If the world were fair, Malcolm Gladwell would get a quarter every time someone used the phrase Tipping Point and Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon would get one as well when anyone used the Hundred Mile Something. Today we present the 100 Mile Suit, a project by designer Kelly Cobb to make a man's suit from materials produced within 100 miles of her home in Philadelphia. It took 20 artisans several months to produce and Ralph Lauren it's not.
"It was a huge undertaking, assembled on half a shoestring," Cobb said at the suit's unveiling one recent afternoon at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art. "Every piece of the suit took three to five pairs of hands to make," Cobb added. "Every garment you wear took three to five pairs of hands to make too, but you don't know whose hands or where."
Local sheep, local spinners, knitted underwear, local brain-tanned buckskin leather for the shoes, the outfit is 92% local. "If we worked on it for a year and a half," Cobb says, "I think we could have eliminated that 8 percent." ::100 Mile Suit via ::Wired
Wow, its amazing what collective brains can achieve. If we all had to make our own cloths that were sourced from materials in our community, we would have lots of challenges but also beautiful discoveries about our planet.
ReplyDeleteThis work also speaks to the globalization of products, thinking about the source of our materials, the ethics that play into the subjects that become the objects. How little control we have over how production is actually conducted, the consumer is only granted one choice, to buy or not to buy.
Im also curious, how much of what we wear today is synthetic...
Yes Jacque, and she is a UF sculpture MFA. This work makes me think also about Thomas Twaites toaster project. I added to the list because also it would be a great project to show with your thesis works.
DeleteI think it would be interesting to see different articles of clothing produced in the same way, perhaps in different cities. In doing so, I think there is a lot that can be learned about local productions.
ReplyDeleteAnother artist/project I might include coming up is Andrea Zittel's "Smockshop." In this case she did something similar to what Olivia is suggesting. She brought multiple artists in to help realize the project. However, it did not deal with locally sourced materials (as was the focus in Cobb's project).
ReplyDeleteI love that this was a community undertaking, showing the joint passion that collective minds can achieve. I wish that they had made it to 100%, but I think that even that shows how difficult it is to be local and how global production now is.
ReplyDeleteThis truly works to show us what is invisible to us. The workers behind everything we consume; fashion being one of them. Our clothing travels far and take a lot of resources to be very very very cheap. THis asks the question what does it take to have quality.
ReplyDeleteGood point. And it demonstrates the new way(s) people are assigning "value" and "quality" and "cost" to clothing. I agree.
DeleteReading through the blog, I liked that every part was attributed to a certain person. It shows the community aspect as well as proving just how little we know about the production of the clothes we wear everyday. I'd love to see a whole series of these outfits, perhaps made by certain groups of people or from different 100-mile areas. If there were suits coming from different areas, that would make even more of a connection with the unique ecology of every place.
ReplyDeleteAlthough a suit such as this is far from practical for most people to create and wear, it artistically speaks on mass production vs hand made clothing. It's a great example of utilizing local ecology and contributing to the growth of small businesses within a specific area. This reminds me of Dr. Craig Smith's Ghillie Suit, except it utilized other materials and was conceptually talking about something else, however the objective was to create wearable suits by sourcing materials from something else. This piece seems to work towards bringing to light the secrets of the clothing industry that lay dormant in the shadows.
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