Vestige and TNQ
I have a memory of creating a piece of clothing in grade eight. It was a home economics class and that brown skirt—A-line in style—was made with some form of polyester. The making of it was tortuous. I was thinking of the final product, and the ensuing grade. I was not thinking of the act of creating or any form of self-expression.
That would come later, with writing. It was through putting pencil to paper where I finally learned to pull back, to slow down so as to understand the wisdom of what I was doing. Alas, I have not transferred this knowledge to sewing. The brown skirt was the last item I made.
It was a stroke of luck and good research that we found the work of Aileen Lee at Vestige, where the whole language used in making clothes is a celebration of the literary arts. In our first conversation, Aileen shared the things that were important to her. The need for time to think through her designs, to refine them over and over. This is what we do in writing, choose a word, discard it for a better one. She has talked about having eight iterations of the dim sum bag, and all I could think of is that it mirrored the writing process – draft after draft after draft. It’s a slow process. It’s an act of faith. You have to hope that you get something exquisite at the end.
That fashion design has a narrative was something that hadn’t occurred to me, and I left that first conversation thinking about it. How is the designer thinking in terms of narrative, I wanted to know. What tale is that dress telling, or that brooch, or those shoes. At a recent writing awards dinner where the theme was “dress to impress with a dash of Canadian pride,” I learned that a woman at our table had made her stylish dress using local material and had incorporated nuanced flourishes of Canadiana. This was someone who clearly understands the narrative in fashion design. Later, I read that the British writer Sarah Hall is a long-time fan of fashion narrative: “I dress in the same spirit that I write with language, metaphor, and sleight of hand.”
That fashion has a narrative is obvious to me now that I’ve had time to reflect. I see it in the decisions we make, in the way in which we present ourselves, how in doing so we become something other, a reinvention with every combination. It is almost as if we are telling a story.
Those early conversations with Aileen on craft have evolved into a unique collaboration, the form of which we’re still playing with—this too is the best kind of process. The art and craft of writing is our love language at TNQ, and to share this love with an artist like Aileen has been expansive and generative. This new initiative is a way of celebrating the artisanal crafting of fashion and how it aligns with the slow, deliberate act of writing.
