do, it would not necessarily enhance human happiness and wellbeing. From her writings on ‘alternative hedonisim,’ (6) I am interested in her ideas of developing new modes of satisfaction that do not necessarily require goods but rather new modes of experience that are possibly more sensory, sensual and slower than what we usually give value to.

Brown dress with tail, 2011

“I don't really want to become an animal with a tail.................I just like being in the bush dressed up because I feel expansive simple as that.” I wrote that to Jane two weeks ago after being up at the mountains in a white silk dress with ears and tail and elaborately embroidered fur muff that I had made. I am now thinking that a sensation of “expansion” whether through feeling or sight though certainly not a new human experience, maybe an important one to strive for. When I feel expansive I feel a sense of wonderment and respect for and I guess love in and connection for my surroundings. Paradise Valley in the space of the clearing, through idleness and having the time to sit and think, we both decided that expansion and very simple ideas were vital. And my experience of spending ten days in a clearing watching the grass and sun and feeling things, I think has changed me. For years I thought I was seeking immanence – a complete collapse of myself to become more plant or animal or rock like, to be fully immersed into the trees but as Kate Soper argues if I really had the option for immanence I would have to renounce all my aspirations for philosophical or poetic transcendance. When I’m out there I don’t transcend my corporeal self; the wet skirt touches my legs and I am part of the landscape. Yet I expand and am transformed…my three wardrobes are full, and I believe. Because it is the being in it that I am interested in, the jouissance of being in the bush luxuriously dressed and feeling expansive in way that I am still struggling to articulate.

When tramping with a heavy pack on my back I spend a lot of time looking down on myself, on the next spot to put my foot. I delight in looking down and seeing the satin or silk dress fabric outline my knee as I physically push myself. But mostly it is the colour of the fabric against the leaves, the mud, the tussock, the snow, and the alpine flowers. The sound of the fabric rustling and swishing, my fabric tail dragging through the moss trailing me, the smell of the bush and the feel of the whole experience… moving through it in a brown or satin dress. Being small in a space of enormity, beauty, perfection and it is hard and unknown. Maybe I’m just dressing up in reverence for it all. In the clearing I have come to realise that whether it be twirling or just sitting or lying, the clearing is a space for hedonistic small pleasures and a sense of expansion: a place to think and find different ways of being.

The Clearing, 2011

All images by Catherine Bagnall

Catherine Bagnall is a Lecturer in the Fashion Programme at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in New Zealand. As artist her focus is on the intersection of fashion and performance practices and her recent work explores clothing’s ability to transcend and transform the wearer in ‘wilderness’ landscapes. Her work focuses on how clothing can offer revelatory experiences in feminine ways of being and becoming through representations of the clothed female body.

Endnotes
1) I admit that my sister’s red gortex jacket with the double zip front and Velcro tabs at the cuffs and borrowed crampons made the crossing possible but I am never out to kill myself just to see what can happen what else I can become. 
2) Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamophosis, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (London: Oxford University Press, 2002),p.202
3) Ibid,p.164-165. 
4) Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (Berg:Oxford, New York, 2005),p.4. 
5) Kate Soper, “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress and Ecology” Capitalisim Nature Socialisim 10 (2), June, 1999 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455759909358857
6) see Kate Soper on Alternative Hedonisim.
 

Susan Cianciolo, "When Buildings Meet the Sky"

Photo: Rosalie Knox, courtesy of Susan Cianciolo

by Angeli Sion

Towards the closing of this season’s relatively quiet New York Fashion Week, the National Arts Club in Gramercy was alive with warmth and laughter in a beautiful farrago of vibrant words and movements. This past Wednesday night artist and fashion designer Susan Cianciolo presented her Fall 2011 Collection, When Buildings Meet the Sky, in enchanting moments woven together by a play of prose titled She Stories of the Sky. Written and imagined by an emerging artist and designer Andrea Diodati, the play conjured up interpretive Noh theater with dance and chant complete with a live flutist and tambourine player.

The clothing was appropriately a riff of Japanese dress. In collaboration with Hinaya textile in Kyoto and kimono fashion stylist Hiromi Asai in New York, Cianciolo sent out colorful kimonos and wide obi-like sashes done in elaborate oriental prints. Many looks were accompanied by mask-like make-up, bright color thick around the eyes, and hair piled up in buns high on heads. Tinges of metallic gold could be found in the clothing and on faces. As the character Nobel Lady Time, Cianciolo herself donned a deep peach-orange kimono and golden make-up with her hair piled up high too.

Moreover, Cianciolo’s continuous support for friends and former students was telling not only in the latest February issue of Art Forum but also in the presentation’s program. Young designer Willie Norris contributed his bow ties while another emerging designer Su Beyazit helped out with the styling. To note, a few of the models were also current or former students.

Cianciolo’s collection as a whole was a performance of a collage of soft and vivid colors in rhythm with the fluid movements of the performers and the words.

The clothing was raw. The girls were barefoot. Beauty is found in strange spaces.

Photo: Rosalie Knox courtesy of Susan Cianciolo

Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA's Collection

This post is long in the making. I have been meaning to review the exhibition Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA’s Collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as it ties in with themes explored in my Ph.D. on the grotesque in fashion at the turn of the twenty-first century, which I recently completed at Central Saint Martins

However, having not yet been able to visit the exhibition in person combined with the fact that it closes January, I figured for the moment, to at least mention its central theme and participating designers as sketched out in the museum’s accompanying literature:

"Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA’s Collection, examines the many ways designers have manipulated, transformed and liberated the female figure. The exhibition will feature ground breaking designs by Rudi Gernreich, Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace and other avant-garde fashion designers. Body Unbound will explore how these designers used modern construction and unexpected materials to contort, conceal, reveal or mock their wearers.

Fashions by visionaries Rudi Gernreich and Jean-Paul Gaultier illustrate how some designers played with the notions of shape and construction, challenging mid-century ideals of form. Examples by Issey Miyake and Junya Watanabe, based on the theories of androgyny and “universal beauty,” demonstrate how Japanese designers working in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s promoted an alternate way of styling the body, concealing its contours and silhouette. Pieces by Thierry Mugler, Gianni Versace and Franco Moschino display how designers utilized innovative textiles and subversive design elements to toy with the concepts of seduction and femininity."

The exhibition is on view through January 30, 2010 and the IMA will be its sole venue.

Virgin Knitters at the Textile Arts Center

Hall's father first scarf.

The Textile Arts Center, the founders of which were recently interviewed by Sarah Scaturro in Fashion Projects, is hosting a collaborative exhibition by Kimberly Ellen Hall titled "Virgin Knitters."

The exhibition is the documentation of a project started in 2007 for which Hall taught a number of people how to knit in exchange for their first project, a scarf. The project was inspired by the Buddhist notion of Wabi-Sabi, which can be partially understood as the appreciation of something specifically because of its imperfections.

That is how Hall explains the project:

"The virgin-knit scarves have both an emotional and aesthetic appeal. A virgin-knit scarf draws in the wearer through the knowledge that the knitter worked hard making it, while the aesthetic appeal stems from the ideas embodied in Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese concept of beauty. The idea that there is beauty and power in an object that is not precision made or the result of years of experience seems an important one today. It's easy to agree that everything is mass-produced, cheaply/quickly made these days, etc.—an antidote to that can be found in craft. But we often find at the other end of the spectrum is artisanal and labored handwork that can be a put-off when deciding to learn to make something for the first time."

Kimberly Ellen Hall is an artist and designer with an interest in the intangible qualities of textiles. She holds an MA in textiles from Central Saint Martins in London, and has designed on both sides of the Atlantic from Hussein Chalayan to Coach.

For more information on the exhibition and the accompanying programming, among which is a lecture by Sabrine Gschwandtner on November 11th please visit the Textiles Arts Center site

Kimberly Ellen Hall, Virgin Knitters Exhibition at the Textile Arts Center

Where Worlds Collide: Second-hand Clothes Reconsidered

by Patty Chang

Mitumba trader in Mathare Valley, Photo from REculture

Three things over the past few months got me thinking about second-hand clothes: (1) bedbugs, (2) the public debate waged through social mediaearlier in April that pitted development specialists against entrepreneur Jason Sadler over his questionably well-intentioned but spectacularly ill-conceived 1 Million Shirts for Africa project, and (3) the link between second-hand clothes and sustainability with the rise of environmentally conscious and socially responsible designers and consumers, who care about each step of the production process (re: ethics, labor conditions, carbon emissions, biodiversity, waste, animal welfare, etc.) Bedbugs aside, the last two points touch on the uneasy relationship regarding “doing good”, charities, and commerce, as well as a process more colloquially known as “aid dumping” which informs the subject of this post.

In 2008, Oxfam published a survey that estimated that in the U.K. alone, close to half or 2.4 billion items of clothes remained unworn gathering dust on shelves and hangers in British homes. The charity urged consumers to be more environmentally conscious and help fight poverty by donating their unwanted clothes to charities across the U.K. The U.S. spent a collective $282 billion in 2006 on new clothes and the average American got rid of 68 pounds of clothing and textiles. According to Goodwill, approximately 23.8 billion pounds of clothing and textiles end up in U.S. landfills each year. In an effort to make a dent in the percentage of discarded clothing, Levi Strauss & Co. partnered with Goodwill to launch in 2010 a product care tag that also encourages people to donate their unwanted clothing. With the rise in environmental responsibility over the past decade, more consumers are dropping off their excess clothes at their local charity or thrift shops. Many of us would concede that donating unwanted goods to charity is morally the right thing do, and a win-win situation – your items are going towards those in need and you get a tax write off.

Bale of Second-Hand Clothing. Image from Collective Selection

While a cohesive definition of “sustainability” on the supply side of the fashion industry has yet to emerge, as consumers we are often called upon to recycle and reuse, barter, swap or buy second hand where possible or even simply buy fewer but more durable items to contribute to the overall concept. And by extension, some people deliberately seek out second-hand clothes as a form of validation of their ethical stance on wasteful over-consumption and over-production of clothing for what some deem to be ‘superficial’ purposes.

How your clothes donated to charity organizations winds up at market stalls in far off foreign locations has been the subject of increasing scrutiny. The process goes something like this: before second-hand clothes can be re-consumed or take on a ‘new’ life with other owners, charitable organizations like the Salvation Army and Goodwill need to sift through the loads, price, and evaluate the items at their warehouses. Special period clothes are set aside for foreign and domestic vintage garment buyers. The rest of the load is indiscriminately compressed into 50 kg or heavier bales sometimes containing other unsorted clothing. The lowest quality clothing is shipped to Africa, medium-quality to Latin America, while Japan gets the bulk load of the top-quality items. Used clothing companies known as “rag traders” pay a few cents per pound for what they take and relieve logistically overburdened charities of these donations. Some estimate that as much as 75 percent of the clothes we donate in the U.S. to charities are exported globally to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Once the bales arrive at the country of destination, they are sold off to wholesalers and pass through a number of transactions before they end up for sale at local market stalls (see here for a firsthand account). By the way, since 1990 the second-hand clothing trade in U.S. and foreign markets is valued at approximately $1 billion annually.

Monrova, Liberia, Photo from Foreign Policy

Media coverage of Western cast offs to developing and least developing countries has not been positive, especially the impact of the second-hand clothes trade in sub-Saharan Africa. While various regions are affected by the trade differently, sub-Saharan Africa is the number one destination for these garments. Some argue, with much eye rolling, that the dumping of Western “leftovers” in Africa is symptomatic of a culture of excessive overproduction of low grade clothing waste. Still, others assert that the ailing local textile and garment industries are direct products of neoliberal markets and adverse economic policies dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The cases of Zambia and Uganda are often cited as examples in which cheap North American or European second-hand clothes flood the local markets and undercut the competitiveness of local textile industries, and with that, induce the decline of ‘traditional’ culture. In the sub-region of West Africa, where the dumping of cotton on the international markets has already produced adverse impact on the 10-15 million small farmers, the recent trends in a study by Oxfam show that out of the 41 textile and clothing industries that were in existence in the region in the mid-1990s, only six were operating at full capacity in 2004, and only three had satisfactory levels of performance. These trends have been detrimental to national policy makers who strove to transform the cotton fiber into finished and semi-finished products to stimulate employment and industry in the region. Countries like Eritrea, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, and South Africa enacted protectionist trade policies to ban the trade of used clothing in what they claim to be because of porous borders and illegal smuggling practices that went along with the trade.

Justifications in defense of second-hand clothing trade tend to point out that it creates employment in recipient countries, especially in the form of transporting, cleaning, repairing and restyling clothes. Development economist Steven Haggblade has argued that second-hand garments provide low-cost (or more affordable) clothing for people living in poverty. His study of Rwanda in the 1980s demonstrates that while the country was an outlier in that did not have an indigenous textile and a garment manufacturing industry, the second-hand clothing trade created better paid jobs in cleaning, repairing and restyling of garments for the 88 percent lost of employment in the informal sector tailoring.

Along similar lines, anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen has argued with respect to Zambia that it’s too easy to blame used clothes imports for the poor performance of local textile and clothing industry which were already ailing prior to the liberalization of trade import regulations. She views the embrace of the second-hand clothing trade as a response to the economic woes of the early 1990s. Moreover, she claims that the second-hand clothing trade has generated more income for locals and the government from import tariffs. Her analysis also moves past the argument of the consumption of Western goods in Africa (especially clothes) as a symbol of Western domination and global imperialism. Instead, she convincingly shows us how Zambian men and women have culturally re-appropriated and re-defined Western notions of dress to their own contexts and outward function of their identity. Lastly, she’s quick to point out that countries like Kenya and Uganda which are large importers of second-hand clothing also have textile and garment manufacturing firms that export to the U.S. under the provisions of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

George Packer proclaims in a matter of 5,000 words, “I have become a convert to used clothing. Africans want it. It gives them dignity and choice”. Me, on the other hand, I’m not all that sure. I often think about Anthony Appiah’s case for cosmopolitanism. While he acknowledges that many people in least developing countries are simply too poor to live the life they want lead, irrespective of what one calls ‘choice’, he also queries the premise of a cultural expression of “authenticity”. He notes that if people in impoverished communities one day become richer and still choose to wear T-shirts, then “Talk of authenticity now just amounts to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions”.

Still yet, the question remains whether impoverished recipients of Western cast offs should pay for items effectively donated to non-profit charities?