December 2023 - Monthly Madness
Marian posing with her pieces at what I believe was a Japanese shibori colloquium.
Writing
Taking the majority of December off was much needed, but it wasn’t wholly fruitless! I travelled up to Leeds to meet with my supervisors and attend a writing seminar to kick off the month. Two nights and hours in the library were just what I needed to get everything situated, and an hour with my supervisors was well spent discussing my current progress. Long story short, everything’s fine but I need to get writing!
The prospect is only mildly terrifying. While I do of course understand that I need to actually write things to achieve a PhD, the idea of actually putting a rigorous structure to the reading I’ve been doing is a daunting task. I pulled together the first bullet points today and got the distinct impression I had no clue what I was talking about and hadn’t read anything of consequence. I’m going to assume this is normal and will pass, but golly that wasn’t a fun feeling.
Visiting Mary
However, before I made any major enhancements to my writing capabilities, I had a few other things to get to. After my visit to Leeds I odysseyed all the way back out to Essex to visit Mary Schoeser. Odysseyed is in fact the word, since it always takes me about 3.5 hours to get there and another 2-3.5 home. However, time there is never wasted, and we spent a long time talking about potential readings, plentiful ideas on how to better structure certain arguments, and of course access Mary’s mammoth contact book.
One particularly insightful answer came off the back of what I felt was a rather fundamental question: “If Marian walked the New York Fashion Week runway in 1999 immediately after Oscar de la Renta, and if her designs were sold on racks with Dior, Chanel, and Balenciaga, why wasn’t she as prolific as these fashion houses?” The answer was simple, and two-fold:
Marian refused to compromise her methods of production for commercial benefit. For her it was about the art and the making, not the output or the money brought in. She even turned down an interview and feature with Vogue because she felt it would create too much demand for her garments, and she wouldn’t be able to meet the needs of her clients. This led to what Mary S calls Marian being the “insider’s secret” in the industry, and that wearing a Clayden put you in a very exclusive club.
Marian never made handbags, or perfume, or jewellery, or sunglasses. She wasn’t a “brand” or a “house”, she was just Marian, making garments with the ladies in Los Gatos to be beautiful creations and enable the beautiful works of art they became when they were worn. This failure to diversify was a conscious choice, and an example of her business ethics overcome traditional approaches to the industry.
I had a sense of the first reason, but the second genuinely had not occurred to me, and looking back it makes perfect sense. Mary helped to point it out and it was very good of her to. There were a few other points we discussed, and touched upon again, and Mary was very passionate about the idea that the rapidity of the spread of the internet has led to a dangerous precedent among younger academics that if it’s not on the internet it doesn’t exist. This is of course not true given the vast majority of academic work is published in paper format, but it is the primary driver for this Foundation and the work I want to do in bringing Marian back into the conversation. She fell ill in 2005 and was unable to make the great leap online like others of her generation, and I strongly believe that’s why she’s not better known in 2023 outside of those who know her before the internet became the main method of communication and data storage for modern society.
A portrait of the researcher wearing a Clayden printed scarf, keeping the art alive.
(Very Little) Reading
Quite apart from my Mary visit, I also had a chance to finish a very short little book before the end of the month called The Shape of Things by George Kubler. Written in the 60s, Kubler tries to categorise all of human-designed objects, art or otherwise, into three distinct categories:
Planes: flat objects with something on them like a textile or painting
Solids: three-dimensional objects like a sculpture
Envelopes: architecture, or other container-objects
By doing this Kubler avoids the unfortunate debate about fine art vs craft that plagues Western art criticism and theory. I really enjoyed this idea and while Kubler goes on to discuss the way that objects can be classed as prime vs sequence (aka boundary-pushing vs minor improvements on an existing form), or the way they flow through time by achieving a cycle of invention, repetition, and discard, it was his classifications I found most interesting because I could see Marian flitting between them. Her surface design work was a plane (textiles), before she moved into three-dimensional solid sculptures (solids) and then onto the body for art-to-wear and fashion (envelopes). There is something pleasing about being able to show that her body of work was diverse in such simple language.
Raiding Aladdin’s Cave
While home I also paid another very fruitful visit to the Clayden storage unit, where rests all the remaining materials I have yet to bring to the UK. I raided it for a wealth of paper materials I have yet to scan or catalogue, as well as a bunch of old VHS tapes and family photo albums. One benefit to your research subject being your own grandmother is you get access to a lot of ephemera not usually available to academics. In my case it was lovely family photos which also contained key insights into Marian’s career.
Perhaps the biggest goldmine was the VHS tapes I was able to watch using my sister’s portable TV. Thank god for nostalgia because without it I would have had to hook up an ancient VHS player to watch some of her fashion shows. Not only were they full of excellent quotes, but they’re also so 90s it hurts. I brought back about 8-9 slide boxes as well, which is another 1000 slides to add to the collection of unscanned slides. I will not be taking questions at this time.
“Not only do I create the fabric, but I’m very interested in the surface. Anything to make it look gorgeous.”
Marian Clayden
Roll on January, for lots of writing, lots of reading, and hopefully some pretty pictures along the way. Perhaps obvious now but I’m also going to be switching to a monthly newsletter because weekly was just…too much work and also I never had much to say! Your understanding is appreciated.