~ Sometimes I think, ‘What is life?’ Well, life is very short. Sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes you are successful. It’s your life. C’est La Vie. Of course I try my best and strive for perfection but sometimes I try and make something that is very rough or unfinished because if I don’t I will die in madness pursuing an impossible ideal. ~ Kansai Yamamoto13
How do I get out of my head ? The idea was to create an efficient, waste-reduction system while also balancing aesthetic appeal. Frustrated with waste accumulating with no yield and also looking at fellow classmates trying to deal with the amount of unsuccessful effort; much thought was put into how I could make peace with the mistakes I made, rather than knitting fabric just to ‘get it over with’. This method could potentially reduce the time taken to complete a project as well as offer new design.
Figure 1. Failure exemplified by the Dubied knitting machine - Numerous knots due to an undesirable increase in tension, London, 2019. Photography: Shipra Chandran.
Unbeknown to myself, it was a quote from Oscar Wilde that set off this particular train of thought :
“I have no more desire to define ugliness than I have daring to define beauty; but still I would like to remind those who mock at beauty as being an unpractical thing of this fact, that an ugly thing is merely a thing is badly made, or a thing that does not serve its purpose; that ugliness is want of fitness; that ugliness is failure, that ugliness is useless, such as an ornament in the wrong place, while beauty, as some one finely said, is the purgation of all superfluities.
There is a divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and no more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant; ugliness is a spendthrift and wastes its material; in fine, ugliness, as much in costume as in anything else, is always the sign that somebody has been unpractical. So the costume of the future in England, if it is founded on the true laws of freedom, comfort, and adaptability to circumstances, cannot fail to be more beautiful also, because beauty is the sign always of the rightness of principles, the mystical seal that is set upon what is perfect, and upon what is perfect only.”14
Ugliness.
Beauty.
Failure.
Perfection.
Beauty = Perfection // Ugliness = Failure.
13
Koren, New Fashion Japan, p.5.
Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004) p. 118. 14
