Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Glorifying the Needle and Thread
- 1 On Pins and Needles: Hypermodernity and Hyperclothing Ourselves
- 2 The Perfect Pattern: Dressmaking as a Political Tool in María Dueñas’s El Tiempo Entre Costuras
- 3 Lining with Surrealism: Spaces and Stitches in César Aira’s La Costurera Y El Viento
- 4 Unraveling Gender and Sexual Confinements in Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo Miedo Torero
- 5 An Honest Measuring Tape: Peripheral Places in Frances de Pontes Peebles’s The Seamstress
- 6 Tailoring Peace and Purpose: Sartorial Representations in Children’s Literature
- Conclusion: Final Notions: Toward Consumer Consciousness
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - On Pins and Needles: Hypermodernity and Hyperclothing Ourselves
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Glorifying the Needle and Thread
- 1 On Pins and Needles: Hypermodernity and Hyperclothing Ourselves
- 2 The Perfect Pattern: Dressmaking as a Political Tool in María Dueñas’s El Tiempo Entre Costuras
- 3 Lining with Surrealism: Spaces and Stitches in César Aira’s La Costurera Y El Viento
- 4 Unraveling Gender and Sexual Confinements in Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo Miedo Torero
- 5 An Honest Measuring Tape: Peripheral Places in Frances de Pontes Peebles’s The Seamstress
- 6 Tailoring Peace and Purpose: Sartorial Representations in Children’s Literature
- Conclusion: Final Notions: Toward Consumer Consciousness
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
We seek identity in the body, and clothes are an immediate continuation of the body. That is also why clothes are so important to us: they are closest to our body. Clothes rewrite the body, give it a different shape and a different expression. This applies not only to the clothed body but also to the unclothed; or, more precisely, the unclothed body is always also clothed.
(Svendsen 77)Fashion has its own manifest virtue, not unconnected with the virtues of individual freedom and uncensored imagination that still underline democratic ideals.
(Hollander 12)Fashion is one of the faces of modern artifice, of the effort of human beings to make themselves masters of the conditions of their own existence.
(Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion 24)While this book focuses on the professional and creative processes of seamstresses, due to the message-laden content of clothing, the predominant voice of fashion must not be excluded from the dialogue. Although fashion has remained a topic of discord for a slew of theorists with conflicting viewpoints, what can be agreed upon is that clothing does not merely meet a basic human need by protecting us from natural elements. Garments possess more than a functional role in our everyday lives no matter how much we resist. Though anxieties over the appropriate clothing for an occasion may resonate for a majority of our lived, shared social experiences, even “comfort clothing” bears fashionable identity codes. Svendsen denies that one may decide or chose to exist outside of fashion's domain: “To be excluded from the game, and aware of being excluded, is to be within its sphere” (20). Our inability to escape these cultural messages and markers confirms how fashion has cast its net far and wide, seeping into almost every aspect of our public and private identities and experiences.
When approaching the interpretation of fashion in contemporary times, rapid changes result in a maddening conundrum. In the face of irrational changes, Svendsen cautions against misinterpreting history by linking fashion trends and societal change, a practice that does not always translate into direct cause-and-effect: “If skirts are longer for a season, it is not because society has become more puritanical, but because they have been shorter. In short: fashion develops more on the basis of internal conditions than a dialogue with the political developments in society” (29).
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021