Worn

Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear

Ellen Sampson

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350087194
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Conception
• Categoría: Stylisme

Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2021 In a culture preoccupied with newness and a fashion system largely predicated upon it, what is the significance of worn clothes and why do they have the power to affect us so deeply? How are relationships to clothing produced and maintained through the embodied practices of wearing, maintenance and repair? Through a focus upon a single garment, the shoe, this book calls on readers to reconsider the value of the marks of wear at a time when fast fashion reigns supreme and interest in damaged, or worn, garments quietly increases. Originating in an experimental practice-based methodology which placed wearing at its center, this book presents the act of wearing as a tool for developing knowledge, of 'being in' or 'being with', rather than observing from the outside. Bringing together anthropological and psychoanalytic theory with practices of handmaking, wearing, and photography, this book asks what is the embodied experience of wearing and the affect of the worn? Beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, Worn is the first book to focus exclusively on the significance of imperfect garments as important aspects of our material world and culture.

Wearing Diary 1

I have flattened the back of my shoe, unthinkingly pressing my heel into it as I walk around the flat. My gentle morning routine, the shuffling from kettle to fridge to table has damaged my shoe. Conscious of the damage and unsure of whether to repair it, I am suddenly aware that this unconscious behaviour is not new but a regression. That throughout my childhood I did exactly this; flattened the heel of my left shoe while the right remained intact. At some point I grew out of it, I left this bodily tic behind. I had forgotten the familiar feeling of the compressed leather beneath my heel but now it is there for me. I am flooded with familiarity and loss. My past selves have re-emerged.

(Wearing Diary, August 2015)

1

Entanglement, Affect and Experience: Walking and wearing (shoes) as experimental research methodology

Figure 1.1 Fold 1, 2013. Ellen Sampson.

The experience of wearing is fundamental to our relationship with cloth and with clothing. Though we engage with our clothes through all of our senses, wearing is a relationship grounded in touch: it is through the tactile experience of garments that we come to know them. Understandings of clothing are both sensory and cumulative: our knowledge of a garment is predicated on both our experience of it and of all the garments we have worn before. This chapter explores the methodology utilized throughout this research; presenting wearing-based research as an addendum or adjunct to more widely utilized practice-based and performance-based research methodologies in fashion and dress. It asks how wearing as research practice might open up new avenues in fashion and textile knowledge, producing different perspectives on the spaces and situations where body, cloth and psyche meet. In doing so it presents a methodology of entanglement, or of blurred subject-object relations, which draws upon the works of phenomenologists Schilder (1935) and Merleau-Ponty (1962), psychologist Winnicott (1971) and sensory ethnographer Pink (2015). In exploring my methodology of ‘wearing-based research’, this chapter does the following: first, it addresses approaches to wearing as both a subject and methodology. Second, it asks what a ‘wearing-based’ research methodology might look like and what types of knowledge such a methodology might produce. Finally, it explores the theories of entanglement and blurred subject/object divides that have informed my research practice.

Practice-based research and tactile knowledge

I have flattened the back of my shoe, unthinkingly pressing my heel into it as I walk around the flat. My gentle morning routine, the shuffling from kettle to fridge to table has damaged my shoe. Conscious of the damage and unsure of whether to repair it, I am suddenly aware that this unconscious behaviour is not new but a regression. That throughout my childhood I did exactly this; flattened the heel of my left shoe while the right remained intact. At some point I grew out of it, I left this bodily tic behind. I had forgotten the familiar feeling of the compressed leather beneath my heel but now it is there for me. I am flooded with familiarity and loss. My past selves have re-emerged.

(excerpt from wearing diary, August 2015)

This chapter commences with an excerpt from the wearing diaries written¹ as I walked in shoes I had made. Recording the re-emergence of forgotten habits and bodily memories, which resurfaced through my sensory engagement with the material world, it seems an apposite place to start a discussion of the tacit and sensory knowledge, which are central to practice-based research. Practice-based research occupies an increasingly large space in the growing field of fashion studies from research into making processes and design techniques (Lee 2016; Valle-Noronha 2017) or technologies and materials (Petreca et al. 2013), to historical and archival research (Rossi Camus 2019), and research into methodologies themselves (Igoe 2010). Within the context of a burgeoning culture of fashion research through doing, this chapter therefore presents wearing as a tool for practice-based research.

The term ‘practice-based research’ encompasses many practices in diverse disciplines, from ethnography, to international relations, to architecture, to the arts. Since Frayling’s seminal 1993 paper on research in the arts and Candlin’s (2000) insightful review of the 1997 UKCGE report into ‘Practice and Performance Based Research’, practice-based research in the arts has become an established and accepted methodology. It is widely understood that knowledge may be produced through ‘doing’ as well as observing. In the arts, the predominant utilization of practice-based research has been self-reflexive: practice-based methodologies are used to examine the practice itself. However, throughout this book, the term ‘practice’ refers to my research methodology as a whole, or the practice of conceiving, producing and displaying artworks as research; however, the practice itself can be split into three distinct yet inter-related facets: making artefacts and images, wearing them and processes of recording, writing and display. Though this chapter addresses the practice of wearing, it should be noted that these processes were not and cannot be neatly separated. The shoes, and thus the work, were ‘made’ through wearing, so that wearing became simultaneously a mundane and creative act.

What is distinct about research by, through or into practice, is that it often examines those things that are unspoken: knowledges and experiences that sit outside words. As Polyani famously stated, ‘We can know more than we can tell’ (1967: 4) and, to paraphrase him, we, as researchers, sense more than we can write. The knowledge produced in fashion practice-based research is not always articulated or articulable in text. Wearing is often a tacit and tactile experience: from the tacit knowledge embodied in acts of dressing, to the sensory experience of garments and skin, to the complex relationships between memory, experience and garments. Indeed, wearing clothes is a form of what Ingold (2013) terms ‘friction’: a meeting of materials and intentions, not as a seamless convergence, but instead as a practice which is constituted in the ways that these disparate things, garments, bodies and thoughts, fail to fit.

Over the past two decades there has been a resurgence in interrogations of materiality and the material, which have engaged both with concepts of materiality, and the nature of the artefact itself (Ingold 2011a: 26; Hodder 2012). This material turn has led to a renewed emphasis on the tacit and tactile, and on the experiential nature of our relationships with things. Within the context of the material turn, the unspoken and un-verbalized practices of doing and knowing by hand and by eye, and the role of knowledge beyond or outside language, are increasingly understood as central aspects of how we encounter and navigate the world (Ingold 2013; Sennett 2008). In the context of this interest in inarticulable and embodied knowledge, what might be the nature of knowledge produced through practice-based research, and in turn through wearing? Macleod, writing of the artwork as a form of knowledge, suggests:

This is theory which is not written; it is made or realized through artwork. This theory is the result of ideas worked through matter. It might be appropriate to see this as a matrixial theory, a complex of ideas/matter/form and theory which is external to practice.

(2000: 5)

Similarly for Scrivener (2002), the role of the artist-as-researcher is in uncovering knowledge through its manifestation as a material form. That is to say, the artist-as-researcher’s role (and the role of the artwork as research output) is not to present explanations but to produce or enable the encounter, or to create an affective experience. For Scrivener, art-based research is concerned with producing apprehensions or abductions, so that the experience of viewing the artwork must create a new way of knowing for the viewer.

Frequently recurring in discussions of practice-based research are questions about the relationships between object (or artwork) and text. Returning to Macleod:

The written text was instrumental to the conception of the art projects but the art projects themselves exacted a radical rethinking of what had been constructed in written form because the process of realizing or making artwork altered what had been defined in written form.

(2000, 3)

In exploring wearing-based research, what I suggest is that the knowledge produced and embodied in wearing is not just tacit but tactile. To begin to address this, one must locate knowledge as material and bodily. This is not to say that this knowledge should not be articulated but that its verbalization may not, in itself, be necessary. It might be experienced and understood by interaction with artwork rather than read. The works I produced attempted to create and contain body knowledge, to make body experience apparent in material form. The manifestations of this knowledge are dual, both the marks made through wearing (both on the garment and on my body) and the knowledge within my body, or the memory of sensation, the understandings of fit, restriction and comfort.

While fashion and fashioning are predominantly visual practices – practices of image making, of looking and of mimicry – dressing, or the day-to-day ‘fleshy practice’ of covering the body is tactile: we feel our clothes (Entwistle 2000). Garments produce a multi-sensory experience, which both mediate and create our experience of the world. This tactile experience of our garments binds us to them. If as Pink (2015) states the auto-ethnographer’s task is to participate with the world, then it is through these participations that we become bound to the things we wear. In his development of the idea of ‘bodily schema’, Merleau-Ponty expresses this particularly well: ‘To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them or conversely to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 166). Thus, a wearing-based research into clothing is research into and within the ‘body schema’.

The maker as researcher

Figure 1.2 Fold 2, 2013. Ellen Sampson.

Figure 1.3 Fold 3, 2013. Ellen Sampson.

As research into (and through) the ‘body schema’, this research addressed the dual themes of transmissions and of transformation – the ways that persons and artefacts entwine over time. This blurring of subject and object is common to much practice-based research. Ideas of entanglement were central to this project, which is concerned with object relations in both a literal and psychoanalytic sense. In viewing our relationships with clothing as a form of object relations, this research positioned the work of Winnicott (1953, 1971) as central. Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object (1953), an object capable of mediating and maintaining the boundaries of the psychic self, was applied both to the relationship between wearer and garment, between artist and artwork, between ideas of touching and holding, and of the capacity to contain. Winnicott’s ideas are further present in this work both in relation to ideas of touching and holding and of the capacity to contain (1953, 1971). For Winnicott the ‘transitional object is not an internal object (which is a mental concept) – it is a possession. Yet it is not (for the infant) an external object either’ (1953: 3). Transitional phenomena are intermediary spaces, spaces which allow inside and outside worlds to meet. It is this capacity for a possession (or in the case of the artist an artwork or performance) to become an intermediary between psychic and external realities, which this research aimed to both explore and embody. It was the shifts from me to not me, from new to used and from commodity to inalienable possession, that my work explored.

It is the nature of practice-based research that the researcher is also often the creator of the object of enquiry – a fact that sets practice-based research apart from more traditional research practices that fashion studies typically employ. Making gives the researcher the ability to alter or enhance their experience of the research subject in a manner that would not be possible through observation alone. Maker-researchers come to know their subject through touch and often the material manipulation of its form. For the maker, the capacity to look, the self-reflexive ability to spot a problem or error and acknowledge it, is an intrinsic tool in the production of the artefact. Indeed, as Scrivener writes, ‘Like qualitative researcher, the artist and designer is central to the sense that is made and is engaged in a process in which reflexivity dominates. Hence, reflexivity must be seen as a central feature of research-in-design’ (Scrivener 2000: 15). Said differently, the practice of making is one of charting the dissonances between intention and actuality. Making as auto-ethnographic process is self-reflexive so that in my work I was both the producer and the product of this research.² The shifts in my research were mirrored by shifts in my own capacity to contain and articulate knowledge.

Making and wearing as practice-based research

Though the methodology of my research was the creation of artworks, the subject was the wearer’s relationships with clothing, specifically shoes. The project was research ‘through practice’, or practice as a way of uncovering knowledge about another distinct subject. Practice was the means through which the research was conducted, making (and wearing) as a means of uncovering embodied and bodily knowledge. It was research into an artefact via that artefact’s production and use, so that the researcher held the position of maker, user and observer.

Figure 1.4 Stills from film Fold, 2013. Ellen Sampson.

This research aimed to examine the attachments that wearers have to their garments; the ways that, through tactile engagement, they become incorporated into our bodily and psychic selves. Locating itself within the new materialism and materiality studies that have dominated social science and humanities research over the last decade, it asked if, by addressing the material outco...