3. How do I get out of my head?

~ 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 Yamamoto 13

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.

14 Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004) p. 118.

His equations of them are contradictory to that of my own. I set about unknotting these complex terms and the stigma/honour associated with them. Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. 15 In a well-written and rather poignant article in the Financial Times, the author Janan Ganesh states:

“Our seeming inability to look this fact (failure as a lasting condition) in the eye is not just unbecoming in and of itself, it also inadvertently makes the experience of failure more harrowing than it needs to be.” 16

He further discusses why the stigma around failure should be removed, and how honesty about losing is the way to go.

Here, I deal with that concept of imperfection that is spontaneous and not forced. Since wabi-sabi centres around the idea of perfection and diverges to related concepts, most of my research deals with implementing this unique concept onto knitwear. Would people seem happy with this? Would they be comfortable being draped with irregular/ ‘sub-standard’ looking fabric? How does this alter their ideas /change their views on ‘flawless fabric’ (and subsequently, a ‘flawless lifestyle’)?

I will be looking at naturally occurring defects in the knitting process, as well as structures that have been knit to make them look like defects or ripped on purpose. The techniques that have been described here may be applied to garments. Challenging the work of Rei Kawakubo and Maison Martin Margiela, I believe they have purposefully used ‘destruction’ as a part of the design process rather than just allowing the mistakes to occur. I use the primal definition of wabi-sabi to impugn understanding of the same; wherein the depiction of ‘poverty’ or a ‘poor look’ is falsely equated with ‘imperfect beauty’. Semiotics will also be a tool to elevate the element of a maker’s touch, as l study imperfection as a form of language and expression.

It is near impossible to untangle people’s opinions of beauty on their apparel, from all the layering it has collected and stagnated over the years. This dissertation starts tugging at the yarn, but it is only a start. Hopefully, it unravels a fruitful conversation.

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15 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p.2.

16 Janan Ganesh, ‘Why We Should Be Honest about Failure’, Financial Times, 2019 <https:// www.ft.com/content/432d3482-457b-11e9-b168-96a37d002cd3> [accessed 20 March 2019].