Accidental Iconのインスタグラム(iconaccidental) - 12月9日 03時40分

Yesterday I was honored to be part of a panel at Parsons facilitating the first critique of MFA student portfolio’s. It’s the first look at the student’s ideas about a collection and the practical challenge of turning abstract concepts into a material object: a garment. This is much more challenging than it seems and that struggle appeared in the early prototypes and attempts. I was very much reminded of when you had to defend your dissertation proposal before you could get on with the work. This point of critique is critical because it can offer valuable guidance before things start becoming real. I was struck by all the tensions I saw in the presentations; fashion/art, sellable/aspirational, sustainability/scale but especially the desire to tell a personal narrative and the difficulty there appeared with situating that within a larger context. I wondered if what is going on in the world made them want to be small, to take refuge in a safe, personal space? Feeling this desire myself, I know the impact on work. I felt my/their uncertainty. Some garments hinted at life, they moved. Hope. How does one take control of a personal narrative so it shows up in a way that no one can take away your story? Or make it what they want it to be?

I was particularly taken with one young woman who was confronting trauma, patriarchy and standards of beauty. Her own experience led her to want to design a garment that when she wore it would make her “forget” about the part of her that fell short, that did not meet the standard. What an act of resistance to patriarchy and control, moving through the world in a garment that makes you not give systems of surveillance any relevance at all. You refuse the gaze to begin with. The political theorist Jane Bennett writes about what she calls “thing power” the ability of inanimate things, like a garment to be a vibrant thing, “to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”

Wearing clothes created for me in 2020 by Parsons students I “forgot” and I refused.

Do you have a garment that makes you forget?

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