Intermediate-Level Sewing at the London College of Fashion

During the third week of July, 2010, I took an intermediate-level "short course" at the London College of Fashion - it was called "More Sewing Skills". As a self-taught sewer (seamster?), I felt it would be useful to "even out" my skills a bit by taking a formal course, and also, the descriptions of the course included sewing stretch and on the bias, skills I have yet to master. I had no idea what the experience would bring me other than these very general expectations, nor who would take such a course. (The image shows the lovely little courtyard next to the entry to the Curtain Road building.)

The course was held at the Curtain Road facility, which I understand to be a more industrial setting than most of the sites of the LCF. London was in the middle of a heat wave when I arrived, although it cooled off over the course of the week.

Upon arrival at the site on the Monday morning, the cafeteria area served as an assembly point for the students, actually for two courses being given at the same time (I'm not sure what the other course was, actually). Although several had already arrived when I got there, I took a table on my own. After a few minutes, first one young woman and then another joined me at the table. We got to talking and I discovered one was Greek and the other Italian (but living in Ireland).

In a few minutes we were introduced to our teacher, Ms. Siaw-Lee Priddle, a diminutive Chinese woman, who took us to the back of the building to the rooms that were to be ours for the week. Within a short time it became clear that Ms. Priddle knew precisely what she was doing, but her English diction wasn't always easy to decipher! Nonetheless, she impressed me with her evident expertise and, over the course of the week, what I came to recognize as both a passion for sewing, and a passion for passing on some of her knowledge to others. I found her to be an excellent teacher, and would have no second thoughts recommending her.

Over the course of the week, we made miniature versions of a shirt, a lined dress (just the top part, actually, above the waist), a stretch t-shirt and a lined skirt cut on the bias. It was implied that these were children's versions, but at one point over the week, we discovered that the patterns were all in Ms. Priddle's size! She had recycled several patterns she had developed for her own clothing for our use!

Although I have made lots of shirts and several dresses and skirts, I actually learned a lot about different ways of doing these things. Ms. Priddle taught us to do things quickly and efficiently, with a minimum use of pins (which is usually where things slow down a lot!). She didn't actually forbid us pins, but whenever someone suggested using pins, for example, to set a sleeve, she laughed and told us we didn't need pins to do these things.

Unfortunately, over the early part of the week I developed a very bad cold with a hacking cough, which reduced my energy level and left me exhausted every day (with the cough I was having trouble sleeping). I ended up "skipping class" Thursday morning when my energy was at an all time low. This cold made it difficult to get the maximum benefit of the class (and the time in London!).

Overall, however, I've very pleased with the class. I believe I "honed" my skills - I learned a lot of tips and tricks for doing things faster and more efficiently. I finally understood what the issue is with sewing on the bias - it wasn't all that complicated, but it's hard to explain in (or learn from) written texts. It's the kind of thing you need to see, and then you understand it. So I got more or less what I wanted out of the course, despite my low levels of energy as a result of the cough.

When I asked Ms. Priddle what she thought might be appropriate as a follow-up course, eventually, she more or less said that I didn't really need one. She did suggest that the course on Jackets might be useful, however, which confirms my own opinion. She paid me a very nice compliment at one point in the week - I took in my finished corset to show them, and when she saw it her jaw dropped and she said "I thought you were joking when you said you'd made a corset!"

Two Cities, Two Fashion Cultures

Last month (July, 2010) I spent several days in Madrid, Spain, followed after a short interval by several days in London, England. Somewhat to my amazement, I found people in both cities to be highly fashion conscious. I have been reading lately in the academic literature on fashion a number of criticisms of so-called "street fashion", writers who are disappointed with the apparent lack of imagination of everyday people regarding fashion. I must say, however, that my experience in several cities does not support this jaded view. I find street fashion to be quite fascinating, especially as it seems to differ in "flavor" in different cultures. I wish I could share more photos from Madrid - I took several photos while there, but I then lost my camera with the images still not transferred to my computer, to me great frustration. I could have accepted the loss of the camera if I hadn't also lost a number of great pictures!

Madrid in July is hot and humid and filled with people - lots of tourists, yes, but also lots of locals. In the evening, the city is abuzz with places for eating tapas. There are streets more devoted to tourists and others which seem to cater more to the indigineous population. I went down one set of streets that clearly catered to the young crowd. (The photo is the only one I've got from Madrid - it just shows me in a restaurant that could be anywhere in the world... but it is a kind of "proof" I was there :) ... )

Everywhere you go, people dress up - they are extremely chic, men and women. The ones who don't are actually more the tourists. Fabulous clothes, many quite originally, for the most part very sexy, even, I would say, sensual. None of it in bad taste, none of it crass or vulgar. Often, very elegant but also very simple clothing, but lots of attention to how the clothes move with the body and not just how they look when you're standing still.

Madrid struck me as a very livable city, with a vibrant lifestyle and many different areas of quite different character. I understand it is listed as one of the world's most liveable cities - I can see why.

London, England, provides a very different sense of fashion, but no less trendy or interesting in its own way. The one label I would use to describe London street fashion (obviously more relevant to women than to men) is "cleavage, cleavage, cleavage"! This is very different from Madrid (or Quebec, for that matter). Londonians seem to think that cleavage is sexy (well, it is, too, but it can be rather overwhelming and not always appropriate, in my experience!). I would say that well over 50% of the women in the streets display a lot of cleavage, and this includes young teens as well as women in their sixties. Where women might wear a man's shirt in other cultures with the top one or two buttons left undone, in London it is likely that the top three buttons are left open, if not more. (The photo shows some cleavage, but is not a great example of the fashion-sense I found in much of London - perhaps more so in the green dress... I have to say that I discovered that the second floor of London's buses makes a great platform for taking interesting pictures!)

Londonian clothes in general I found to be eclectic and chic, but not stuffy or overly conservative, as I half expected. No doubt it depends which parts of London you visit, but I was staying in North London (Hackney and Islington), working in Shoreditch and visited areas in Southwark, Kensington and Greenwich/Blackheath. I'm sure if I hung around in more business areas, I would have seen more conservative dress, but overall I say a wide range of clothing and fashion styles.

The trip left me intruiged by the whole issue of street fashions. I wish I hadn't lost my camera, because I become convinced that good photos would help reveal these cultural differences from place to place. The world could use more "sartorialists" I think!

The moment of commitment

One of the most intense sensations when designing and sewing, I find in my own practice, is the moment when I must commit to cutting the fabric following the finalization of the pattern. When you are working from a pattern someone else has prepared, you also get this in a milder form - have you selected the right size and traced out all the lines correctly? But when you've worked for days coming up with a pattern that you think serves and must commit to turning the pattern into a garment, this moment is particularly intense. It is true that you can make a muslin shell rather than use the good fabric, but even for that, you are committing to several hours work that may be less than adequate if you need to rethink the design at that point. As long as you are working on paper, you are not "committed" to the design, but after switching to laying out, cutting and sewing, mistakes become more serious and what you do has direct consequences.

It is both a terrifying and an exhilerating experience, even for the most modest garment. I'm sure if you did this professionally, you would learn to manage this moment more routinely, but I'm not sure even then that the intensity of the moment of commitment will every quite disappear!

What I do...

Several people have asked me recently, online, what I do. They may have seen me write that I'm a scientist and they are curious about what kind of scientist I am. Some people are themselves scientists, and want to know what my specialty is, partly out of professional interest. Also, I have stated in several locations that my passion for sewing has begun to intersect with my scientific research, and, of course, that catches people's eye and they want to know more.

It is actually not all that easy to tell you what I do. I can tell you what academic department I work in ("geomatics", sometimes called "surveying" or "surveying engineering"), and what discipline my Ph.D. was in ("astrophysics" - actually "observational cosmology" if you want to be precise). But my current research is very, VERY interdisciplinary - I work at the intersection between "rehabilitation science", "new media and performance art", "geomatics", "cognitive psychology" and "computer science", more specifically "artificial intelligence", and, more recently, "fashion". For example, I am constructing a new media laboratory within a physical rehabilitation hospital that incorporates a range of sensors (cameras, microphones, touch sensitive devices, pressure-sensitive mats, data gloves, physiological sensors, radio frequency identity tags, etc.) and provides a wide set of perceptual experiences (via mono and stereo projections on walls and the floor, loudspeakers located throughout the room space, motorized devices that engage the body, etc.) with the goal of exploring the impact of new types of interaction between the self and the environment, on our ability to adapt to changes in our body or to learn new ways of understanding who we are.

Furthermore, to a large extent, the "science" I do is less about "measuring" and more about "engineering", or "designing" environments (although we do some assessment as well). This is where fashion issues come into play. One of the lines of inquiry we are following involves developing garments that showcase dynamically moving images, and investigating how certain dynamic images may be used to change our postural control, for example. For example, imagine that you are wearing a shirt which displays a horizontal line - no matter how you hold your body, the line is always horizontal with respect to the surrounding environment! Does this absolute horizontal reference affect how you stand or move?

I'm not sure if that is any clearer, though. You'd have to see us in action to really understand what we are doing, and since the lab is presently under construction, it is hard to actually show you concrete results at this point. There isn't much to see, yet...

The Perfect Shirt

I've made four different shirts for myself over the past 18 months now, each using a different design (and incorporating a number of mistakes). Now I'm working on the "perfect shirt" for me (see Figure at right). There may appear to be nothing particularly outstanding about the design shown, but it incorporates a number of features that are important. First of all, it is wide - the design is made to fit my girth, not my waist. Secondly, it uses a dress shirt style hem at the bottom - this ensures there is lots of fabric below the belt so that when the shirt is tucked in, it stays tucked in! The top of the curves at the hem at the bottom are low enough that they also stay out of sight, even when the fabric pulls up (such as when I do stretching exercises). Third, the neck line is much lower than for most commercially-made men's shirts - it is closer to a boat neck in overall form. This allows me to button the shirt up to the top without putting any pressure on the neck - I hate how regular shirts are too tight around the neck, even when they are "loose". I like wearing a shirt I can button up to the top (without a tie - I don't wear ties!) without feeling like I am being strangled! Fourth, the fabric extends several centimeters past the Centre Front line, so that when the shirt it buttoned up, there is no possibility of the shirt gapping open between buttons and showing skin underneath.

The upper part of the shirt may or may not be modified into a yoke - I have tried both, and I generally prefer the non-yoked versions of shirts over the yoked versions. I tend to make my shirts without a pocket, also - I've taken to put the things I usually put into my shirt pocket into my back pants pocket instead - I like the uncluttered look of a shirt without its pocket. I've also found that most ready-to-wear shorts have too long a shoulder and I have shortened the shoulder seam (and moved it towards the front slightly for my particular case).

I have experimented with several collars for shirts, including a mandarin style collar and standup collars - I prefer the latter. I've also experimented with wide cuffs (which I like), and wide sleeve openings (which I don't like as much).

I like the sleeve to be fairly wide at the sleeve cap - I narrowed the sleeve on one of my shirts and found the results to be uncomfortable.

I found that offsetting the buttons slightly from where the collar fastens gives a slightly asymmetrical feel to the shirt front which I like, very different from ready-to-wear shirts. This is particularly effective when using high quality fabrics like hammered silk, where the quality of the fabric highlights the design features of the shirt that make it different from a standard shirt.

I'm not sure whether my "perfect shirt" is right for everyone, but for me, after a considerable amount of experimentation, I think I have found a "look" that suits me and that I like, while still remaining dressy and chic.

The Mathematics of Sewing!

I have been thinking about the mathematics of sewing for some time. It seems to me that one could develop a really interesting little memoir on the subject. Here's a mini table of contents for such a text :

1. Introduction
   
2. Metric spaces - from 1D to 2D
   
3. Metric spaces - from 2D to 3D
   
4. Fabric, manifolds and topology
   
5. Tilings and prints
   
6. Draping, gravity and constrained dynamic systems
   
7. Conclusion
   

I'm sure I haven't exhausted the possible topics, either. Here's a few notes about each of these topics.

Metric spaces - from 1D to 2D : The practice of drafting a sloper or block (or pattern) is one familiar to engineers and users of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software - it consists of using interconnected lines of pre-determined length to lay out a set of two-dimensional shapes. In addition, the process of weaving threads to form two-dimensional sheets is another example of extruding one dimensional objects (threads under simplification) to form two dimension objects (sheets). The process of manipulating patterns (or fabric, for that matter) by cutting and then reattaching cut pieces at different locations exploits particular sets of the metric properties of 2D spaces. The relationship between the metric and its properties on the one hand, and the manipulation of sewing patterns on the other, could be rendered explicit.

Metric spaces - from 2D to 3D : The process of stitching fabric together in complex ways to form 3D objects constitutes a second class of transformations that could be explored.

Fabric, manifolds and topology : During the process of taking pieces of fabric that have been cut and sewing them to form 3D objects, topological properties of the sheets are also exploited. Indeed, whether sheets, tubes (thread) or 3D objects (garments), we are dealing with entities that are mathematically described as 'manifolds'. The topology of the objects concerned affects the fabrication process - for example, turning a jacket inside out is a manifestation of certain topoological properties of the garment.

Tilings and Prints : The procedure by which one generates a print pattern through repetitions of a motif is a form of tiling, for which there is a very interesting mathematics derived of both very old and very new ideas. Hence exploring tilings presents an interesting area of study, inlcuding repetitive tilings but also non repetitive tilings such as Penrose tilings.

Draping, gravity and constrained dynamic systems : Once garments are design, printed and constructed, they are worn. How they are worn depends upon the behavior of dynamic systems under gravity, especially in the presence of particular classes of constraints (e.g. adjacency or connectivity constraints).

A full exposition of these different aspects would make fascinating reading!

Footprints in the sand...

As part of my ongoing work on the fabric wiki, I have been researching so-called "eco-friendly" fabrics and the issues that surround them. This makes fascinating reading (see my wiki article on this for more details). It turns out there is no "perfect" eco-fabric - all of them have issues (even recycled fabrics), despite what some people on the net seem to believe. That said, it is possible to make intelligent choices that can put pressure on the system to change for the better.

What I found particularly interesting, though, is the whole notion of a "footprint". First of all, there seem to be several footprint concepts being used now, including the "ecological footprint", the "carbon footprint", even the "water footprint" or the "energy footprint", with a certain amount of confusion as to what each represents. Although we probably hear more about the carbon footprint, the most general concept is actually the ecological footprint. The ecological footprint is the amount of land that would be needed to produce and/or absorb the materials needed and/or generated by our activities. The reason for the "slashes" in this statement is that land is required to make things, but the pollution or garbage generated by our activities (and the nature of the world means that waste products are ALWAYS generated by activities) also requires land support. This notion of footprint is hence, truly a footprint - it is expressed in surface area that activity generates. The footprint per capita is then multiplied by the total population of the Earth to determine the total surface area needed to support all our current activities. Well, it turns out that we would need, roughly 1,5 planet Earth's to support current activity levels. In other terms, we are using up the planet's resources faster than they can be renewed. This is NOT a GOOD state of affairs for future generations.

Interesting, and perhaps surprisingly to many, our use of fabric is a primary component of our overly large ecological footprint. The textile industry is a heavy polluter as well as an energy gourmand, and the result is a direct contribution of something near 15 to 20% of our ecological footprint, due mainly, of course, to the use of fabrics in the developed world (Europe and North America). It should be noted that the ecological footprint of the developed world rings in at five (5!) planet Earths - we are using resources five times faster than the planet can renew itself. Therefore, the 15% to 20% contributed by the world of fabrics actually represents one whole Earth ON ITS OWN. This is a serious problem, and one that those of us interested in sewing and fashion need to be aware of and doing something about!

This means not just what and how we buy, but also how we talk about and promote fashion, how we engage with the community, and so forth.