Weaving the Lockdown Away: Tales of Women and Looms
I started weaving this year during the lockdown, mainly to prevent myself from brooding. I had adjusted my work as a fashion writer to the so-called new normal, but couldn’t reconcile with the loss of the fun parts: shows, events, and getting dressed. Having been deprived of entertainment and art, I decided to fill these voids by creating something myself. I’d like to say that I have always been fascinated by weaving, but in truth, I simply remembered having a toy loom as a child and finding it relatively easy to use. I ordered a real one, watched some tutorials, and got going.
Weaving is not easy at all, but for someone like me who understands words better than visuals, it is perhaps easier to master than other techniques. It is a dialogue between warp and weft yarns, which are both very much alive and constantly shifting. Choosing the right yarns is a bit like choosing the right words, unraveling and combining them to discover multiple meanings. As I embraced a new routine—writing during the day and weaving at night—I started thinking of this slow, individual process as the nemesis of contemporary fashion. Weaving follows no seasons, no marketing rules, and no retail demands. Every piece is unique, timeless, and perfect in its imperfection. After several small tapestries, I started working on my first fashion piece: a stole. Using high-quality merino wool and silk, the amount that I spent on yarns and fabrics would have bought me a lifelong stock of stoles from any fast fashion brand. Still, it was much cheaper than therapy, and when I finished the handmade piece I was so happy that I almost cried.
“The pandemic, however, has only exposed the fact that the fashion system has been broken for decades. Today, it is the clear expression of an unhealthy society: excessively fast-paced, stressed, and never fully satisfied.”
Sara Kaufman, The Stole, Handwoven on frame loom, merino wool and silk, 2021.
Since Covid-19 has forced us all into a long period of wearing pajamas and sweatpants, fashion retail is on the verge of collapse and purchasing anything outside the realm of basics feels anachronistic. The pandemic, however, has only exposed the fact that the fashion system has been broken for decades. Today, it is the clear expression of an unhealthy society: excessively fast-paced, stressed, and never fully satisfied. In spite of this, fashion is not (quite) dead, and this is because fashion is not just clothes: it is ideas, talent, and culture.
The latest fashion weeks have shown how more receptive designers have managed to translate the Covid-19 experience into contemporary fashion. Some, like Jonny Johansson from Acne Studios, offered a bright take. (Oh, the privilege of sheltering in place in a Swedish country house!) Others, such as Dries Van Noten and Rick Owens, staged shows exuding fear and powerless rage. Cheerful or melancholic, all of these collections have something in common: they tap into the state of our mental health as the result of the pandemic. Whether we’ve been secluded in a tiny flat or enjoying a pastoral escape like Jonny Johansson, at some point, we’ve all hit rock-bottom.
Textile artist Ellie Beck writes:
“By taking away the hard deadlines and the visions of the end result, you are able to reframe your thought process about your projects, and see that the very simple act of making, stitch after stitch after stitch, can remind you why you started making in the first place, and where the true joy lies.” [1]
I experienced first-hand the therapeutic benefits of artisanal work by weaving the lockdown away, taking care of my own mental health by entering that “stitch after stitch after stitch” flow. Contemporary trends such as “Cottagecore” and “Dark Academia” clearly demonstrate that plunging into the past is a very efficacious form of escapism. I avoided going full on Little House on The Prairie, but still enjoyed imagining my female ancestors sitting in front of their looms night after night, busying their minds with those same ancient gestures to prevent themselves from thinking too much.
This whole “seeking comfort from the past” business is also probably what led me to re-watch old movies instead of bingeing modern television series on the nights I was not at my loom. Unsurprisingly, being a woman and a fashion writer, most of the movies I watched are notable for their on-screen fashions and have strong female leads. Slowly, an idea began to take shape: I imagined a woven artwork for each of the women in these films, something that would reflect their “troubled” personalities and explore connections between style and mental states. For this project, I focused on three characters that represent contemporary issues related to mental health despite being alive or portrayed long ago: Blanche Dubois, Little Edie Beale, and Dorothy Gale.
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Heart-Shaped Box: Blanche Dubois
The Tennesee Williams play A Streetcar named Desire hit Broadway in 1947, followed by the homonymous movie by Elia Kazan filmed in 1951.
The role of the main character, Blanche DuBois, in both the movie and original play ranges from “fallen angel to deranged harlot.” [2] In the film, when Blanche (Vivien Leigh) arrives at the Kowalskis’ apartment, she is at the end of her rope: her husband is dead, she has lost the family plantation, and she has sunk into a pattern of promiscuity and alcoholism. But volatile as she may be, Blanche is right. When she says that “Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable,” she is right. When she goes into a tantrum because Stanley (Marlon Brando) hits Stella (Kim Hunter), she is right. And when she tries to explain to her sister that humanity has evolved since the Stone Age and that she could now expect to engage with someone a bit more civilized than Stanley, she is also right. After having lost everything, she desperately goes from one man to another “hunting for protection,” and it’s those same men who fail to protect her and eventually cause her downfall. She becomes a victim of male dominance and of a cold, unresponsive society that fails to see just how right she is, where even her own sister—a victim herself—ends up turning a blind eye to these injustices because “life has to go on.” The story may be set in the first half of the twentieth century, but in terms of chauvinism, there are many parts that still seem relevant to today.
Susan Harlan wrote:
“Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors understand—that artifice is not the opposite of truth but a means of achieving it. And if she is the ultimate actor, she possesses the ultimate stage prop: her trunk.” [3]
Blanche is her trunk, or at least her trunk is her. Stanley Kowalski sees her glitzy possessions as an indication that he is being swindled, but his wife Stella immediately understands that the value of Blanche’s belongings is close to none. (Stanley: “What is rhinestone?” Stella: “Next door to glass.”)
Blanche also knows that her clothes are nothing more than costumes, as she is most likely to know the difference between a well-made dress and a flimsy one. But once she’s lost her money, she chooses extravagant items instead of sensible, well-made frocks because she understands that people are generally more impressed by frills than they are by sensibility. She dresses the part, holding on to her previous Southern Belle persona, using clothing as a passing device and enhancing her performances with soft lights and music. While her performed identity is not entirely authentic, this idealized version of blond femininity still feels more like the persona she identifies as rather than the broken woman she has apparently become.
At one point in the movie, Blanche is seen sewing for the Kowalski family. Like most women of her time, she is familiar with needlework. For my Blanche Dubois inspired tapestry, I used her infamous heart-shaped jewelry box, mentioned several times in the script, as a starting point. I weaved lace ribbons and fake pearls into the pattern to represent the content of the jewelry box: pretty, worthless things. The entire tapestry is elegant but messy; the stitches are nervously uneven, the lines blurred and the pattern confused. I imagined Blanche darning her old clothes, desperately trying to stich her life together. The outline of the heart blends with her costumes and fading lifestyle.
Costume designer Lucinda Ballard chose to dress Vivien Leigh in fluid, transparent garments to hide and reveal Blanche’s many contrasts. In the final scene, when Blanche is overpowered and led away by the doctor, she is seen wearing her first garment that is not transparent. Ballard later reminisced about this outfit, defining it as a soft, embracing straight-jacket.
For the Spring 1988 season, John Galliano released a collection named after the character of Blanche. The collection won him the Best British Fashion Designer award, and is still considered to be one of his best. The designs are bolder than what Blanche would have ever worn, but the designer used a lot of light, airy fabrics similar to those used in the character’s costumes, twisting and ruffling the silhouette to convey Blanche’s inner torment. Galliano’s skill at balancing historical inspiration with modern ideals earned him the reputation of a respected prodigy, while his outrageous public behavior made him widely known as being offensive and mentally unstable. It wouldn’t be the first—or last—time that the fashion world brought these two things together.
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Contessa Miseria: Little Edie
Years later, in 2007, John Galliano dedicated another collection to the inhabitants of Grey Gardens, stars of the infamous 1975 Maysles brothers documentary of the same name. His choice wasn’t an original one, as Sarah Mower wrote in her Vogue coverage: “This tale of faded flapperdom and eccentric cat-loving aristocratic decay is one of the most hackneyed fashion references of recent times.” [4] Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, respectively the aunt and the cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, have inspired countless fashion editorials, as well as a 2009 HBO movie. In particular, Little Edie became a fashion icon because of what is considered to be her unique sense of style. Underneath the surface, things are a bit more complex than that.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Beales were socially prominent figures and their home known as Grey Gardens was a luxurious Hamptons mansion. When their fortunes dwindled, Big Edie’s husband divorced her and left her pretty much destitute. She lived alone in Grey Gardens until 1952, when she asked her daughter to join her, although the house had fallen into terrible disarray by that time. For the next twenty-five years, the two women lived together in a strange, codependent existence. They shared their house with fifty-two cats, racoons, and an impressive amount of garbage, performing most of their daily activities (including cooking and eating) inside one small room, sheltering themselves from the outside world. While there are moments in the documentary in which the two ladies appear to be demented, there is no evidence to confirm it. Little Edie might be eccentric, but she confidently stares straight into the camera sharing lucid opinions on her family and critical views on historical events. Most memorably, she shares quite a modern view of fashion.
Little Edie creates her outfits with random items and fabrics, upcycling them as she sees fit and securing them with knots and safety pins. Having lost all of her hair to Alopecia, headscarves are her signature piece. She dresses herself in untraditional ways, such as wearing a shirt underneath a bathing suit or using skirts as capes. However, it’s interesting to note how her headscarves, color blocking, wrap skirts, and draped necklines echo certain fashion trends from the 1970s, suggesting that she does have an idea of what’s going on outside of Grey Gardens after all.
At the beginning of the movie, Little Edie describes her “costume of the day,” noting, “I have to think these things up, you know.” This sentence says a lot about her style and living situation, as “I have to think these things up” could be interpreted as “I have to keep my mind active” but also as “I have to make do with what I have.” In this sense, labelling Little Edie as someone “with a unique sense of style” is oversimplifying. What makes her iconic is not so much her clothes as the relationship she has with them. Her style originates from her seclusion and is born out of necessity. The act of getting dressed can be seen as a way to keep her somewhat sane by offering her a creative outlet and a temporary escape from Grey Gardens, but it can also be seen to represent unconventional behavior that clashes with the mainstream.
When I watched Grey Gardens for the second time a few months ago, I found it much less shocking then the first time I saw it. After a year of lockdown, the act of not leaving the house, fantasizing about the outside world, using one room for multiple purposes, and constantly bickering with those you live with didn’t seem so weird anymore. I was actually a little envious of Little Edie’s energy, of her creativity, and of the discipline she put into conceiving one outfit after the other as I slouched in my jeans for the umpteenth day in a row.
I called my Little Edie-inspired tapestry “Contessa Miseria,” meaning “countess misery”, after an Italian song from the nineties. I tried to stick to deep colors and avoided anything too shiny, hoping to evoke the dark and dusty atmosphere of Grey Gardens. The weaving is full of deliberate mistakes, including some small holes here and there, as Little Edie comes to me as an impatient person that can’t be bothered with excessive precision. However, shapes and patterns are well defined and carefully considered, just as she would have liked it. The yarns blend with twisted pieces of fine silk, including some leftovers from my own stole, in pure Contessa Miseria style. The header and footer are left unfinished, ready for the next readaptation.
Today, Little Edie’s style could be considered “métissage” and her clothes as “vintage.” Her habit of mixing styles and old garments is now considered to be a cool, liberating, and sustainable approach to fashion, but it has always been an approach to style that originated from necessity. As we try and pull ourselves together, processing the traumatic impacts of the pandemic and bracing ourselves for the recession that’s likely to follow, it is once again a sense of necessity that has inspired this style to return to the catwalks.
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Dorothy-Louboutin
Many people are familiar with the term stiletto, meaning “small dagger,” as well as the alarming red of shoe designer Christian Louboutin’s signature soles. In 2009, Mexican artist Elina Chauvet presented her project titled Zapatos Rojos, an installation featuring a multitude of empty red shoes to symbolize the victims of femicide. Since then, Chauvet’s work has inspired women-led movements around the world, with a multitude of red shoes occupying major city squares during feminist protests. The sexy red shoe has become a symbol of violence against women.
When it comes to red shoes in pop culture, nothing beats Dorothy Gale’s famous ruby slippers. Unlike the previous two film figures discussed above, Dorothy isn’t necessarily considered a disturbed person. What makes her relevant to this series is the sad story of the actress who interpreted her: Judy Garland. As I recently re-watched The Wizard of Oz, what I saw was a young girl pressured into stardom in a way that eventually affected both her physical and mental health. Anxious and insecure, Garland was constantly criticized by directors and MGM chiefs (Louis B. Mayer referred to her as his "little hunchback") either for not being cute enough or for not being glamorous enough. [5] This led her to alcohol and drug abuse, and eventually to the barbiturate overdose that caused her death at the age of forty-seven. [6]
Before shooting The Wizard of Oz, Garland was put on a strict diet to better match the childish appearance of her character. However, when I look at the movie, I do see the body of a young woman grotesquely dressed in a gingham pinafore that fails to blur her mature figure. I wish she had been allowed to grow, or not grow, according to her own rhythm instead of being molded into a woman when she clearly was not (she signed with MGM at thirteen) and shrank back into a child when she wasn’t one anymore (she played Dorothy when she was sixteen). Unfortunately, society often puts a similar pressure on young women today: girls are expected to be “innocent” (as in “virginal”), but at the same time, fashion urges them to act as glamorous Lolitas, rewarding them with an idea of agency that is nothing more than an idea and discarding them once their adulthood is no longer concealable.
In the original book, Dorothy’s slippers are actually silver. Reportedly, they were changed to ruby red for the film to appear more vividly against the yellow-brick road, taking advantage of the technicolor cinematography that was still seen as an exciting innovation in 1939. However, if paired with Dorothy’s famous line “there’s no place like home” and the multiple abuses to which Garland was subjected, they symbolically lead us back to the Red Shoe protests. Cases of domestic violence are also thought to have increased by 20% during the lockdown, while the calls to emergency lines have fallen dramatically as victims, stuck home with their abusers, find it hard to call for help. [7] Indeed, there’s no place like home.
“I do believe that where fashion is concerned, promoting artisanal practices could help mend a broken system, connecting us with the clothes we wear as well as with the people and the work behind them.”
Textile artist and fellow weaver Rana Feghali created two artworks denouncing domestic violence and its increase during the pandemic. “Violent Lockdown” and “Domestic Violence”both feature women's hair woven within the structure, another example of feminine element becoming a symbol of violence against women. For my last art work, Dorothy-Louboutin, I chose an image of a pair of glamorous red shoes, the kind that the sixteen-year-old Garland would probably have liked, and created a soft, woven frame around it. But, as some of the warp is left bare, the frame also becomes a cell, as it covers the red shoes like prison bars. Home is not a safe place for everyone; the red shoes continue their silent march.
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It is now June 2021. Italy is not in lockdown anymore, and yesterday I received my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine. I am hoping for a speedy return to normalcy, but I don’t see how the mental, physical and financial consequences of the pandemic can be expected to promptly disappear. One thing is for sure: I will keep on weaving. In March 2020, trend forecaster Li Edelkoort predicted degrowth as a healthy consequence of the pandemic, with local industries gaining momentum and people-based initiatives taking over through bartering systems and open tables, farmers markets and street events, dancing and singing contests, and a very dominant DIY aesthetic. [8] While I am personally doubtful about this happening in full scale, I do believe that where fashion is concerned, promoting artisanal practices could help mend a broken system, connecting us with the clothes we wear as well as with the people and the work behind them.
Notes
1. Ellie Beck, Mindful Thoughts for Makers (Brighton: Leaping Hare Press, 2019).
2. Laura Seigle, “Blanche Dubois: An Antihero,” WR: Journal of the Arts & Sciences Writing Program 2 (2009/2010): 42-48. https://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/past-issues/issue-2/seigle/.
3. Susan Harlan, “Going Through Blanche DuBois’s Luggage,” The Paris Review, January 30, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/30/going-blanche-duboiss-luggage/.
4. Sarah Mower, “John Galliano Spring 2008 Ready-to-Wear,” Vogue, October 5, 2007, https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2008-ready-to-wear/john-galliano.
5. Suyin Haynes, “The True Story Behind the Movie Judy,” Time, September 26, 2019, https://time.com/5684673/judy-garland-movie-true-story/.
6. Michael S. Rosenwald, “‘I’ll ruin you’: Judy Garland on Being Groped and Harassed by Powerful Hollywood Men,” The Washington Post, November 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/14/ill-ruin-you-judy-garland-on-being-groped-and-harassed-by-powerful-hollywood-men/.
7. Megan L. Evans et al, “A Pandemic within a Pandemic. Intimate Partner Violence During Covid-19”, The New England Journal of Medicine, 383 (2020): 2302-2304. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2024046.
8. Marcus Fairs, “Coronavirus Offers "A Blank Page for a New Beginning" says Li Edelkoort,” Dezeen, March 9, 2020, https://www.dezeen.com/2020/03/09/li-edelkoort-coronavirus-reset/.
