Fashionable excuses

December 2015

Well, damn, huh? I moved to a city with a fashion district, and my last five posts have been about maps, stuff I could be working on literally anywhere.

The first few months in Toronto have seemed to see me divorced from my physical, tangible work; I’ve sewn a few things, sure, but nothing interesting, nothing that engaged my mind as much as my hands. I was trying to figure this out over the winter break and came to a few conclusions:

I’ve been busy. Let’s just get that out of the way, though it isn’t the interesting answer or the most truthful one.
My new apartment is too clean and new; I can’t tack shit up all over the place for inspiration. I’m currently working on making a mess of it.
I don’t know anyone here beyond a few people, so what’s it matter what I look like? Part of the fun for me may have been just in making myself uncomfortable around people I know, rebelling against any personal identity as it began to form in anyone’s mind. Or in my own?
I’m no longer surrounded by artists capable of understanding form. Academics, every day!
Or, to elaborate on #3 further: am I saying that I have to feel known to be seen? Or that communication is properly dialectic rather than expressive? Does that sound like vapid nonsense? Will anyone who finds themselves outside of my head understand what I meant by that? I mean that without a shared context of formal expectation, a shared expectation of what certain things usually look like, there is little message content to a violation of the non-expectation. This is related to entropy and information theory, which makes me suspect my own thoughts. Just because I happen to be reading a book on that topic right now, doesn’t make it relevant!

So… I really need to get on top of making something! I have well over a thousand dollars worth of fabrics and materials just lying in piles, and more than a dozen stores within walking distance if I found myself missing anything at all.

What’s on the block?

I need a winter coat, a long, thick, wool one with broad shoulders and all! I have a ‘prototype’/fully-finished version that has a couple little failings that currently prevent me from sharing it here.
I want to make a jacket out of sailcloth, which is extremely stiff. This will be an excuse to play with exotic ways of flexibly joining sleeves to body and dealing explicitly with joints.
Someday I will have leather pants…
I have another idea for the sailcloth. It’s a pair of motorcycle-style pants, using the sail cloth as a sort of exoskeleton on the inflexible bits and contrasting it with a dark, supple cloth at the joints. I haven’t fully figured out the joint articulations yet, but I know that whatever happens, this is going to end up using several yards of elastic cord!

Well, I should stop making lists that no one will read now. With hope, publishing this on new years eve will help to cement these little plans in my mind and perhaps with luck some of them will make the transition into jpg and then into your own mind.