Category: At The Seams
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A Study of Draping
The history of the draped garment dates back to 3500 BCE. Across the land, visual arts of ancient sculptures, terracottas, cave paintings, and wood carvings depict men and women in unstitched cloth with various draping styles. A notable draped garment in the East is that of the Buddha, called the kāṣāya, named after ochre, an…
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The Fall
“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”Genesis 3:1 In the middle of Eden was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but…
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The Kantha Gown
Kantha is more than one thousand years old, dating back to the pre-Vedic era in ancient India. Traditionally a utilitarian, functional craft, kantha has evolved into a unique way of portraying and celebrating life events. Today, the word kantha has come to describe the stitching style rather than the object itself. Beyond simple running stitches…
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The Peacock
The world’s most spectacular border ceremony takes place daily before dusk at Wagah, roughly halfway between Lahore in Pakistan and Amritsar in India. Large crowd gathers between the Indian Border Security Forces and the Pakistan Rangers to witness a spectacle of what could be appropriately coined “Peacocks at Sunset.” Using their body instead of weapon,…
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Flowers of Giverny
“All gardening is landscape painting,” said Alexander Pope, the English poet in the 18th century. The picturesque tradition continues to dominate the field of landscape architecture to the present day. Dotted across the history of landscaping are alternative points of view, however. For example, the Sacro Bosco garden was unlike any other design during the…
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The Kantha Jacket
Kantha, meaning “patched cloth”, refers to both the traditional craft of making quilted blankets as well as the stitch itself. The craft is native to rural Eastern South Asia, particularly Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian states of West Bengal and Odisha, along the Bay of Bengal. Originally made from old, recycled saris, the traditional kantha…
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The Great Wave
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is Katsushika Hokusai’s first and most celebrated work in his collection of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is of the Ukiyo-e genre, meaning “pictures of the floating world”, which flourished in 17th-to-19th-century Japan. The woodblock print depicts three elements: three boats weathering the stormy sea, the great wave, and…
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The Flamingo Party
Color had been considered superfluous in Western culture since ancient times. Classical writers saw it as being indulgent, even sinful, a distraction from the true glories of art, which were of line and form. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in Theory of Colors, 1810 that “savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection…
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Aries
To paint a sky onto my cloth, I have chosen the Aries constellation. It is located in the Northern celestial hemisphere between Pisces to the west and Taurus to the east. The name Aries is Latin for the ram, thus the astronomical symbol for Aries represents the ram’s horns. The brightest star in the constellation…
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Zoot Pants
Interviewed by Vogue in 1911 about the possibility of women wearing trousers, the English designer Charles Worth said, “Yes, certainly they will. They will accept it because it is vulgar, ugly, and wicked – those reasons insure the success of any article of feminine wear! The world has gone mad!” The earliest versions of female…
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