Folk Fashion

Understanding Homemade Clothes

Amy Twigger Holroyd

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781838608569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Designgeschichte & -kritik

A dynamic resurgence in sewing and knitting is under way, with many people enjoying making and mending their own garments at home. However, stories abound of homemade clothes languishing at the back of the wardrobe. Amy Twigger Holroyd draws on ideas of fashion, culture and craft to explore makers' lived experiences of creating and wearing homemade clothes in a society dominated by shop-bought garments. Using the innovative metaphor of fashion as common land, Folk Fashion investigates the complex relationship between making, well-being and sustainability. Twigger Holroyd combines her own experience as a designer and knitter with first-hand accounts from folk fashion makers to explore this fascinating, yet under-examined, area of contemporary fashion culture.Looking to the future, she also considers how sewers and knitters might maximise the radical potential of their activities.

1

Introducing Folk Fashion

What is folk fashion? Perhaps the words conjure up a mental image of a ‘peasant’ blouse, richly stitched with hand embroidery, or perhaps they suggest a discussion of the great variety of regional textile traditions found across the world. But no: when I say ‘folk fashion’, I am not referring to specific styles of clothing, nor to established traditions of making. Rather, I mean the making and mending of garments for ourselves, family and friends; the items these activities produce; and the wearing of those clothes once they are made. I use folk fashion as a catch-all term: an umbrella concept that encompasses everyone involved in making their own clothes, and everything they make. Thus, folk fashion garments can be of any type whatsoever, with no fixed aesthetic.

The most important characteristic of folk fashion is that it is not practised professionally, although there are plenty of professionals aiming to support this activity through workshops, instructions and patterns. While folk fashion is produced by amateurs, it does not indicate a particular level of skill. Many people who knit and sew for themselves turn out beautifully finished items, and these pieces are just as much included under my folk fashion banner as somewhat cruder garments, which we might more commonly associate with the word ‘homemade’. While in the past many people would have had to make and mend their own clothes out of necessity, today folk fashion is, in the main, taken up as a pleasurable activity and a valued outlet for creativity.

I am stepping into dangerous territory by using the word ‘folk’. Whether applied to music, art or craft, the term is highly contested and carries a great deal of cultural baggage. For me, folk implies a participatory and inclusive contemporary culture, open to anyone who wants to get involved. My interpretation stands in contrast to the dominant historical understanding – used by, amongst others, the Brothers Grimm – of ‘the folk’ as ‘the lower stratum of society, the so-called vulgus in populo, the illiterate in a literate society, rural people as opposed to urban people’.¹ As if this patronising definition were not bad enough, the traditions, dress and music of these people have frequently been manipulated by elites and instrumentalised in the interests of nationalism. Writing about the history of folk music, Stefan Szczelkun argues that influential English song collector Cecil Sharp ‘took a romanticised, cleaned up, censored and edited version of a past rural culture and represented it as the ideal for a national song and dance’.² Similar processes have taken place in terms of dress. Historian Lou Taylor describes how Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania established state structures to exploit local textile traditions as a vehicle for patriotic propaganda in the postwar era.³

Yet folk is a mutable term, and alternative meanings are in circulation. In 2005, Folk Archive, an exhibition curated by artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, opened at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. The selected works – including diverse cultural forms, from decorated cakes to hobby horses – represented the artists’ view of what constitutes contemporary folk art. As they explained, they define folk art as ‘the vast range of energetic and engaging local creativity from outside prescribed art arenas’.⁴ Deller has even suggested that YouTube videos are a new form of folk art.⁵ For Deller and Kane, ‘the folk’ are not some peasant underclass, but rather, simply, people. This understanding resonates strongly with my concept of folk fashion: in both cases, we are concerned with cultural production by non-professionals, creating work for their own enjoyment and self-expression. While my initial motivation for coming up with the concept of folk fashion was pragmatic – I needed a concise term that could refer to homemade garments as well as the acts of making, mending and wearing them – I am pleased to be able to align myself with Deller and Kane, and their valuing of ‘everyday’ creativity.

And what of ‘fashion’? While not as inflammatory as folk, this term has a similarly nebulous definition. There are many different interpretations of this ubiquitous word, and fashions can be recognised in many areas – from tangible things such as cars and houses to immaterial things such as music and philosophy. In its broadest sense, the term refers to cultural forms which are invented, accepted and discarded. I am interested in fashion in the sphere of clothing and dress, so the description offered by sociologist Joanne Entwistle is helpful: ‘a system of dress characterized by an internal logic of regular and systematic change’.⁶ Some people argue that not all clothing in the contemporary context should be described as fashion. Theorist Ingrid Loschek, for example, suggests that clothing becomes fashion only when it is adopted and identified as such by a large proportion of a community.⁷ From this perspective, many homemade clothes would not be considered to be fashion. But Entwistle points out that the fashion system – this ever-changing system of dress – is so influential that ‘even dress which is labelled “old-fashioned” and dress which is consciously oppositional is meaningful only because of its relationship to the dominant aesthetic propagated by fashion’.⁸ Essentially, all clothing decisions are framed by the fashion system, and so – like it or not – we are all engaged in it. Thus, as eminent fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson argues, ‘in modern western societies no clothes are outside fashion; fashion sets the terms of all sartorial behaviour’.⁹ Wilson’s inclusive understanding makes sense to me. Rather than setting up a binary categorisation of clothes versus fashion, it recognises that all clothes, whatever their style and whatever the intentions of their wearer, are connected to the fashion system. On a similar note, sustainable fashion expert Kate Fletcher proposes that practices of garment use – mending, for example – ‘are a fundamental part of the fashion process. Users may be far away from fashion capitals. What we wear may be old hat. But it is part of the fashion whole all the same.’¹⁰

Some people making their own clothes will be motivated by the desire to fit in with current fashions and others to rebel against them; a third group will be largely unconcerned with what is deemed to be fashionable at a given moment, instead pursuing a personal vision for the garments they aim to create. All of these makers, and all of these homemade clothes, fall within the scope of folk fashion. Likewise, a home dressmaker making a type of garment that would usually be mass-produced – such as a sweatshirt or a pair of jeans – is as much a folk fashion maker as a knitter producing an item that clearly corresponds with an established local craft tradition, such as a Fair Isle jumper.

Starting the Quest

Folk fashion is close to my heart: I have been involved in this world, in one way or another, my whole life. My mum made a lot of clothes for my siblings and me when we were little. I picked up a taste for sewing from her – along with a passion for knitting from my grandmother – and started to make my own clothes when I was a teenager. I enjoyed this process so much that I went on to study fashion and textiles and set up my own knitwear label, Keep & Share, in 2004. Craft has always been integral to the philosophy of Keep & Share; my pieces are made using craft techniques in my studio by me or – in the past, when I was producing on a bigger scale – one of my in-house machine knitters. After a few years of running the label, I became interested in supporting other people’s making, extending my activities to run hand- and machine-knitting workshops and participatory projects in a range of settings.¹¹ These experiences brought me into contact with scores of amateur makers: people who, as I still did myself, spent time and effort sewing and knitting garments for themselves or their family and friends to wear. As we knitted together, the stories came spilling out: the successes and disasters, the never-finished projects, the tricky finishing tasks that never turn out quite right. Happily, I met plenty of people who find making their own clothes to be an empowering, positive experience. Yet for many makers, folk fashion is riddled with ambivalences and idiosyncrasies. Despite my professional training, I had suffered my own share of disappointments. By talking to others I realised that this was not unusual, and in 2010 I embarked on a PhD to study this topic in much more detail.

As part of my research, I hunted for previous academic writing about making and wearing homemade clothes, and was puzzled to find very little. A growing number of researchers are examining the process of making – I will draw on some of this excellent work later in the book – yet I came across very few books or articles discussing how it feels to wear something you have made yourself. I did discover some fascinating tales of homemade clothes in the past,¹² but found contemporary accounts to be incredibly scarce. This is particularly odd in the light of the striking resurgence of sewing and knitting in recent years. An abundance of published material instructs us in what to make, and how, but there is a strange absence of makers reflecting on their experiences.

1. Machine knitting in the Keep & Share studio.

This book is the story of my quest to understand folk fashion. On this journey I have gathered many stories of making and wearing homemade clothes, and used theories of fashion, craft and culture to make sense of them. Because the imperative of sustainability has shaped my work for over a decade, I am driven to explore the ways in which folk fashion can contribute to a more satisfying, equitable and environmentally responsible fashion system. While I am fascinated by the vibrancy and complexity of what is happening now, I cannot help but look beyond the present. As a designer and maker I have a strong urge to build upon my understanding of a situation to make an impact: to initiate change. Therefore, I am aiming to analyse a set of creative practices which are often overlooked or even belittled, and to propose a vision of how sewers, knitters and menders – myself included – might recalibrate our practices to maximise the radical potential of our actions.

Althou...