More-than-human encounters with clothing: Experiments in sociological sewing

• In Event: Messing with Methods in More-than-Human Worlds II

Abstract

Clothing is a ubiquitous, mundane and essential feature of everyday life. It is central to how we protect ourselves from the elements, how we move (and don’t move), perform, organise and make sense of society, each other and ourselves. It reveals much about how we live in the present, remember the past and imagine the future. We tell stories with clothing, and it tells stories about us. This paper considers clothing as a site of TRANSformation, TRANSmission and TRANSlation. I focus on radical new forms of cycle wear designed, made and worn in the late nineteenth century by inventive women. The most remarkable of these are convertible costumes that enabled wearers to secretly switch ordinary clothing into cycle wear when needed. We know about them because many of these women also patented their designs. Given the lack of existing artefacts, the project involved making and wearing these costumes as a means of getting closer to the women who lived over a century ago and the social conditions which fired their imaginations. I ask what happens when cycling, sewing and sociology collide. What emerges from making garments that differs from analysing documents? And, what can we learn from wearing the clothes of others?

Author

• kat Jungnickel, Goldsmiths