Week 1 - Hopeless ignorance
Wouldn’t it be easier to just say “shut up”?
This has been a great week, mostly of reading but I’m excited to be getting stuck in. I realised rather quickly I’d need access to a good fashion & textile library, but lacking the ability to run hours back and forth to Leeds every time I wanted a book, I had to find something closer to home. Luckily for me, Central St Martins has just such a library and PhD researchers get access to any university library (a feature I’ll be missing quite a lot after this is all done). So I applied for access and got it! I’m not able to get there until Saturday so for now I’m just pushing ahead with what I hope is sensible Google skill to find relevant stuff.
I started off with A History of Dyed Textiles by Stuart Robinson, published back in the late 60s. I was hoping it would have some interesting stuff inside about contemporary (read here: hippie) use of dyecraft as they got involved in the resist dyeing (‘tie-dye’) movement so classic of the time. What I got was quite a frank and informative, if somewhat irrelevant, history of dyes that people used for textiles. I was interested to learn about ancient and early modern dyeing practices, but I wasn’t really looking for chemical processes, just info on how hippies got into tie-dye. I didn’t find it, but the book was still a good intro.
I then picked up a bunch of articles about the idea of fashion and how it intersects with what we wear everyday1 and it raised some really interesting questions about what's ordinary and what makes a garment exceptional. There were some pieces about fashion as a method for communication2 (which I already knew a bit about) but quite a lot of the reading was not super useful. I blame my scatter-gun/Google-Fu approach to it which I suppose can't be helped this early on.
I really had a wonderful time reading about the theory of things, which I have a soft spot for. The concept of the everyday and the idea of fashion as communication really underpin the theory/methodology lenses I'm looking forward to getting stuck into. There's plenty more to come from the realm of performance art, phenomenology and beyond, but this work helps to add to the context of all that in the framework I'm trying to set up.
I started reading a new book called Twentieth-century American Fashion that I hope does as advertised. I'm about halfway through it and it's an interesting collection of essays. I don't find the stuff about Edwardian corsets particularly compelling or relevant but as we move towards the 50s-90s I think I'll probably gain interest. Looking forward to the Central St Martin's library this weekend!
1. Buckley, C. and Clark, H. "Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Lives", Design Issues Vol 28, 4 (2012) pg. 18-28
2. Castaldo Lundén, E. "Exploring Fashion as Communication: The Search for a new fashion history against the grain", Popular Comunication 18, 4 (2020) pg. 249-258