I learned to sew from the movie Labyrinth.
She is wearing a loose when her character recites the monologue that she would recite to an audience of Vermont pine. Her costume is a mark of her being a hero. I had never seen anything like that before. I promised not to rest until I could wear this most beautiful of all garments.
My mother told me that the shirt was called a peasant blouse. I asked if it was possible to buy a peasant blouse. I asked. She must have been worn down by my pleas. The Ames in St Johnsbury was a provincial New England department store in 1991. No one would have expected it to stock a garment that was close to Labyrinth's interpretation of the Renaissance. I slid the disappointing shirts around the display rod to thoroughly examine them.
When the Ames trip failed, my mother suggested I learn how to sew. My best friend, Molly, also wanted to learn, so Hannah agreed to teach me along with her teenage daughter. The lessons were held in a greenhouse. The smell of tomato plants and Geranium perfumed the air of our cutting room. With Hannah looking over our shoulders, we cut the thin paper patterns and pinned them to the fabric she had made us wash and iron, as I was never again able to do without her attentive care.
The first project she assigned was a bed. A sleeveless dress with multiple panels in the skirt flared at the knee. Finally, I wore the peasant blouse. I didn't consider perfect fidelity to the original colour necessary and chose to use a bright pink jersey because I must have thoroughly assimilated the peasant blouse into my being. The blouse was not good. It never draped the way she did, it looked like she had been lulled.
I could explain to my child that it was not her sewing that was flawed, if I could travel back in time. The blouse's effect was more than just a blouse. It was the stage lighting, the makeup, the music, and the breasts of my prepubescent self that formed a packet of immense desire. The blouse's drape was due to the structure of the molecule it was made of.
In my 20s I made the dress worn by Ada in Bertolucci’s 1900
As adults call it, playing dress up is a rehearsal, as though it were a frivolity to be allowed in children for obscure reasons. According to Joseph Campbell, the heroism of the hero depends on being willing to be the story's main character and not having a costume. There are a number of reasons why words like rehearsal and stage are unavoidable when describing the most pressing acts of life.
In the 400 years since the death of Shakespeare, no one has adequately replaced the metaphor that all of life is a stage, and on this stage, one is costumed. When I learned to sew, it was important to me that I commit to a role, and my needle has not left me since.
In my early 20s, I tried to copy the dress worn by the character of Ada from the Bertolucci film, who ends up marrying a fascist and becoming an alcoholic. The dress was very clingy and had long sleeves. My version was too fancy to wear to any of the places I went at the time so I kept it in my closet. I was invited to eat at a trendy restaurant by my friend, who was a nanny for the restaurant's owner. I wore a dress. I was disappointed that she was wearing a shirt while sitting next to us.
We went to an art opening and I met an artist from the other side of the world. It became special to me because I was wearing that dress the night we met, and after he broke my heart it took on an aura of sadness and failure. The dress was imprinted with fatalism from the beginning by the person who could not escape alcoholism or fascists. Maybe the sad story was started by the dress, or maybe I knew I was going to need a costume for a tragedy. I got into that story because of sewing. I put a hammerhead shark on a black T-shirt that the artist left in my apartment and left it outside his door. I don't know why, but this cured my pain.
To sew is to produce and it has the natural optimism of the generative act, but it can also accommodate death, decay, and stagnation. It is large. When our force is not enough to overcome the circumstances, it can be a way of biding time. There are many kinds of winter and sewing is a way to survive them.
The skirt is enormous – several children could hide under it
I made a skirt out of old curtains a few years ago. She loved the bright scarlet color. She died almost a decade ago, and the curtains retired from service a decade before that, but they were kept in a box under a bench. I wanted to use all of them, so the skirt is enormous, with hundreds of small pleats to bring it in at the waist. Children could hide under it.
There is a scene in the ballet where eight children appear from under the skirts of Mother Ginger, who is played by a dancer on stilts. There is a scene in Tin Drum in which Oskar recounts that he hid under his grandmother's skirts when he was a child. A full skirt is a palace for a child. To become that palace, as a wearer of the skirt, is to embody a particular kind of matriarchal power. As I sewed the skirt of scarlet curtains, I only thought of my own body, but from the moment I tried it on, I wanted to shelter other bodies as well. When my nieces came to visit, I wore it. As we moved about the city together, it seemed like it was a protective force for them.
capitalism is incapable of generating or sustaining ideas of benevolent spiritual or ancestral involvement, which is why manufacturing clothes under capitalism is unique.
Even in the twisted strands of two-ply yarn that look so similar to genetic coding, the link between sewing and reproduction is still strong. My grandmother and my niece were a link in the chain.
It also bridges future and past selves. Sewing something for yourself is a sign of belief in a future self. I made a dress using a 1940s pattern I bought on eBay, and dark brown deadstock in flannel. I wanted something sculptural and elegant that felt like pyjamas, but I also wanted to be able to imagine being out among people again one day. The vision of sociality was built into the act of ordering the pattern, its fabric and buttons, and following each step of the crumbling pattern. I believe in the future because each stitch has a way of saying it. I believe in the future.
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