TIGHT
09-02-20
[THIS TEXT MAKES UP PART OF THE RESEARCH FOR THE INSTALLATION PROJECT TIGHT, WHICH YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT HERE ︎︎︎]
Narratives pre-exist; they sit there untarnished and perfected, untouchable as art in a glass cage at a gallery. They have been printed, painted, woven with impeccable precision. They speak of boyish battles, male bravado, hunky heroes and myths of fiendish females always, ALWAYS, leading astray, needing help.
Narratives pre-exist; they sit on our bookshelves, they hang in museums, they are whispered in the wind, in words, in tabloids and cruel rumours. They’ve been stitched into our clothes, the ones we wear to fulfill the image set out for us. We animate these narratives with our own limbs, pressing and squeezing into skin tight tops, tight trousers, tights.
Enmeshing.
That’s the whole premise of tights themselves, hosiery, from HOSEN, covering. They make us into meshed bodies. A fraction warmer, a fraction more on trend, a fraction more sexy if that’s your thing. They stretch till they tear, and if you’re me this happens far too often. Tales of being reprimanded for my inability to go a day without laddering my school stockings are innumerable. They stretch over your head and make your face into crazy abstractions, distorting your identity yet still displaying features with their opaqued ability.
And they walked hand in hand with badass female movements, like revolutionary mini skirts, when the popularity in tights surged once more. They, as Jane Bennett would put it, obtained THING POWER, are still obtaining THING POWER today, firstly by standing as icons for the feminine. But also, they can act upon us, change the colour of our legs to be one-tone, an otherwise unachievable feat. Shapewear sewn cleverly into unsuspecting hosiery are undercover undergarments that mould us with their meshy hands into sightly shapes of human hourglasses. Their very shape, their imposterous replication of human legs, looks back at us and instinctively suggests ‘Wear me!’. Their existence reminds us of what should be covered, and we can reclaim this as a feminine act of wearing what we like whilst still staying warm, or dismiss it as a bizarre censoring and sexualising of legs, stumps that almost every animal owns and displays without question.
Narratives pre-exist; they can’t be re-imagined, at least that’s what they said.
My thoughts wander to the women behind the Pre-Raphaelite movement, or any movement in fact, not just the models, managers and muses, but the female painters themselves, replicating and refining the distinguishable portraiture of the time. Yet they sat there, shadowed by the almighty Brotherhood with their rules and regulations- the most obvious being MALE MEMBERSHIP. And no, this isn’t a fact left in the bloody past. The dusty, dusty walls of the art galleries that decorate the country, recounting apparently the great past, still only weave a pathetic half-truth. Exhibitions of the sisterhood are still eclipsed by the permanent collection of man.
Even in fictional narratives this eclipsion remains the same. Mythology and fantasy were embroidered into history; tales of bravery, tales of warning, tales of sorrow, love, loss, enchantment, naivety, the thread through each being the male lens through which every female character is presented. But there is a new hope for these knotted myths of inaccuracy, inaccurate in their shortsighted portrayal of women as anything but the powerful and independent beings we are self-crafted into. There is an army of renegade authors, twisting tales into new shapes. Feminist revisionist mythology is perhaps too recent a genre to take pride of place on a library shelf, however the authors decorating this movement are making sure their voices are heard. As Lisa Tuttle puts it, we are beginning to ‘ask new questions of old texts’; tearing them apart from the scenes and stitching them together with decorative, more honest thread. Angela Carter exemplifies this craft in The Bloody Chamber, her collection of fairy tales retold with added strength, individual agency, passion, life in every female protagonist. Woven into each supposedly well-established character is the less well-established characteristics of any human being. Beauty is granted her sexual appetite, Little Red Riding Hood her sexual liberation, Alice her right to break etiquette.
Narratives pre-exist; they are like a god-ugly scar that however much you moisturised with that miracle oil that “honestly worked so well for me, you have to buy it” and you used it everyday but goddamn it it is still there, in all its pink and protruding glory.
Stitching onto mesh reminded me of those scars, scars of a more surgical manner. Some wound of dis-inclusion left once irreparably open, now there for me to try and stitch together like a dutiful (if unpaid) surgeon. I have done my research here, make no mistake I am practically professional. Sutures, they are known as. Continuous, interrupted, deep, buried, purse-string, subcutaneous; these are the variations. But instead of leaving behind something I’ll try tirelessly to reduce, or to give in and simply cover, I’m weaving something to be displayed unapologetically. A tapestry of tights, mesh and stitch lines.
I turned to the Bayeux Tapestry, naturally, being the most British tapestry I could conjure up. Commissioned by a man, displaying the action of man, but the narrative untold is that of the women who crafted it, wove with unfathomable craftsmanship- crafts’woman’ship. Each complex pattern of stitching was particular to the expertise of the individual worker; the outlines, the block fill, the decorative touches. A story far too familiar, one that still rings true today on a more sinister level. Hands that make our textiles remain detached from a body and identity, in countries undeclared to consumers. Narratives erased.
Narratives pre-exist. Are constructions. Hard hats and high vis were granted space in the story of our cities rebuilding post-war. Work sites from where whistles and ‘whoops’ tickle the shoulders of passing women, produced the celebrated, phallic structures that decorate the London skyline we know today. But we were constructing too, not just in ‘Make do and Mend’. We constructed awareness, that fuelled a few to turn into many, that sparked the building of a movement, leaving behind a trail of beautifully crafted action. We may have Made Do and Mended our stockings, but we didn’t stop there.
And don’t get me wrong, I love tights, hosiery, even the word. I wear them to keep warm, to be on trend, even to feel sexy. They were worn by men, then women, even ancient Egyptians. But I’m tearing them apart and pasting them together not just to fulfill an idea that manifested in my enmeshed dreams. I’m adopting the spirit of Sara Ahmed’s ‘Queer Use’ and looking to these meshy, unfilled legs in a new, queered way to remould some unsatisfactory part of our culture. I wanted to destroy to remake. Destroy to then paste together a patchwork of underrepresented women in history. Destroy to rewrite, reprint, re-work and make a narrative re-exist.