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Hurt Couture
SEAM-STRESS
And why should I dress his wounds
When he has wounded my dress, nightly
Right across the floor?
Fashion is a brutal business. The theatrics of couture have long
embraced the performatives of violence, witnessed in such events
as Alexander McQueen’s Highland Rape collection of 1996, infamous
for its Grand-Guignolesque attention-grabbing antics of fake blood
and outrageous storylines. Rae Kawakubo smashed the expectations
of the perfectly stitched haute couture garment through fabricated
holes, raw edges and redefinitions of the natural silhouette. But
beyond shock-value and the tedium of consumption, within the garment
there lies a fundamental desire to nurture relationships, and a
consequent system of symbiosis, that occurs between the inside of
the clothing and the outside of the flesh.
The gift of the garb establishes the relationship between the skin
and its covering: tight to reveal, loose to conceal. But all is
a supposition, as only externalities are subject to scrutiny and
sensory contact remains a private experience. Infrastructure is
implemented to beguile by modifying the shape of body where it is
malleable, creating myths about what exists beneath.
The conduit between the concept of the design and its realisation
through fabric is the paper pattern: the intermediary of ideas.
The paper, moving back and forth between the dress form and the
flat surface of the drafting table becomes enmeshed in a dialogue
between the 2-D and 3-D. It also evokes a sense of the body taken
apart in surgery, with its working method of direct markings on
the flesh.
LET ME SEE YOU STRIPPED
Jewel Mackenzie truncates men’s suits and weaves dreams in
the air-space of the naked emperor, the unseated king. This practice
conjures up Magritte’s bowler hat that floats in the memory.
The anarchitects Diller and Scofidio employed the ironed creases
of the man’s white shirt as a system of penitentiary encryptions,
in their Bad Press/Dissident Ironing project of 1993. It placed
the white collar under scrutiny and cross-examination, of class
and gender, of interiority and internal languages. Too, Mary Shelley’s
attempts at bespoke tailored a patchwork somnambulist. McKenzie
wields the scissors and wounds the suit in a practice of non-delicate
self-cutting, and thus, through inflicted violence, the suit becomes
the shroud. Only, the mourning-tear of cloth above the heart has
been repositioned for a swashbuckled seasonal interpretation.
Annette Hale presents a diametrically visceral work, an interplay
between the most ancient of costumes, sheets of skin skimmed from
conquered bodies, linked as a networking of corpuscular filaments,
the veins, arteries and minute capillaries, that internally fabricate
the body. Traces of these threads may appear as raised blue lines
on the skin; tensions occur through the desire to turn the body
inside out and release the blood’s pressure. The flesh, with
its skein of invisible nerve endings has provided torturers and
masochists with endless permutations of manufacturing distress.
Historian Daniela Bohde cites a gruesome anecdote linking art and
grave-robbing with transfiguration, “Tuscan sculptor Cosini...skinned
a body and wore the flayed hide over his shirt.”
DRESSED TO INFLAME
After the flattening of the body, through sectioning, smashing flat,
and fragmentation, there is the need to reanimate the body through
a new coating that clings to, and speaks for its host.
Gabriel was wearing his sky-blue uniform. His loosely buckled army
belt was sagging at his belly. The coarse wool and delicate blue
got Divine hot. She will say later on: His get-up got me hot. A
fine and equally blue cloth would have excited her less than a heavy
black one, for the latter is the cloth of the county clergy and
of Ernestine [Divine’s mother], and heavy grey cloth is that
of the children of the state orphanages.
Clothing essentially forms itself as armour of varying softness,
as vestments for social battle, and Kate James has taken up lances
disguised as knitting needles. There is a skirmish that these two
– rider and horse - will be traversing, and the mode of communication
will need to be adapted in order for synthesis to occur, and the
centaur to emerge. Conversation is transmitted through the knitted
reins as the silver aura-l thread, and includes homage to the site
of the famous Crimean War battle. The balaclavas remove external
identifiers; all becomes introspective. The chamfron and crinet
are of a malleable chainmail. Is this headwear enough to protect
the skull, the site of memory storage, and the pineal gland? Madame
Defarge smiles and nods approval at the battle-plan pattern and
heads will roll.
Brodie Ellis marches her uniform into personal combat, overlaying
family histories with contemporary politics, creating a garment
that is at war with itself. Images of marching girls are reduced
to ectoplasmic shells, and create a ghostly temporal duality of
past and present, of what was, and what is. Multiple embroideries
indicate borrowed ownership, and reworked stories. Not merely content
to be vicious representations of insignia, these markings resound
with an ongoing crisis, of the risk of falling through the fragile
membrane, from one polar state to the other, from lightness to dark.
Recognition of allegiances becomes fraught, denoted by an absence
of colour and core. Trickery begins handholding with subjugation.
Like the New York Dolls dressed by McLaren and Westwood in 1940s
Communist emblems, or the white-clad Alex deLarge and his droogs,
the uniform as a symbol of duty to conventional authority becomes
subjected to inverted meanings.
Stitching is a visual language; its traditions as forms of communication
may be considered universal, but the diversity of meanings that
has evolved from many cultures means that this language is subjected
to many different vernaculars. Some pieces are only able to allude
to the full extent of their encryptions, and mysterious codes are
authored and known only to the maker. Hand sewing and embroidery
have a range of styles and types that are both functional and decorative,
as well as purely ornamental.
Threads and fabrics have been used by various cultures as language
and symbolic codes that transcend the merely decorative. Divine
threads are formed by the rigours of stitching that create new lexicons,
through iconographies of flowers, bees, family crests, and monograms,
and punctuated by sacred knots. The Incas used a system of knotting
as a way to write their histories, by recording population and herd
sizes as demographic and temporal chartings. During the protracted
era of Black American enslavement, the patterns wrought into patchwork
quilting evolved into an historical recording through the development
of a stitched and textile-based dialect.
Visual methodologies such as these demonstrate an intellectual complexity
that has found a way to overcome the absence or inadequacies of
expression of a written alphabet: through the medium of sewing.
In the post-industrial age, the linearity of construction seams
in all garments have subsumed their own version of Morse code, echoing
traces of tunes created by machines driven by thousands of feet
and navigated by thousands of guiding eyes and nimble fingers. In
comparison, the melody of hand-sewing is more subtle, muted, and
requires a careful ear.
Jill Barker’s organza dress sings of lightness and ethereality.
The facility of floating is arrested through the cast of anchor,
the heavy-handed application of surface embroidery. The mossy stitching
ensnares the intellectualisation of the ephemerality of childhood
through the intensity of lavish repetitive strokes and pricks of
the needle. Eyes peer into the microscope, in an attempt to decipher
nature that will, in turn, swallow its lover: Benjamin presides
over the shotgun union of fashion as the bartered bride with her
inorganic paramour.
I recall Central Park in Fall,
How you tore your dress, what a mess
I confess, that’s not all…
Barker’s tiny stitch-work evokes the samplers and trousseau
embroideries that young girls worked on as accoutrements for their
destiny as wives and mothers, firmly sited in domesticity. The exaggerated
overworking of the delicate organza alludes to an internal rebellion,
perhaps mentally involuntary, rendering unsuitability for this traditional
path. Like the substitution of Desdemona’s handkerchief where
mistranslation spelled out a death-sentence, the stitched language
has been garbled, and calls for an experienced code-breaker.
CHASE THE COSTUMES SHE SHALL WEAR
The flesh of the outfit exists as the mediating boundary, simultaneously
moderating the beginning and the end of the interior and exterior.
To look for the internal meaning of the body inscribed in the skin
is more difficult; hints may be gleaned from facial expressions
and their traces, or emotionally manifest conditions like eczema
or hives. Autobiography attempts to strip the author naked, but
only ever reveals a simulation of the inner; there are no translations
for this lexis.
Skin as a surface onto which text can be inscribed was evident in
late nineteenth century psychiatry, in Charcot’s practice
of dermographism, sometimes called autography or lithography. This
process involved lightly scratching the skin of the female hysteric.
The skin surface would react by reddening, swelling, and sometimes
blistering, indicating a physical hyper-sensitivity of the patient.
Other forms of inscribed decorations that transcend the banality
of fashion include sacred engraved designs into the flesh, occurrences
of the stigmata, and the name of the lord inscribed as the engine
in the automaton’s forehead.
Marking monsters of the interior, Jazmina Cininas inscribes playful
motifs of the werewolf: hysteria for fashion is embraced with an
underlying envy of the real thing. Her tales speak of possession,
of the emergence of the baser, animal soul, of metamorphosis, of
transmogrification. There is also the furry, girlie thing going
on. The nineteenth century located hysteria in utero, linked it
with the waxing of the moon, which in turn was synchronised with
the appearance of the werewolf. It is known that Lycanthropists
often have symptoms of pica: unnatural cravings to ingest substances
like chalk or fabric. The traveller brings home souvenirs of nocturnal
journeys: Cininas sews anastaltic fables, gauzy truths fused to
shattered forensic filaments.
The mask, ears and tail become the signifiers of the werewolf’s
skin, for the majority of the body remains easily identified. A
recent performance of extreme punk band The Dwarves was filled with
harsh vocals and vicious chicanery. HeWhoCannotBeNamed, wore nothing
but his guitar, and a mask like something from an Aztec sacrificial
ceremony or television wrestling; most striking to me however, was
his smooth, pale skin, with neither a blemish or a birthmark, so
supple and vulnerable.
Victoria Boulter also draws upon dark fictions with her anachronistically-styled
outfits that hint at tales within their coarse textiles, of sexual
delinquency, of unrequited love, and unrequired love. Excess sleevery
furled and unfurled, by the self, or by intervention? One pair of
arms has stretched out – over-reached - in hope to…nothing.
The complementary arms retreat, reserved and self-absorbed.
Maybe someday, I’ll hold somebody’s hand,
Maybe somewhere, someone will understand…5
The cloth is delicately assembled, and the trinket scale is reminiscent
of faddish Victorian mourning tokens that came from earlier traditions.
Necklaces and watch chains were woven from the hair of the departed
beloved, but often were sourced from the sold tresses of prostitutes
and lower-class women. The soundtrack of hollow yearning and incessant
mourning is set to repeat ad infinitum.
DRESS YOU UP IN MY LOVE
Historical as well as autobiographical implications are mapped out
onto a textual reading of these stitches that relies on the viewer’s
identifications of these tropes. Memory, too, can present itself
as a series of histories, both accurate and fabricated, half-truths
that become merged into personal stories, appropriated source material
and borrowed anecdotes that have become so reworked they become
remoulded and branded as one’s own repertoire.
The pieces in this exhibition are stitched with a corpuscular thread,
manifest as another literary medium, and the words of worn histories
that they generate dance endlessly through charmed social fictions
and factuals with their matching [always red] shoes. Fashion merely
moderates versions of these allegories through an historical positioning.
Myths of pierced-ribbed tight-lacers are giving way to new versions
that remain sinister, cruel, camp or disengaged, and speak with
burned, slashed and tangled textiles, of compulsions, revulsion
and expulsion, and endless longing. Sometimes, such as in the case
of the club-footed Empress Taki who is fabled to have started the
whole foot-binding craze, violent fashions can emerge as a both
a cure and a punishment.
Anna Hirsh
February 2005
(Anna Hirsh is a Melbourne-based writer)
1. FLEXING THE SARTORIAL MUSCLE
Slice open the front of a human thigh with a diagonal cut from outer
hip to inner knee and you will find a long ribbon of muscle running
the length of the incision. It’s called the sartorius and
you flex it every time you sit cross-legged. It takes its name from
the literary word for tailor, sartor, a mildly deprecatory Latin
term meaning a person who patches things up: somebody who creates
nothing new but repairs existing damage, content to mend or make
amends. The sartorius was designated as the tailor’s muscle
because traditionally, the tailor made much use of it: since ancient
times tailors were observed to sit cross-legged on the ground in
order to sew.
I present this little detail, a mere footnote in the history of
anatomical nomenclature, by way of suggesting that clothing is not
superficial nor only concerned with outward appearances as is often
assumed. It corresponds with a pair of sympathetic organs buried
in human flesh. Concealed underneath the surface of the body, the
sartorius muscles emerge from below the skin only with the violent
incursions of surgery, injury or dissection.
Practitioners wield the needle in both the medical and clothing
trades. And surgery shares with dressmaking a reliance on cutting,
removing matter, and joining sections together with stitching. The
very word surgery comes from the two Greek words kheir and ergon
(via the French: chirurgie) that together mean ‘hand-work’.
The naming of the sartorial muscle shows that we must look to the
Romance languages to uncover dressmaking’s secret viscera.
One of the meanings of the Latinate verb to doctor is to patch something
in a makeshift manner and when an injury has healed, we say the
patient has mended. Tissue, a differentiated part of the body in
which the cells are alike, is the Anglicised version of tissu, the
French word for cloth.
Like that of a tailor, my job is to fit and flatter. To fit, because
a catalogue essay should match the exhibition’s themes. To
flatter, because it should also present the art works in their best
possible light. But as this narrative progresses, you will suspect
me of cutting my cloth from sources more and more gruesome, those
where the most yielding material is to be found. I will not tell
you where I am harvesting it from; all I will divulge is that –
as for dresses that cling tightly to the skin and outline the body
most revealingly – all my material is cut on the bias.
During the earliest period of their history, dissection and surgery
were often performed by two classes of practitioner whose contemporary
equivalents are neither doctors nor experimental scientists but
people from the so-called “image industries”: artists
and hairdressers. Artists performed amateur dissections, often at
night and in secret, applying the knowledge thus gained to the portrayal
of human or animal figures. And by hairdressers I refer to the barber-surgeons,
dominant practitioners of surgery and dissection in Europe at different
times from the fourth century to the eighteenth .
Adept at smoothing the body’s surface as well as hacking through
its interior, they might have neatly trimmed somebody’s beard
one minute and amputated one of their limbs, without anesthetic,
the next . In France, it was easy
to distinguish academic-surgeons from barber-surgeons because the
hairdressers were the ones wearing the short skirts: academic-surgeons
were known as ‘surgeons of the long robe’ while barber-surgeons
were known as ‘surgeons of the short robe’ and each dressed accordingly.
Inside a glass cabinet in a small exhibit within the museum of the
Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh lies a tiny item of hurt
couture: a little hand-stitched leatherbound notebook. The skin
that encases the pages was not tanned from an animal but from the
flayed hide of a man, William Burke, a serial killer who harvested
his victims not far from the region of Edinburgh where his own hidebound
notebook now rests. Burke moonlighted as a steady supplier of recently
deceased bodies for demonstration dissections in university medical
laboratories. Unlike the other so-called ‘bodysnatchers’
or ‘resurrectionists’ who dug up the cemeteries after
dark to supply the anatomists’ insatiable demands, Burke found
the way to guarantee a dead body that was really fresh and completely
intact was to make it himself. He killed all his victims by suffocation,
the best way to murder someone when you know the anatomists will
pay more for an unblemished corpse.
After Burke was convicted and hanged, his own corpse was subjected
to two unusual punishments of Old Testament-style retribution. The
first (official) punishment was to be publicly dissected. On the
day of the dissection and subsequent public exhibition of the anatomised
corpse, the public rioted. Among the throng, it was noted, “there
were seven or eight who fainted or had their clothes torn”
. The second (unofficial) punishment
in store for Burke’s body was for a piece of his flayed skin
to surreptitiously be made into a notebook.
What inscriptions can the person who fabricated this object have
intended it to bear? What records should you keep in a note pad
whose leaves are sandwiched between two layers of human skin: names
and addresses, household expenses, shopping lists, laundry lists?
Did its tailor feel any sympathetic twinges of their sartorial muscles
when they formed each neat needle prick that pierced the dead man’s
hide?
The sartorius has a hidden side that is both violent and criminal,
relating as it does to bodysnatching: the technical term that describes
the movement of the muscle to rotate the thigh out from and to the
side of the body is ‘abduction’. There were several
professions, besides that of anatomist, that supported the practice
of stealing dead bodies from graves at night: tailors, candlemakers
and butchers were noted to steal human corpses on which to practice
embalming, a lucrative trade to adapt their skills to, but a hard
market for a novice to crack.
Oddly enough, in the three centuries when bodysnatching was at its
most rampant in Scotland and England, it was not an offence to remove
a dead body from the grave for whatever purpose, but it was a criminal
act to steal clothes from a corpse. Some bodysnatchers took the
trouble to leave the grave clothes behind them having first undressed
the body by cutting off its garments. For several hundred years,
then, burial plots all over the United Kingdom bore coffins devoid
of all contents but the damaged clothes of the dead.
2. HURT COUTURE
Skin is the first layer that clothes the human body; the second
layer is cloth. We are born naked but mostly we are fully clothed
when we die and are buried. In our passage through life, then, we
accrue at least one extra protective and expressive layer than that
with which we began.
Because we are born naked, because clothing skims the surface of
the body, and because we regularly replace or discard it, we usually
think garments are entirely separate from the persons wearing them.
But why should clothing not reflect the realities that lie beneath
it? The topography of a surface often reveals patterns of disturbance
generated below. The earth’s crust is variously folded or
torn apart in places by the tremors of an earthquake, and dark patches
of seawater can betray the existence of dangerous rips. For centuries,
artists performed secret dissections on human corpses, because they
knew then – as we now sometimes forget to consider in our
interpretation of clothes – that the formation of sub-structures
can explain surface morphology.
The look and feel of our clothing expresses and reflects interior
states. Distortions, constrictions, discontinuities, slashes or
tears can mirror other kinds of ruptures or repressions borne by
a human subject. To really see and understand the surface, you must
be prepared to excavate beneath it. If clothing’s meanings
penetrate under the skin, or originate there, then it is the purpose
of the art works in this exhibition to peel back some of the layers
and to expose some of the raw nerves. When the boundaries of the
body are symbolically breached, these artists variously expose or
generate anxiety, cruelty, degradation and suffering. None of the
artists in Hurt Couture is concerned to fit and flatter; they perform
careful examinations and dissections to locate each malady at its
source. But each row of tiny stitches signposts the site of the
affliction and, simultaneously, hastens its mending.
Jill Barker’s artwork is a small dress, the size worn by a
girl of about three. Tiny black stitches picked out on pink fabric
are reminiscent of sutures closing over flesh wounds. Less of an
embellishment, more of a stain, the embroidery spreads with a logic
of its own, a cloud of something viral and oppressive that threatens
to constrict the wearer’s chest or even suffocate her. In
one place there is a deep cavity-forming spiral of stitches sucking
the fabric inward as if to press against, or penetrate, the child’s
heart or lung. The material of the dress is flimsy, transparent,
and insubstantial, but the stitching seems concrete and even virulent,
like a parasite that has siphoned-off the strength of its host organism.
It is hard to tell who is more disturbed: the maker of this dress
or its intended wearer. The carefully controlled formation of these
tiny stitches, and their seemingly endless repetition, suggests
the presence of some obsessive-compulsive disorder on the part of
the seamstress. But in donning this dress, its wearer submits to
a nameless affliction with undertones of horror or doom.
Annete Hale’s artwork is a tubular grid cobbled together mostly
from strips of leather torn off a pair of motorcycle pants, with
other seemingly random elements tied or grafted on. Strips of clothing
can double as an emergency first aid supply, filling in for bandages
when there is uncontrolled bleeding. Seen in this light, these strips
must represent the aftermath of such an application for theirs is
the colour of dried blood. The artist has thoroughly dissected these
pants, taken them apart piece by piece and examined each section
for its usefulness and its potential applications. The artwork’s
title, Vein, encourages us to view it as a network of the body’s
tubes and ligatures, with which blood vessels are tied off to prevent
haemorrhaging. But if these are human body parts, they have been
badly doctored indeed. None of this surgery appears to have taken
place in a sterile environment. My guess is that it was carried
out in secret in somebody’s garage, basement or toolshed.
Its peculiar combination of resourceful but roughly patched repairs
is reminiscent of the proverbial pantyhose that can stand in for
a busted fan belt at a pinch. Let’s call it a Mad Max aesthetic:
a strange blend of blood and gore, leather and hotted-up engine
parts.
The sudden appearance of hair on the surface of the body can indicate
the mundane commencement of puberty or the startling transformation
of a human into a werewolf. The onset of both may be accompanied
by panic and strongly resisted. The changeover involves a shocking
breach of the body’s surface by hair that erupts from under
the skin. But turning into a werewolf is a liberation as well as
a curse; it may be a license to transgress conventional standards
of morality, sexuality and sanity. Jazmina Cininas’ werewolf
costume does not represent a spontaneous bodily transformation but
something adopted altogether more deliberately. In comic books and
television shows, an ordinary human takes on the role of a super-hero
simply by donning a costume. It is as if the clothes alone are sufficient
to effect the transformation. Is it a dingo? Is it a fox? No, it’s
Wonder Wolf! Is this kinky masked avenger ∫– wearing
accessories lined in ruby satin – intended to save the world
or provide more intimate diversions? And do her powers appear when
she puts the costume on, or when she takes it off? Her superpowers
may all just be part of a delusion. Belief that one is a werewolf
is an indication of a severe psychiatric disorder; in the psychoanalytic
literature, it is presented as a symptom of mania.
The collective noun for seamstresses is a ‘scolding’
while that for tailors is a ‘disguising’: women chastise
and men dissimulate. Victoria Boulter presents two tiny outfits
side by side on the wall. They operate as Victorian character costumes
for a man and woman, delineating gender roles through the psychology
of emotions. Each outfit is designed to accommodate a physical deformity.
The man is an amputee. His sleeves and trouser legs have been rolled
up and pinned, suggesting missing limbs. The woman’s dress
has extended sleeves, as if her arms continued lengthening when
the rest of her body had stopped growing. She intrudes and he withdraws;
her body exceeds its limits and his falls short. Although each bears
physical deformities we suspect their maladies are psychosomatic
in origin. The clothes are tiny and one label, near the door of
the gallery, tells us the material is wool, so each must be laundered
on a gentle cycle. Still, I don’t think these outfits have
shrunk in the wash. The other label, the one below each costume
(let us call it the ‘care’ label), tells us altogether
more intimate details: her desires are unfulfilled and his are repressed.
It seems their stunted emotions have shrunken them both.
Kate James presents a double balaclava worn simultaneously by a
human and a horse. It effects a symbolic breach of the outer limits
of the human body not by opening up its surface but by grafting
another body onto it, yoking woman and animal together in one harness
to create this maladapted and cumbersome double creature that is
partially blind. The garment suggests restraint and suffocation.
Wearing it simultaneously, both creatures are immobilised. With
the enforced myopia of the built-in blinkers, they can gaze mournfully
at one another or, like some curiosity in a circus or zoo, pose
rigidly for the scrutiny of a third party but other movements are
hampered. In a masochistic gesture, the woman has willingly donned
the outfit. There may be a hint of sadism too, as a hood is not
only worn by victim, but also by an aggressor: it is the headgear
of choice for criminals and assassins. By retreating into a symbiotic
relationship with the animal, the woman appears to have sought comfort
from the brutal reality of the outside world. Her pain may be self-inflicted
but it is shared in a sympathetic gesture with the horse, a species
that has submitted to the harness from time immemorial. The hood
is warm and snug and it may block out what’s unpleasant, but
how much comfort can it really provide? If the horse should startle
we know that the woman, with the weaker body of the two, may be
strangled or crushed.
The pinstriped suit is the ultimate anonymous garment, imparting
a conservative uniformity to all that wear it. And because it operates
like a cloak of invisibility over the body, it can be a shield for
dehumanising measures employed by the corporations its wearers labour
under. Workers have long been categorised by their clothes: the
simple delineation between blue-collar or white-collar designating
differences in profession, education, income, postcode and life
expectations. A man may change his destiny then, simply by changing
his shirt. Jewel Mackenzie exploits the idea that the worker’s
identity is as fluid as his clothes. She has altered part of a business
suit to reflect the crushed expectations of an anonymous male worker
in a climate of economic rationalism. She has cut down the suit
jacket by sectioning it out horizontally, as if its wearer has been
lopped off with a chainsaw across the torso, the bloody work of
some modern day barber-surgeon. Its title, ‘Downsizing Jacket’,
suggests the hacking down of the garment and the individual it might
contain. While the word ‘downsizing’ is a euphemism,
Mackenzie’s artwork carefully articulates the human diminution
it conceals.
Brodie Ellis presents a woman’s military jacket copied from
an Australian World War II uniform. Like the pinstriped suit jacket
adapted by Jewel Mackenzie, the military uniform is also an anonymous
outfit. It too operates as a shield for violence and atrocity ∫–
more literally than does the suit in the corporate world, but no
less subject to the overall logic of some strategic plan. Unlined,
rendered in unbleached cotton and embroidered in matching thread,
it has a raw, blank and unfinished quality as if it is not an actual
uniform but an archetype. The artist’s blank embroidery traces
the various military emblems on the jacket but it defeats the purpose
of insignia for it to appear too subtle or indistinct. The patches
have been roughly attached as if they are there only temporary or
may be hastily substituted by others; perhaps this comments on the
interchangeability and banality of flags and other insignia within
the overall economy of signs. This jacket is a memorial, not merely
because it recreates part of the uniform from a war that is past,
but because military uniforms are often, quite literally, worn to
death.
Christine Morrow
February 2005
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"Daina and Arielle wearing
'Girlie Werewolf Suits'
from the series
'Iron She Wolves'"
Jazmina Cininas
2002
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