Warp and Weft, 12.29.23 (Daveed Baptiste)

I interview people about clothes.

I met up with some friends at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art a few weeks ago, and while I was there I was taken aback by a fashion exhibit, Ti Maché, showcasing the work of the artist Daveed Baptiste—it’s open until tomorrow if you happen to be in the neighborhood—which had a lot of really great lines and folds and pleats, and when I asked Amy Andrieux, the executive director and chief curator of MoCADA, if she could put me in touch with him for an interview, she was super helpful in getting us connected. Daveed was gracious enough to walk me through a few of the looks from the show and his philosophies that inform his craft. (Read this interview he did with Doreen St. Felix to get more of that.) It was really great to listen to the way he talked about, and I hope you enjoy the resulting bit of textile indulgence. 

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The concept of your show, Ti Maché, is the marketplace, capturing these ephemeral moments of exchange. You have the garments, and they're on mannequins, but there's also photography of people in the clothes, in marketplaces holding things. And then at the feet of several of the mannequins is money, coffee beans, all these sorts of things you might encounter in a market. How do the clothes figure into the overall vision of the show?
The garments speak about a part of me that's just human and enjoys the design and enjoys denim and enjoys like all of these things that have nothing to do with the land I'm from, my racial identity, my cultural identity. But North Miami is my community. That's where I grew up. Little Haiti is one of the fastest-gentrifying neighborhoods in the US. It's a neighborhood that was founded by Haitian immigrants—they call them “boat people”—in the late 70s, early 80s. They created a home for themselves. I haven't lived home in like eight years, but it'll always be home. For that to be the place we photographed this collection, and to photograph spaces that may not exist tomorrow or may not exist in a year from now, those things are important to see in visuals, to be in a fashion context, to be celebrated in that way. It's coming from joy and love, but there's always context behind these things that we're doing.

In this show, we're speaking about migration, about the movement of people. I was looking at a map of migration trails—going from Haiti to Brazil, coming into the Texas border, some people go to Chile—all these migration routes that people take to make it to America. The map wasn't meant to be gorgeous, but once you see that map and you see the trails and the swirls, that visual kind of looks like what my jacket looks like. Those decisions about having coffee and sugar and corn was an opportunity for me to tell another story that I couldn't do in the garments, or that I was choosing not to do in the garments, but I wanted to do in the overall exhibition. 

I learned that from Amy [Andrieux, executive director and chief curator of MoCADA], who curated the show that you have different opportunities to tell different stories in a moment that puts the whole story together. It doesn't all have to be all at once. I love that. Like, the show is titled Ti Maché, and you can hear the sound of a merchant from the audio, but you really truly never see a marketplace. Haiti is the first free Black republic in the world. In the show, we're speaking about colonization, we're speaking about products that the country had been exploited for and products that the country is a major exporter of—or used to be at least. Part of our story, of our revolution, is sugar, indigo. I choose those moments of what these mannequins are sitting on, which is a piece of history, a piece of Caribbean history, a piece of Black history, a piece of Haitian history to tell my full story. 

Let's start with the pink shirt look. We have an oversized, point-collar, three-quarter sleeve shirt with a French packet that comes down to the thigh on the mannequin. Then there's a zipper component that runs the length of the shirt. It goes from the placket and spreads further before it goes over the shoulder, pushing a V formation. Inside the zipper component is a bunch of folded fabric. So it's a figurative wing, but also it looks like a literal wing, an angel wing, because of the folds. Underneath that are some denim pants that are wide-legged, but then they come down to a sort of candy wrapper knot at the bottom. They’re a regular denim blue with a wavy, bleached-looking line pattern. So it's like a striped candy wrapper for your legs.
It's a very simple design too, four pieces with an insert of accordion pleats. They’re hidden inside of the zippers. Because the zippers are covered—the mouths are kissing on the fabric—it's my nice little peekaboo. And when you zip down the shirt, the accordion opens up. That's something that I engineered back as a sophomore in college. Our professor’s prompt was to make a garment that was inclusive of all body sizes. Sometimes people who aren't used to designing plus-sized clothes just make something big, oversized. Sometimes it does work and it’s gorgeous, but often it’s disrespectful to the person's shape. I was like, All right, let's just, let's, I don't know, let's make a shirt that you can enlarge and decrease in size as you wish. I think my favorite part about that description is calling it a wing. I never, ever saw that or thought to call it that. And now that you're calling it that,I 100% see it. There is something almost angelic about that piece and how the accordion pleats lay out and set.

The pants are, in fact, a techy, water-repellant polyester material. It has a little bit of sheen to it, and then the print that's on top of that material is um an engineered puff print. I love the surface texture, I have a huge love for screen-printed textiles; I remember we spent about eight hours printing yardage for that. I think for me, a big part of the collection was creating my own surface textures and, and having everything have a slight net like live to them and, and to give these fabrics the kind of depth and, and dimension and thinking to myself in every single piece. Like what can we do? What can I do to manipulate the fabric to, to give it a vibe, to give it some kind of surface.

Next, we have a denim shirt-slash-jacket and a pair of denim trousers-slash-jeans. The jeans are a wide leg, low rise, in a denim blue with very gentle stonewash happening. Along the length of the pants are these gently undulating twists of fabric that are raised and give an almost bow legged effect. The jacket is hip-length with a slightly curved hem. It's also a denim blue, but with a more intense bleached/stonewash effect, and it has these really intense folds to where it looks like a cellular membrane. The thing I find most interesting about that is the way that there's so much like motion in it. It has a zipper front and a track jacket-style collar where it zips all the way to the top. But if you want to unzip it a little bit, then the collar can lay against the shoulder a little.
Something I didn't expect on the pants is the way they stack. The weight of all the piping together kind of holds the pants up and creates a wave effect which makes your legs look like they're and three parts. I think motion is like such a perfect word. I'm going to keep using that word because I love, it describes what I'm also trying to do across the whole collection. I love swirls, I love things that look like they're moving in a fabric, and I wanted to create a garment that looks like it's moving in a very subtle way. For that jacket, and for the whole collection, it was really about like. taking some of the processes that exist in wash houses and applying them to materials that have been manipulated to give us a fresh idea of what denim could look like. Are you familiar with a moto jean, or a moto jacket?

Yeah, where it has a padded, quilted effect on contact points like the knee.
I love that little area on those jeans and jackets. It’s a point of drama, and then it has a very functional aspect to it. I was taking the aesthetic vibes of it and thinking to myself, Ok, what if we had a whole jacket that has that kind of ribbed, gathered technique. It took a lot to make it because you have to lay out a piece of denim, and then you have to lay out a piece of stretch fabric like 100% spandex under it. You have to stretch them together, and basically the spandex is gathering and pulling all the denim back. Then you have to stretch the denim out again, and to create little ripples you have to stop top-stitch it. On that jacket there's hundreds of top stitches—it has a great weight to it. To me, it's like couture, it's avant garde, it's artisanal. It was done with a lot of love, care, attention to detail, and what's beautiful about that piece.

A lot of these pieces are made of denim. What do you like about that material?
I have a very special love for denim and I thought I used to think that made me unique in a lot of ways. But then I found out about the whole online community of people who love denim. On Instagram there's a million and one denim pages from all different levels, from people who to people who really avant-garde pieces to hypebeast brands to people who make denim artwork. It’s a for-the-people material, it's for everyone.

Yeah, it has such a long history too. Something that holds a lot of space in my head is the idea that SNCC people, when they really started organizing in the South, would wear denim overalls. It's one thing to have a college kid on your porch, but in a Tweed blazer and your saddle shoes and all that? It might’ve been off-putting to someone who either just got back from or is about to step onto a farm who’s like, Why is this person dressed like this coming to bother me? But if you show up wearing overalls, you’re like, Oh, I work in overalls, and I work in denim, and you're wearing denim, and you're wearing overalls, and, and I feel like you're kind of like meeting me in the middle. It wasn't always like, I'm wearing this to be fly.
Yeah, very utilitarian in origin. I don't know how utilitarian it is now, but it’ll never really go out of style.

It’s definitely reached a certain permanence. You mentioned the wash house a couple of times. Forgive my ignorance, but what is that?
A wash house is a facility where you go as a designer or a company or a brand for washing down denim to create different desired looks. a lot of brands in New York City. Any, all the big brands from Marc Jacobs to smaller brands are going over to BPD Washhouse to get there, um, to get wash treatment or wash services. There’s wet process, dry process, a lot of cool equipment and machinery. It’s basically a factory. A lot of wash houses have laser machines that distress and etch. Sometimes wash houses have dye houses in them that create tie-dye, create gradient, anything that involves adding color. They also do hand work like whiskers with sandpaper, removing indigo from the jeans. I used to work at the wash house back when I was in college. I worked there for about six months. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had. I've had really great jobs in the industry, but I really did love that job. I loved seeing what the industry was up to when I came to treatments.

Ah, thank you! So, the next look I wanted to talk about involves another jacket. Denim, light wash. The hem is curved, and it ramps up on the side almost like a corset. And in the main body there's a big lava-lamp blob of raised roping that dances from the hem up to the chest on one side of the curving zipper and dipping down from the shoulder going into the sternum on the other side. On the sleeves is more of that raised roping. And then the pants are loose leg with another kind of wavy line effect happening.
The pants with that jacket are actually the same pair of pants from the other jacket, the wrinkly jacket that we said had a lot of movement in it. The difference between them is that one of them is washed and one's not. With the other look, it's really gorgeous because you get to see the DNA and all the beauty and different tones of the indigo once it's washed out because, when it's being stone-washed, the parts that the stone doesn't scratch and rub up against are the parts that remain the darkest. The pants on this jacket are unwashed, so you appreciate the shape more because you're not looking at the crazy wash details. 

The jacket, I call it a whirlwind jacket. Everything in the collection cost a lot of money to make, but it was definitely one of the more expensive looks to create because it went through various iterations. It took a lot of engineering to get those curves right, trying to create a harmony in the garment where things are moving like waves. That was the goal, to create abstract shapes and movement and motion that flows and moves the eye like a great Renaissance painting or the way you look at the ocean. When you look at the ocean move, you don't question that, you're just memorized by it. But also I love things protruding outside the body, things that rise and go low. Seeing the garment come out of the wash scary too, fucking terrifying, because that garment has a whole different look with a wash. When you design a garment that is going to be washed, you have to add shrinkage and make things slightly larger. There's a whole math that goes into calculating for shrinkage—which I didn't do. So that jacket shrunk tremendously. That jacket could barely fit on any model. I barely got it on the mannequin, but it worked, and it gives it an even more dramatic look because it's so tight, like the waves want to rip out of the body.

I made a lot of complicated pieces in collaboration with my good friend Aaron Cooper. He’s the founder of Blueprint Production, a designer himself who has his own label but also does samples for some of our most beloved New York City brands. I was excited to work with him on some of these samples because I knew he could execute, and he did.”

The last look I wanted to ask about is a pant set. The shirt short-sleeve, point collar, with two chest pockets and a flat hem, slightly oversized to where the hem comes to the mid part of the thigh. The pants are wide-leg pants that have like a slight flare to them. There's a gingham print that has a patchwork effect, where the pockets and the collar and the sleeve have a bigger gingham and the rest of it has a smaller check. Then the fabric itself is not manipulated, but the print is manipulated so that it pinches in some spots and it blows out in other spots, almost like you took a big piece of gingham fabric and threw it in the wash so you're looking at it the way it might ripple and flow in water.
Yeah, that's the only piece that isn't manipulated in a three-dimensional way. It was digitally printed.

I forgot to mention that there's also a hat-sculpture component on top where there's a big dish and a super-wide tray and a bunch of baskets of different sizes, all wrapped in the same fabric as the shirt and the pants. Would you describe it as more of an art piece, or is it an accessory that goes with the look?
That specific sculpture was inspired by the women merchants in Haiti who literally can carry anything on their heads. Like 2016, 2017, I saw those women carry unimaginable things, from produce to buckets of water, and I wanted to create that visual with the distorted two-gingham look. I definitely describe it as like an art piece. If I call it an accessory, I feel like that implies that it has some kind of function, and this has no function at all. It was literally drilled to the head of the mannequin. But I love 3D objects and shapes that are part fashion, part design.

Every piece here has like a manipulation to it. Manipulated, moving, bunching fabric versus, like, Here's a shirt that's just so and that's it. Why?
In design you learn that form is the first thing, but there's a whole world of people who don’t think that way. I come from a school of thought of color, texture, surface, how things feel. I come from a world of really awesome material designers and textile designers, but I was an artist before I was all of those things. I grew up looking at art, looking at surfaces, looking at textures, looking at different ways that visual artists would manipulate a surface through a bazillion techniques. Later on, as I started to design and do a little bit more research, I learned that there's a whole class of people who think and look at the world this way. You buy an Issey Miyake Pleats Please obviously for the shape, because they make some really beautiful shapes, but it’s also a beautiful pleated look from head to toe. The consumer is purchasing that for various reasons, it might be for the brand, but it's a very specific decision to put pleats on your body, you know what I mean? There are people who want something fluffy, or who want something with a really cool texture, which makes me like super happy because it's a symbiotic relationship. We designers think this way, and then there's a group of people who want products that are made in that way.

When I made this collection, I wasn't really thinking of a consumer. When I made it, I did it for the love of denim, for the material, for the craft, the people who work at wash houses, the people who work in the factories who like who make denim. I love all that shit. And my goal was to push it visually. Like, what new visual or idea am I inventing or attempting to invent or scratching the surface of?

Tell me about an interesting garment detail you recently found yourself compelled to talk with someone about?