The story goes that there was a man called Guo Han in the Tang Dynasty who, upon gazing at the bright moon one night, saw a heavenly girl slowly descending towards him. When he had a closer look, he saw that the dress she was wearing was seamless. He asked her why. She answered: “Heavenly clothes are not sewn with needle and thread.” Hence, the Chinese idiom “a heavenly dress without seams”, which denotes something flawless.
Although humanity has always striven for perfection in all things, this has often, if not always, escaped us. The seamless garment, however, is firmly within our grasp and there is even an exhibition to prove it.
The Endless Garment: The New Craft of Machine Knitting brings to Australia for the first time nine leading international designers.
Exhibition co-curator Ricarda Bigolin explains: “The show is about possibilities, also about knitwear being a medium that has as many creative possibilities as cut and sew.”
Knitwear has traditionally been associated with craft and, even when it is mass produced, it rarely evolves in the leaps and bounds of fashion that uses woven materials. High fashion designers use knit mostly in the way they use fabric – fine jersey knit that is cut and sewn according to a two dimensional pattern – although the odd chunky scarf makes an appearance now and then as a homage to the humble hand knitter. But there is a new trend spearheaded by the likes of Sandra Backlund (Sweden), Yoshiki Hishinuma (Japan) and Saverio Palatella (Italy), who are working and thinking in 3D.
Ms Bigolin explains: “[Ms] Backlund is getting a lot of acclaim in Paris, London [and] New York, but her work also shows an embracing of volume, as opposed to making really form-fitted work. She can build a form around the body, which I find really exciting and interesting, and also that with new technology, you don’t have to literally cut and piece together a form, but you can actually integrally build a form.”
This may seem new to some, though not to Melbourne sculptor and designer Julianna Turcu, who first held an exhibition in 1988 at the Blackwood Gallery that featured modular, seamless knitted garments.
At the time, Australia was in the grip of a recession, the likes of which saw the fashion industry manufacturers drop like flies. It was not the time to talk revolution, though the machine that could produce seamless, whole garment pieces had just been invented.
Mrs Turcu’s passion for volume came from the fact that she was a sculptor in stone and wood, and senior curator for sculpture and textiles at the Contemporary Art Museum of Romania before she migrated to Australia in 1984.
Since coming to Australia, she has been experimenting with the manual knitting machine to create modular knitwear with the unwavering conviction that one fateful day we will all be able to walk around wearing mass manufactured knitted sculptures. Her recipe for this is the machine, the module and the divine proportion, or golden mean.
“The first step is to think in terms of modular constructions because it ensures that the finished work has an inherent harmony and order. And it also frees the imagination once the foundation is ensured. Just like in architecture or any kind of design. The smallest module of knitwear is the loop, which can be represented as a number. So when I think of the structure of my designs, I have to think in numbers,” Mrs Turcu explained.
Surely this is not the kind of talk uttered by a fashion designer. It sounds so restricted, predetermined and unromantic. And there’s more.
“To be able to go from the loop, to modules and from modules to the whole construction is where I apply the divine proportion and the Fibonacci series. I became interested in this idea when I was teaching descriptive geometry to high school students so that they can learn to think spatially, three dimensionally.
When I applied this to knitting, I had a eureka moment because I felt as though I found the ideal way to design a garment, which is totally repeatable,” concludes Mrs Turcu with an animated gesture of long-awaited resolution.
But this is too scandalous – a designer admitting to aiming for mass production, repeatable garments.
And there’s the rub.
Curator Ricarda Bigolin, who classifies herself as a research-based designer predominantly concerned with design processes, observes: “The machine in fashion hasn’t been given a good rep; it symbolises mass production, which is not really a glam thing and the ugly side of fashion.” She sees the exhibition as an antidote to the way people view design processes because it showcases high end, exploratory fashion, which is not necessarily handmade.
“A lot of people don’t talk about the machines. Often, the handmade is really celebrated.
“It’s interesting because people often talk about the virtuosity of the hand, the haute couture practitioner being able to put in 2000 hours of handwork and producing a ball gown, and that is a very comfortable thing for the public to understand. But if you then say no, actually a machine did it in six hours, then it’s not something in the general discourse of fashion,” Ms Bigolin said.
At the other extreme is the flood of imports from China that has redefined the word “cheap” and inadvertently changed the landscape of world trade.
Ms Bigolin said: “Now, we are seeing in fashion big French-based designers and Italian designers things’ being made in China, and the extent of things actually still being made in places like Italy is really dubious because they are finding it hard to compete. So a garment might be produced in China, but then sent back to Italy for a bit of finishing and then gets the ‘Handmade in Italy’ on it.”
Despite this, there is room for optimism. The antidote to “cheap” is not necessarily exorbitant, it can be affordable, although the antidote to bad design remains good design.
For designer Julianna Turcu, the way forward is clear: “I want to celebrate the fact that for the first time, the industrial knitting machine can be the direct tool to our imagination. And for the first time, the mass production of the most exquisite sculptural garments is possible, from the most diaphanous to the most voluminous. We can really revolutionise the way we cover ourselves. The machine finally has the speed to match our imagination.”
Machine knitters and technicians and factory owners of the world unite!
*Julianna Turcu and Kati Turcu are mother and daughter.
The Endless Garment: The New Craft of Machine Knitting is currently showing in Melbourne at RMIT Gallery until March 21, 2010. Visit www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery for upcoming workshops.
Although humanity has always striven for perfection in all things, this has often, if not always, escaped us. The seamless garment, however, is firmly within our grasp and there is even an exhibition to prove it.
The Endless Garment: The New Craft of Machine Knitting brings to Australia for the first time nine leading international designers.
Exhibition co-curator Ricarda Bigolin explains: “The show is about possibilities, also about knitwear being a medium that has as many creative possibilities as cut and sew.”
Knitwear has traditionally been associated with craft and, even when it is mass produced, it rarely evolves in the leaps and bounds of fashion that uses woven materials. High fashion designers use knit mostly in the way they use fabric – fine jersey knit that is cut and sewn according to a two dimensional pattern – although the odd chunky scarf makes an appearance now and then as a homage to the humble hand knitter. But there is a new trend spearheaded by the likes of Sandra Backlund (Sweden), Yoshiki Hishinuma (Japan) and Saverio Palatella (Italy), who are working and thinking in 3D.
Ms Bigolin explains: “[Ms] Backlund is getting a lot of acclaim in Paris, London [and] New York, but her work also shows an embracing of volume, as opposed to making really form-fitted work. She can build a form around the body, which I find really exciting and interesting, and also that with new technology, you don’t have to literally cut and piece together a form, but you can actually integrally build a form.”
This may seem new to some, though not to Melbourne sculptor and designer Julianna Turcu, who first held an exhibition in 1988 at the Blackwood Gallery that featured modular, seamless knitted garments.
At the time, Australia was in the grip of a recession, the likes of which saw the fashion industry manufacturers drop like flies. It was not the time to talk revolution, though the machine that could produce seamless, whole garment pieces had just been invented.
Mrs Turcu’s passion for volume came from the fact that she was a sculptor in stone and wood, and senior curator for sculpture and textiles at the Contemporary Art Museum of Romania before she migrated to Australia in 1984.
Since coming to Australia, she has been experimenting with the manual knitting machine to create modular knitwear with the unwavering conviction that one fateful day we will all be able to walk around wearing mass manufactured knitted sculptures. Her recipe for this is the machine, the module and the divine proportion, or golden mean.
“The first step is to think in terms of modular constructions because it ensures that the finished work has an inherent harmony and order. And it also frees the imagination once the foundation is ensured. Just like in architecture or any kind of design. The smallest module of knitwear is the loop, which can be represented as a number. So when I think of the structure of my designs, I have to think in numbers,” Mrs Turcu explained.
Surely this is not the kind of talk uttered by a fashion designer. It sounds so restricted, predetermined and unromantic. And there’s more.
“To be able to go from the loop, to modules and from modules to the whole construction is where I apply the divine proportion and the Fibonacci series. I became interested in this idea when I was teaching descriptive geometry to high school students so that they can learn to think spatially, three dimensionally.
When I applied this to knitting, I had a eureka moment because I felt as though I found the ideal way to design a garment, which is totally repeatable,” concludes Mrs Turcu with an animated gesture of long-awaited resolution.
But this is too scandalous – a designer admitting to aiming for mass production, repeatable garments.
And there’s the rub.
Curator Ricarda Bigolin, who classifies herself as a research-based designer predominantly concerned with design processes, observes: “The machine in fashion hasn’t been given a good rep; it symbolises mass production, which is not really a glam thing and the ugly side of fashion.” She sees the exhibition as an antidote to the way people view design processes because it showcases high end, exploratory fashion, which is not necessarily handmade.
“A lot of people don’t talk about the machines. Often, the handmade is really celebrated.
“It’s interesting because people often talk about the virtuosity of the hand, the haute couture practitioner being able to put in 2000 hours of handwork and producing a ball gown, and that is a very comfortable thing for the public to understand. But if you then say no, actually a machine did it in six hours, then it’s not something in the general discourse of fashion,” Ms Bigolin said.
At the other extreme is the flood of imports from China that has redefined the word “cheap” and inadvertently changed the landscape of world trade.
Ms Bigolin said: “Now, we are seeing in fashion big French-based designers and Italian designers things’ being made in China, and the extent of things actually still being made in places like Italy is really dubious because they are finding it hard to compete. So a garment might be produced in China, but then sent back to Italy for a bit of finishing and then gets the ‘Handmade in Italy’ on it.”
Despite this, there is room for optimism. The antidote to “cheap” is not necessarily exorbitant, it can be affordable, although the antidote to bad design remains good design.
For designer Julianna Turcu, the way forward is clear: “I want to celebrate the fact that for the first time, the industrial knitting machine can be the direct tool to our imagination. And for the first time, the mass production of the most exquisite sculptural garments is possible, from the most diaphanous to the most voluminous. We can really revolutionise the way we cover ourselves. The machine finally has the speed to match our imagination.”
Machine knitters and technicians and factory owners of the world unite!
*Julianna Turcu and Kati Turcu are mother and daughter.
The Endless Garment: The New Craft of Machine Knitting is currently showing in Melbourne at RMIT Gallery until March 21, 2010. Visit www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery for upcoming workshops.
