Seamlessness: Making and (Un)Knowing in Fashion Practice - Softcover

Lee, Yeseung

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178320642X ISBN 13: 9781783206421

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Taking the concept of 'seamlessness' as her starting point, Yeseung Lee offers an innovative practice-based investigation into the meaning of the handmade in the age of technological revolution and globalized production and consumption. Combining firsthand experience of making seamless garments with references from psychoanalysis, anthropology and cultural studies, Lee reveals the ways that a garment can reach to our deeply superficial sense of being, and how her seamless garments can represent the ambiguity of a modern subject in a perpetual process of becoming. Richly illustrated and firmly rooted in the actual work of creation, this daringly innovative book breaks new ground for fashion research.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yeseung Lee is a researcher and practicing designer. She is currently a visiting academic for research in fashion and textiles at the Royal College of Art, London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Seamlessness

Making and (Un)Knowing in Fashion Practice

By Yeseung Lee

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-642-1

Contents

Foreword Claire Pajaczkowska, 
The Seaming, 
Chapter 1: The Skin Ego, 
Chapter 2: The Garment Ego, 
Chapter 3: Auratic Objects, 
Chapter 4: Here and Now, 
Chapter 5: Seaming Hands, 
Chapter 6: Seamless?, 
Chapter 7: The Toile Ego, 
The Seam(less), 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Skin Ego

My hands, two hands, I & other,
... stickiness ... contradictions ...
... I touch my hand with my hand.
The lines of my fingertips start to melt, from
the point where they touch each other and
the fingers, my ten fingers,
are about to be welded into ... five.
Anxiously I try to pull them apart
but they are already merged into each other.
My effort to separate them pulls them even further apart
into strands, now my hands are seamlessly welded
through my fingers
and I can stretch them long.
A glass-blower in Venice, I remember, made a small
blue horse with beautiful mane for my nephew.
The hot blue glass looked like
translucent ectoplasm
drawn out of the mouth.
I wonder if my plastic hands are
going to cure as they are now. On the fingertips, I can
still feel the viscosity of initial contacts.
I try to keep the five strands separate - I want to
somehow preserve the 'finger-ness' of my fingers.
What if the touch of my hands melt, any surface they touch
is drawn out and extend
into long strands? What if
the people
I hug, the surface of their back,
the skin and clothes
merged, become semifluid with my touches, and
numerous long drawn-out strands from
all the past touches eventually weave a fine web,
and we move within this permanent evidence of
contacts we have ever made?

A journal entry on Monday 31 May 2010
– reading Javier Perez's Autoportrait (1993)

As the membrane that serves as the interface between what is 'outside' and what is 'inside' the body, the skin has the powerful symbolic function of generating metaphors for the boundaries between the self and the world, and the self and others. This metaphorical function of skin as a membrane, with an 'inside' and an 'outside', is perhaps most powerfully present in our clothing. The cultural customs of wrapping, shrouding, swaddling, bandaging, veiling and adorning all carry this need; to create and represent social membranes in the form of clothes. What is more, garments themselves are also constructed through complex conventions of 'right' and 'wrong' ways of bringing skin in contact with cultural surfaces, such as cloths. If skin is the container for the biological body, then nowhere is the paradoxical nature of a living organ seen as an (im)permeable barrier more ambiguously present than in fashion. It is the ambiguity of seamlessness that is the principal focus of this book. This chapter broaches this subject through discussion of some of the most taken for granted 'environments' – the skin, the mother, the garment – that generate one's sense of self. The permeable boundary between self and other becomes more enigmatic as I approach it through my practice. As my hands and the cloth touch each other and work together, my making self relocates to the edge, that is, the skin of the fingertips, and the body of work and the body of maker overlap and separate at the seams. Through such experiences, I examine how the creative arts can carry on the role that, in our infancy, was filled by a person (Milner 1971: 139).

The Bodily Pre-Ego

According to Freud (1961: 26), 'the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body'. From this theory emerged an understanding of the skin as a sensitive expression of the mind's complexion, as well as the body's. This understanding reached its culmination in the works of Anzieu (1989, 1990) on the relations between the experience of the skin and the formation and sustaining of the ego (Connor 2004: 49). Following the British psychoanalytic tradition of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and others, who conceptualized the experience of early object-relations, Anzieu focuses on the mapping of early psychic experience based on that of the skin, and the development of the self in the relational matrix between the infant and its maternal environment.

The Skin Ego is a mental image utilized by an infant during the early phases of its development, in order to represent itself as an ego that is the container for psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body (Anzieu 1989: 40). Anzieu (1989: 4) proposes this notion as 'a reality of the order of phantasy', which functions as an intermediary screen and as an imaginary space between the psyche and the body, the world and other psyches. By developing the notion of the Skin Ego, Anzieu (1990) attaches great importance to the body and to the biological roots of the mind. The emphasis is placed 'on the skin as a basic datum that is of both an organic and an imaginary order, both a system for protecting our individuality, and a first instrument and site of interaction with others' (Anzieu 1989: 3). Therefore, the notion of the Skin Ego respects the specificity of psychical phenomena in relation to both organic and social realities.

As the only sense organ that covers the whole body, the skin is the touchstone to which the various sensory data are referred. Frequent sensory experiences are joined together by the skin and form a figurative, if imaginary, representation that clothes the infant's nascent Ego (Anzieu 1989: 60–61). Although in Lacan's theory it is the specular image that provides a unified sense of corporeal subjectivity, Anzieu suggests that it is the organizing and connecting function of the Skin Ego that gives a sense of corporeal unity:

The Skin Ego is a psychical surface which connects up sensations of various sorts and makes them stand out as forms against the original background formed by the tactile envelope: this is the Skin Ego's function of intersensoriality.

(Anzieu 1989: 103, original emphasis)

This function of intersensoriality provides the person with the sense of a unified self, without the anxiety of the body being fragmented (Anzieu 1989: 104).

Peculiar to the skin is its reflexive structure, that is, tactile sensation is both passive and active. With this intermediate status, tactile sensation procures the basic distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' (Anzieu 1990). The formation of the Skin Ego thus starts as an imaginary interface, which constitutes a biological and psychological link with the mother: the baby's original phantasy in relating to its mother is one of having a common skin with her (Anzieu 1990). Anzieu (1989: 13) reminds us that the word 'membrane' derives etymologically from words meaning 'skin' and 'mother', conveying the pre-conscious notion that the skin of the mother is the baby's first skin. Developing from Winnicott's notion of 'holding' and 'handling', Anzieu suggests that the interaction between mother and child gradually forms the 'double feedback system' like an envelope, taking in the two together. This 'double feedback' means that the baby seeks the attention of the adults who surround it as

I sometimes wonder if I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178320642X
• ISBN 13: 9781783206421
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland