Seamlessness: Making and (Un)Knowing in Fashion Practice

by Michael D Cohen PhD, Claire Pajaczkowska (Foreword by)

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783206421
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.60(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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

Read an Excerpt

Seamlessness

Making and (Un)Knowing in Fashion Practice

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By Yeseung Lee

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-642-1

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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 am inside a bubble. From
the inside, I am unaware of 'the outside'.
But ... already
this thought might mean that I do wonder if there is an opening to this bubble ... or else,
is the wall penetrable?
This idea of bubble, to me, is an ever present fear.
I tend to panic when there is no means
to compare myself with others, as much as
I hate being judged.
What if I am the only one
inside a bubble?
With no measure of comparison,
I guess I am only competing with myself. I try to beat
or meet what I made in the past.
But sometimes it feels like I'm
just beating myself up.

A journal entry on Thursday 10 March 2011


The monochrome contrast of the woven-in surface
looks like a message board.
Mediated through the photo image, the weave-pattern
appears 'textual'.
The thread running in and out of the cloth, with
words, gaps, commas, brackets, and ellipses
with trailing ends ... resembles a thread of thoughts
emerging and then being lost ...

A journal entry on Monday 5 September 2011

much as the adults seek the attention of the baby. From this 'interplay of reciprocal attention-seeking', the baby develops a successfully imitated, repeated and learned behaviour, which has a unique style and temperament, and those mothering it adopt to its particular personality (Anzieu 1989: 56–57). 'Connecting them as it does, this common skin ensures direct communication between the two partners, reciprocal empathy and an adhesive identification' (Anzieu 1989: 62–63).

The formation and structure of the Skin Ego explains how it can later reappear as a flexible and empathetic psychological interface between interacting adults, and how it can even be extended to groups and institutions (Anzieu 1989: 9). '[T]here is no group without a common skin, a containing envelope, which makes it possible for its members to experience the existence of a group self' (Anzieu 1990). This empathetic and communicative aspect of the common skin is further emphasized by the contrasting nature of the intra-uterine phantasy, which is the phantasy of reciprocal inclusion, predominant before the formation of the Skin Ego. Anzieu (1989: 63) adds that 'autistic envelopes' express fixation on this intra-uterine phantasy and the failure to accede to the phantasy of a common skin.

This glimpse of intermediate space, provided by the Skin Ego as an imaginary extension of skin, offers a way of looking at the formation of social and psychological subjectivities through dressing practice. Our primitive helplessness is relieved by the garment we wear: it supplements the protective function of the skin. As humans advanced into a more developed social, cultural and moral existence, garments must also have evolved to complement social and psychological functions. Anzieu reveals that the notion of the Skin Ego was in fact inspired by his childhood memories related to garments; growing up as an only child, the excess of his parents' love, ambitions, anxieties and attention was experienced by him in the form of the garments they put on him: 'I was not allowed to risk myself in the outside air without being smothered under several layers of clothing [...] The envelopes of care, concern and warmth with which my parents surrounded me, one upon another' (1990). The association of the Skin Ego with garments is also made when Anzieu points out that the skin preserves the marks of external disruptions in its form, texture, colouring and scars, while it shields the equilibrium of our internal functioning from these disruptions, 'and through it a great deal is revealed to the outside world about that inner state which it is supposed to protect' (Anzieu 1989: 17). Correspondingly, the Skin Ego registers and preserves tactile sensory traces. Anzieu (1989: 105) suggests that the Skin Ego is 'like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over first outlines of an "original" pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin', which he compares to the social function of scarification, tattooing, make-up and clothes. At a physical level, garments not only receive external influences in the form of wear and tear, but are also shaped and stained by the wearer's body and its movement. At a more psychological level, the way we dress is socially influenced, revealing much about the wearer: we make our conscious or unconscious choices based upon the experience of social interaction, whether actual

The lines in two-dimensional patterns indicate
the seams, edges, and openings of
three dimensional garments.
These lines bear a space from flat surfaces
to contain the body.
So ... seams and edges point at the original 'pieces'
or 'fragments' that have been put together.
What then would be the pattern for an emotional garment?
Psychological body-limit is
not necessarily the same
as physical body-limit.
How to contain the affect and
where to place the seams and edges?
What might be the shape of garment that
clothe the emotion and the affect?
The garment is more of a space than a wrapper
... then ...
to cut an embodied and affective space
as two dimensional pattern
... where should the lines be placed?
When I want to be in a different mood or space,
where would be the opening? ...
doors 'seam' different parts of a house, and
the main door marks, connects, and cuts off
the outside from the inside. An opening, almost always, is also a closing – both connecting and separating.

A journal entry on Friday 4 June 2010

or imaginary. Just like the Skin Ego, garments are both a physical and psychological extension of the wearer, both phantasy and reality, separating and connecting.

The baby's development into an independent person means that this idea of a common skin with the mother is gradually suppressed. Recognizing that each has his or her own skin/ego, the baby makes the final transition from narcissistic relations to object-relations (Anzieu 1989: 63, 65). Anzieu quotes Sylvia Plath to convey the pain and resistance experienced in the separation phase:

I who for two and a half years had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilise my bones [...] Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, [...] the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

(Plath quoted in Anzieu 1989: 19–20, original emphasis)

The urchin's skin that separates and rejects contact is the acute sense of loss that infant Plath felt at the birth of her brother. This first cut, the separation from the mother, seems to reflect a perception of the fundamental human state as 'incomplete', and also to foreground the continuing attempt to repair the wound by searching for empathetic links with others. This research enquires into the ways that 'separation' from the earliest relationship might become figured in the ambiguity that is found in the seams, the hems and the openings of garments. In the same manner as the registering and inscribing function of the Skin Ego, the continuing 'crises' inevitably experienced throughout life – the separations and suppressions of the Skin Ego – involve some form of change on the level of garment and bodily appearance. The common practices of tattooing, piercing, hair-dyeing or changing one's style of garments all express the increasing independence of an individual from the maternal environment, as well as their incorporation into social groups, marking a change to the social self.

The decreasing tactile interaction between the child and the mother, from fusion to separation, also draws attention to the emotional aspect of the garment: is it possible that in the garments we wear, we search for a substitution for the primary interaction, which touches us through and beyond the actual touch of cloth on the skin? The notion of the Skin Ego thus makes it possible to regard the garment as the matrix of human interaction. Almost permanently in touch with the skin, a garment is a significant part of the baby's tactile experience. Its influence on the formation of the Skin Ego cannot be overestimated, and the garment itself can also be said to become the material equivalent of the Skin Ego in later life, as suggested above. A garment is therefore the intermediate area of social interaction, through which the development of our individual style as a unique person is encouraged and recognized.

What is a 'good fit'? Usually
'to fit' isn't to exactly copy the body shape, but
to create an illusory body shape....
The tension between hiding and revealing the body, and
its relationship with the fit? ... what if I start with the
body shape itself as the base, building on this base –
the illusion of how I think I look to others, and also how I
feel about the garment on me in relation to others ...?
The physical body, psychological comfort, and emotions
should all be considered in achieving a 'good fit'
... Maybe a good fit = personal style?

A journal entry on Tuesday 11 May 2010

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Seamlessness by Yeseung Lee. Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Foreword Claire Pajaczkowska ix

The Seaming 1

Chapter 1 The Skin Ego 11

Chapter 2 The Garment Ego 39

Chapter 3 Auratic Objects 61

Chapter 4 Here and Now 89

Chapter 5 Seaming Hands 117

Chapter 6 Seamless? 147

Chapter 7 The Toile Ego 171

The Seam(less) 193

References 197

Index 209

Editorial Reviews

“A richly contextualized and beautifully narrated journey into the cognition of making that binds cloth and skin, garment and person and replaces distinction by modalities of transition. . . . A sharp and incisive critique of the fashion system that will enable a new approach to be developed to the analysis of fashion.

University College London Susanne Kuchler