Fasteners and knitted plastic

Hardware swatch

I attached a snap, a rivet, and a grommet to this piece of polyester felt, which were all new techniques for me this week:

Homemade fabric

I used a “yarn” from the ITP Junk Shelf, which seemed to be a plastic imitation of raffia fiber in a periwinkle/ultramarine color. Using some mid-size knitting needles, I knit the yarn into a small square, and stitched on some chartreuse felt to add a handle, to make a bag only capable of carrying one lip balm (or maybe AirPods Pro without their case?).

Reading Camille Benda’s Dressing the Resistance

The introduction of this book names many iconic usages of clothing in protest movements, including the pink hats at the Trump inauguration as well as protest movements I wasn’t familiar with. Ironically, many of these examples are of social resistances that while widespread and well-known, didn’t bring specific demands to people/institutions of power, and failed to make meaningful or lasting change. While I agree with the premise that clothing is intensely political and can be instrumental in political change, many of the examples throughout have fallen down for reasons outside these accessories, because they didn’t build movements of power, and merely produced photos.

Brat green color associations

Undoubtedly the color of the year, Charli xcx’s selection of Pantone 3507C is loud, abrasive, and slimy. Associations with it have been covered extensively, and discussed everywhere from CNN cable news to stan Twitter.