The Diary of a Seamstress

About

It is the encounter of artistic creation with design practice. Artists and fashion designers show through their artworks their personal reading of this finding. It is their way to examine and recompose the narration of modernity’s diffusion. While they ask themselves questions about the way Greek reality assimilates, processes and appropriates the phenomenon of fashion or even devalues its production.  

The exhibition re-examines the Notebook of Marika Handji as starting point for the 18 invited artists and fashion designers , because it has the characteristic of “written fashion”, namely of fashion that is translated into language and design, with identifiable elements of new behavior (at savoir-faire) and decorative abolition (at the patterns).                                                                                                       

It is a valuable token by an unknown apprentice seamstress, who reveals the traces of a profession that was eliminated from the historic and artistic research and narration. The minor aesthetic practice of dressmaking that represents this woman may have sunk into oblivion the years that followed, however its worth of revisiting and rescuing it from the silence and “the aftermath of the later ones” – as the British historian E. P.Thompson notes – with a series of other craft activities, such as weaving, cutting fabrics, even the “utopic” craftsman and all those female figures of household economy that developed during the pre-industrial era. And this not because of nostalgic contemplation. But because today they acquire crucial importance and perspective to all versions of the post-industrial economy and new cultural developing practices. The Notebook of the apprentice seamstress gives new meaning not just to the subjective “archive fever” but also to a series of neglected aesthetic methods of modernity that are connected to the craftsmanship and during the last three decades, many despised them.

“How far could you go?” This is the question that every generation asks itself, looking for the modern it receives multiple answers through the artworks of the participant artists. The Notebook of the seamstress is transformed into a tool of recording and reviewing. As “Diary” it becomes the background of change in social behaviours that influence not just women, sex matters or ethics but also demanding the re-distribution of social power.  Besides, even nowadays the question wording simply changes – “how far can ideas go?” – emphasizes the changes of fashion and clothing. That reinforces the battlefield between the old guard (the couture houses trapped in the role of the épater le bourgeois of the dominant social classes) and the “new barbarians” that feel that have the right to demand whatever could float in the atmosphere of contemporary air.