Worn Worlds: Community Participation Component - Introduction

Clothes are our autobiography and our identity. Through them, we “can trace the connections of love across the boundaries of absence, and  of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy, as well as” the characteristics of its materiality.

In his article Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things, Peter Stallybrass tells us he lost his friend Allon White to cancer. When Allon died, Stallybrass came into possession of Allon’s favourite jacket. Stallybrass wore it to a presentation where suddenly, he was overcome with emotion and could not continue. He  recalls,
“…I was inhabited by his presence, taken over…..he was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, which in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’.  He was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket….above all, he was there in the smell”.

Susan Avishai: My Father's Leather Jacket

He goes on to tell us that clothes and textiles that are part of our everyday life, receive us and yield to our shape, absorb our odours, scents and perspiration, wearing in the places where our bodies exert more friction. When parents, children, close friends, and lovers die, their clothes still hang in their closet “holding their gestures, both reassuring and terrifying, touching the living with the dead.”

Meru Parmar: Woven Wedding Saris with gold and silver threads

Textiles are witnesses and recorders of our daily lives. Our skin, the food we eat and other particles become imbedded within the intersections of the threads. They absorb scents from our immediate environment and those that emanate from our bodies. Our fingers recall their feel,  surfaces, textures, and materiality. The sensors in our fingers like threads dressed on the loom of our mind, unspool our feelings and our re-memorying of a person or events. 

Carolyn Barnett: My Mother's Horruckses Dress


EVERY GARMENT TELLS A STORY

Every garment tells a story

about the person who made it

whose hands have touched it

fingers caressing

a body it enveloped

in comfort 

or adorned 

the persons who sold it and disposed of it. 

every garment tells a story 

about the person who wears it

each day and the event it was worn for

stories for the adventures they accompanied us on

stories of the people met while wearing them

stories of the relationships that they witnessed.

and when the person who once inhabited the garment does so no longer

the garment remains 

storing  these silent stories

each stain, each rip, each frayed seam

commemorating like a marker

our memories  

their only inhabitants 

Line Dufour ©2019