All that Cloth Can Carry (on a Queer Body)

Abstract

This chapter explores how some cloth and clothing exist as repositories for grief. Through queer materialities in fashion it asks, what can cloth carry? By examining historical and contemporary examples, including by the author, the chapter discusses the transference of grief into cloth. Grief is a potent facet of being alive: stitching loss amplifies the vitality of cloth. Hand stitching has a long history of being used to process grief and trauma. This practice imbues the cloth with a particular aliveness coloured by grief. The chapter explores the queer material knowledge of the stitcher, of the wearer and of the viewer, through a lens of vitality or aliveness. Aliveness helps us understand the state of fashion today: the absence of aliveness in fashion is catastrophic in scale in various parts of the fashion system. This poverty of aliveness in the dominant system, however, must not mask aliveness in the fringes. For vitality to emerge where it is missing and to flourish where it already exists in fashion’s materiality, we must be intentional in holding space for and breathing life into it. This chapter contributes to that work.