A woven world : on fashion, fishermen, and the sardine dress
Alison Hawthorne Deming (Author)
"A reflection and celebration of the fading crafts, cottage industries, and artisans that defined communities-like the author's-for generations Everywhere communities, habitats, and families are endangered by loss. This book is an act of resistance against such loss, a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making. This book is about the quest for continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change. Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of communities and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent's "Sardine Dress," I turned to the artisanal industries of my ancestors, on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2500 residents, and New York City, a metropolis of millions. It begins with a family cottage in the Canadian Maritimes, a place for two centuries the center of a thriving herring fishery, and travels back into that history and to a second strand of family history in my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother who were artisanal dressmakers. Both strands speak to micro-habitats of human making, both peaked in the late 19th century and have faded away. Both represent ways of knowing and being perfectly suited to their time and place that I lament seeing fade away. I wanted to refuse history's erasure, reweave the fabric of those lives. One way to face loss is to give a presence on the page to those people, places, and practices that we have loved, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament can become a praise song"-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2021
First hardcover edition View all formats and editions
Counterpoint, Berkeley, California, 2021
History
240 pages ; illustrations ; 24 cm
9781640094826, 1640094822
1221017487
The sardine dress
Driving the cadillac to Valhalla
The house built of Herring
Camel hair coat
A portrait in five portraits
Herring our king
Brook trout dress
Le Travail de femmes
The stone weirs
The rise and fall of crinoline
The Paris notebook
At the seining
Seal skin coat
The Lacemaker
Invasive beauty
Two-tone satin dress
From calvary to the subway on fifty-eighth street
Some of the ghosts
Silk
One thread