Warp and Weft, 8.25.24 (Elizabeth Way)
"There are definitely words that I feel aren't really appropriate for a general public."
Warp and Weft: I interview people about clothes.
Not long after I finished Elizabeth Way’s anthology Black Designers in American Fashion, I came across Nicole Lipman’s n+1 piece about Shein. In it, Lipman gets a bit into the way that text informs (or tries to inform) the Shein shopping process:
In the grid of product listings, a yellow rectangle indicates if a product is trending: “Trending–Plazacore,” “Trending–Western,” “Trending–Mermaidcore,” and “Trending–Y2K” tags all appear in the new arrivals. “Plazacore” is blazers and faux-tweed in pastels and beige. “Mermaidcore” means a pileup of sequins and glitter. “Western” brings up fringe jackets and bustier tops, fake leather cowboy boots and leopard-print silk blouses. The collection is unimpressive in small doses but starts feeling remarkable as you click through the pages: more than 3,900 items, astoundingly, are “Western.” If I search the word trending, there are 4,800 items to scroll through, labeled with trends I’ve never heard of even after a decade-plus of closely following fashion blogs and Instagram accounts: Bikercore, Dopamine Dressing, RomComCore, Bloke Core. Each phrase alone generates hundreds or thousands of search results of garments ready to purchase and ship.
It’s almost impossible to use text to find what you want on the platform. Influencers direct their followers to commissioned-link-purchase by SKU instead of product name or description because a lack of garmentory vocabulary is almost taken for granted:
A skintight, long-sleeve, shiny green bodysuit with a mock-neck collar and coordinating ruched, side-slit skirt is designated as “Style: Sexy,” “Sleeve Type: Regular Sleeve,” “Fabric: Slight Stretch,” with “Details: Backless, Asymmetrical, Split, Twist.
The user interface optimized for endless scrolling instead of a satisfactory precision. It made me recall a chapter by Way about the designer Scott Barrie, whose jersey designs were both distinctive and part of a fashion era where consumers weren’t expected to have such a drive-by familiarity with such a high-volume, near-disposable wardrobe. Barrie made lastingly memorable clothes, and Way’s description of a red dress in faille silk contrasted heavily in my memory:
The red faille dress is more unusual in Barrie’s oeuvre. It has a distinctive skirt that extends into sharp points at the hips and narrows down to a pegged hem, yet it still maintains softness in the cowl neckline and draped wrap of the skirt. Barrie chose the perfect fabric for the design—the faille is stiff enough to maintain the shape but is surprisingly soft for its weave. This design also incorporated the layering and geometric pattern pieces seen in his other work. The bodice was made from an inverted triangular pattern piece, mounted onto a simple underdress with a straight, horizontal neckline that collapses into the cowl when worn. The bodice’s upper points were pleated into the halter straps that tie around the neck. The bodice was sewn into a pointed waistline, inset into the wrap skirt, which was created from pattern pieces that extend up to sharp points. These points are inverted down into themselves to create the pannier-like silhouette at the hips. Although this dress is complex, the pattern making simplified the construction as much as possible, adhering to the design and construction principles observed in Barrie’s other work. This piece was more experimental and showed Barrie’s comfort in creating structured and avant-garde designs. As early as 1966, Barrie noted his admiration for the great couturier Madame Grès, revealing his knowledge of fashion history. His work can be seen as an updated, “Americanized” version of the intricate draped jersey gowns she created during the 1930s and her more experimental and geometric work of the 1960s and 1970s.
If you come away thinking that the dress looks like an inter-World War lady of means was dumped into vat of red dye and tumbled around in a dryer before being starched into whatever shape she emerged with, you’d be about right. The power of language! I found Way’s description so transfixing that I called the Museum at FIT associate curator up to ask her about it and how she got so good at writing that sort of thing.
I was looking through your chapter in Black Designers, and the precision that you use to describe some of the garments I found mystifying, particularly that Scott Barrie red silk faille dress. As part of your historical and research practices, how important to you is the description of a garment?
Really important. I studied design in undergrad, and I worked for a little while as a pattern-maker. For me, how clothes come together is really interesting. But I've also found that it gives a lot of insight into the context of the designer; going back to the physical object is really important. I've considered myself as a curator and a historian, and as a historian you can refer to a lot of documents and photographs and things like that. What makes curation special is that we do have the physical object in front of us, and I think there is a lot that it can tell us. Taking a more material-culture approach, I think it just gives a different perspective on what we can find out about a garment and about how the designer worked, about how the designer interacted with the industry.
And how do you find the words? A lot of fashion books rely heavily on photography to convey the full story. Reading about the faille dress was an example where a text does so much work to not just describe the appearance of the garment, but also to guide the mind around it—and even inside of it. Where do you find the words to create that journey?
I read a lot about historic garments, and studying apparel design, we read textbooks. So, I do love the names of things. But I also worked at a costume shop for a few years as a stitcher, and I had to converse with my colleagues. We would sometimes take parts of a garment and sew them separately before they came together, things like that, so I had to constantly communicate with colleagues about these clothes—what part I'm talking about, what the techniques were. I think those two experiences have really helped me shape a vocabulary around sewing.
I try to read through my writing carefully and make sure I'm conveying what I'm seeing—it is a process that requires really careful wording. I do understand that it is for a certain reader. That's not information that's useful for every reader. But there's not a lot of really in-depth description of garments unless you go to certain types of books. And so I do wanna have that information available for the kind of the people who need it, whether they're scholars or just people who are interested.
In talking so much about the skill of the designers and how that skill showed up in their garments, where do you think your book sits in the balance between a celebration of black designers and something that troubles the who's-the first-to-do this-who's-the-first-to-do-that “pioneering,” representational view of black designers?
I think it's really important that we work these designers back into our more general understanding of American fashion. Elizabeth Keckley was a really well-respected black designer who would have been called a “mantua” maker or a dress-maker in the 1860s in D.C. In examining her clothes, we see that they're very high quality, that we have techniques that are being used in French couture at that time; she's also utilizing technology like sewing machines in addition to hand-sewing. We can look at material culture from an earlier era and realize that the skill level and the design of black designers is on par with all fashion-makers in the Western world. There's nothing about this garment that tells you that it was made by a black designer, and I think that, at that time, that was a really revolutionary thing. That a black woman could do just as good a job as, say, a French man in making clothes in and of itself was revolutionary.
But as we go into the later 20th century, we start to see a lot more identity politics working its way into all aspects of culture, material culture and otherwise. And so we see and there's more room for personal design and the cult of the designer. People aren't buying clothes that are made specifically for them, that show their personality as the wearer. They are borrowing some of that um that je ne sais quoi, that personality from the designer. It's the designer's point of view that the customer is buying into instead of this give-and-take with their dressmaker. And so we have designers like Willi Smith and Patrick Kelly who want to make a statement about what it is to be black. In that way, we see fashion designers much more aligned with contemporary artists, whereas a 19th-century dressmaker might be aligned much more with an artist or a highly skilled artisan.
That’s not to say there's no artistic merit in earlier clothing, but we have this movement in the late 20th century where it's about a kind of identity politics and other social forces that are impacting fashion design. Certainly not all black designers wanted to do that, or put that idea into their fashion, but there were designers who were very confidently speaking about issues around what it is to be a black person in the world in their fashion, and that only increases as we get into the 21st century. The book is certainly a celebration, but I think more importantly it’s a revisionist history.
There was an n+1 piece recently about Shein, and a detail that really jumped out to me was that the company’s founder doesn't have a background in fashion design or, like, clothing manufacturing. It’s search engine optimization marketing, so a lot of the platform is built around keywords and hashtag aesthetics. Shoppers there are just kind of hoping to get lucky. It’s the opposite of the approach that you have: It's not the idea of the thing, it’s a very specific, material description of the thing. You’re saying, this is it, exactly.
It comes from a different kind of culture and a different end-use. I'm thinking about the clothes and trying to put my mind in the position of the designer, the pattern-maker, and the stitcher in terms of how they were approaching this garment and putting it together. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was obviously a visual culture, but it was definitely not as important as it is now with things that specifically need to read well on a screen, usually a small screen. I think there's a whole different kind of visual vocabulary that goes with that culture, when you think about Shein and other kinds of online retailers.
There's certainly a kind of knowledge that was dying out for the general public in the ‘60s and ‘70s as ready-to-wear became more available. There was a big gap opening up to people who sewed, or people who understood how to read a pattern. The vocabulary that I use is specialized. I try to make it as generalized as I can, but the people who don't necessarily understand what a bodice is or what a dart is probably aren't that interested in this part of that chapter. It’s a way of looking at a garment, and even looking at a picture of a garment, versus something like Shein. They’re trying to convey a very different thing in terms of feelings and vibes and things that people might be searching with for their shopping.
Something I found really interesting about the way that you describe the garments in this chapter is how you talk about their construction and the effects that those techniques would have on the way that the garment may have fallen or moved. Why do you think it's important to link technique to motion or how the garment might appear in the real world?
Specifically for that chapter with Scott Barrie, I really wanted to emphasize skill. When you look at images of these clothes, they seem very simple. He was working with jersey, which was really revolutionary then as a luxury fabric — today, it's much, much more ubiquitous — and he was one of the New York designers that helped usher that in. I wanted to create a separation between what we might think of as a jersey dress that is probably pretty inexpensive and the luxury ready-to-wear that he was creating in the 1970s. [Way’s Barrie chapter also describes a two-tone wrap dress with “a sleeveless black V-neck body with a slightly nipped waist,” “elbow-length sleeves” that “are made of red jersey,” and “a wrap front” that’s been “sewn into the front armhole and line seams”, with “padded sleeve heads to create volume and a stronger shoulder line.”] Even if the dresses look kind of simple, that was a revolution in American fashion at this time, that they could be simple, that they could be easy to wear, that they could allow for a lot of movement and still be really, really high-end evening wear.
I thought it was important to really point that out, so that when people are looking at it they can really appreciate the level of design that the high-end American ready-to-wear designers were putting into their work. French couture came from a much older ethos of making clothes with a lot more underpinning, more understructure perhaps restricting movement. People tend to think of the American designers as cheaper and more casual, so I wanted to dig into the construction. Even when you're boiling it down to, like, comparatively fewer seams, fewer effects, fewer yardage of fabric, they got the maximum effect out of those simpler materials and construction techniques.
As part of my own creative process, I'm always trying to find new terms so I can use them to, like, better describe outfits I see on the street. It's always such a nice feeling to ground something in a word. How do you go about finding new terms, and how do you feel when you encounter them?
It is really empowering to find a word that exactly describes what you mean to say. I just try to read a lot. When I'm not working on specific projects, I try to catch up on all the fashion history books that have been on my list. I also really like historic magazines. If you go back to things like Godey’'s Lady’s Book that talked about fashion, they couldn't rely so much on images. So they had to describe things in really great detail. Even going back to Vogue, in the very late 19th century and early 20th century, there's a lot more description because they had limited images. Oftentimes there were sketches instead of photography, which comes in a little later. Older women's magazines have a lot of really cool fashion description.
But with fashion terms, sometimes there's multiple terms that all mean the same thing, so they can be especially historically hard to parse out. We see this idea of marketing: A walking dress, an afternoon dress, all of these things are referring to the same thing, but a new name kind of gives it a new way to market it.
Yeah, for years I've been trying to make my way through Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System, and that's, like, literally the whole thing — the way fashion is conveyed.through captions.
Barthes is difficult, for sure.
[The FIT Museum collection includes an “afternoon dress” in green silk faille described thus: “fitted bodice” with “round neck, velvet buttons center-front and shaped peplum front and back; long bell or pagoda sleeves; matching gored skirt has cartridge pleated back fullness and train with bias self ruffle at hem.”]
Do you ever encounter a term where it does say exactly what you want to say, but when you come to use it in a contemporary context, the meaning has changed so much that you can't use it that way?
I did a show in 2018 called “Fabric and Fashion” that looked at textiles and how they were used in fashion, and there are a lot of textile terms—because people don't necessarily buy a lot of like fabric or even think too much about the fabric in their clothing—like “ottoman” or “damask” or even “brocade” that people don't necessarily kind of have an immediate understanding of. I tried to show a lot of examples of the fabric and use the name. (Then you think about the name like, Where did this name come from? So many of those silks I just mentioned, for example, have names grounded in the Middle East because of the trade routes through which they came to Europe. )
Or take a word like “flange,” which is still used today. But it's a construction word, I don't think it's something that the general public would actually use. They might say “trim” or something like that, or “extension” or something. There are definitely words that I feel aren't really appropriate for a general public. When I'm curating shows, when I write books, I do try to use those words and explain them, but I do come across words that are the name for the thing that I can't always use because they’re just not commonly understood.
What's the most recent fashion/garment term that you've come across that really stuck with you?
It's not necessarily a fashion term, but there's an art movement called garmenting, this idea that artists are using fashion-like constructions, whole dresses that they might make out of non-traditional materials or dresses that are part of their art installation. I read a WWD article about this, and I thought that was a really interesting term. It's not dress, and it's not fashion. It's not clothing, it's art. It goes back to this earlier era where there used to be a garment industry, but people don't really say the word “garment” when they mean clothes anymore.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and content.