A conversation with Ellen Sampson

Cloth 6, 2015. Ellen Sampson

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few weeks ago, where I saw a show called In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met. Through Hals, Vermeer, and Rembrandt's work, the exhibition claims to orient "visitors to key issues in seventeenth-century Dutch culture."

The curatorial narrative focuses on the tension between realism and idealism in work made during this period. The paintings' subject, most famously still lives, resulted from the end of an eighty-year war. In gaining independence from Spain, The Netherlands could no longer rely on church and court commissions; they had to look inwards and develop experimental forms of non-secular artistic expression—such as landscapes and still lives. 

One of the text panels focusing on the development of the still life states they were used "to convey a variety of messages about human vanity or the pleasures of conspicuous consumption and imported luxuries." Displaying the bounties of new Dutch trade routes by omitting people in turn, these works forgot "the human cost of colonial warfare and slavery." 

My mind wandered to the tranche of imagery generated by people using phone cameras, capturing the food they eat, the clothes they buy, their homes, their cars. Our penchant for imagery that displays the fruits of our purchase power is so common today that, for some, it defines their identity. Like the Dutch Masters' exclusions, what is left unsaid is the cost of these images, the debt on people, animals, and the planet. 

This week I spoke to the artist and material culture researcher Ellen Sampson about her book Worn. Acknowledging that we live in a culture preoccupied with newness and that the fashion system is mostly predicated on it, the book explores our coexisting fixation with worn clothes. By exploring one object, the shoe, it asks the significance of worn clothes and why they have the power to affect us so profoundly?

Shonagh: I love the wearing diary entries in your book. They are slightly perverse at times; as a reader, you feel like you're entering an internal space—somewhere you shouldn't be. Were these diary entries the beginning of the book?

Ellen: The project started as a much more conventional piece of fashion studies research: exploring people's relationships to their shoes— and why worn shoes were often so poignant or powerful. I was in the Fashion department at the Royal College of Art and assumed that I would do design-led, semi-anthropological research. That I would ask people to wear things and then do object-based interviews with them. Sophie Woodward's work had really inspired me; in Why Women Wear What They Wear she does amazing object-based interviews with people about their clothes. 

However, in my research, that wasn't really working, and I was a bit stuck. So, I started making shoes for myself, just as a way of exploring my own relationships to them. I was thinking of it as a starting point to map out some ideas: that it was just brainstorming. The first thing I did was make these very soft pairs of shoes, which you can see in the film Fold. In the film, I put on and take off a pair of shoes that are almost like origami; they just pleat to fold over your feet. After I wore those shoes, I realized I was really taken with these objects, not because they were particularly unusual but because I, my body, was so present in them. 

 At that moment, even though it was only meant to be a little warm-up exercise or experiment, there was a real shift in my research. I realized I wasn't going to try and create work where there was a sense of objectivity; instead, I would embrace the artist researcher's subjective position and place myself at the center of my research practice. 

Even though I wanted the project to talk about people's relationships to clothing more generally, I would use my own body as the site of the research. Over the course of the project, I made and wore 24 pairs of shoes. Each time I wore a pair of shoes, I would take photos of them mostly using a 1970s forensic Polaroid camera—recording their progressive deterioration and change.

I was very taken by the marks of wear, but I realized other things were going on—physically or emotionally. I started writing these short notes about what I felt when I was wearing the shoes I had made. I was trying to push myself into this sensory, psychic place, through wearing, a very interior place. I have always been interested in the relationship between text and image, so I wanted to work out how they come together in this project. I just let myself do free writing. I didn't plan to publish these wearing diaries, I never thought they'd make it that far, but I kept writing. Then I started showing them to my Ph.D. supervisor and a few other people, and they said, "these are really interesting and quite bizarre." I think something that particularly comes across in these passages is my ambivalence to the things I'm wearing. I am often quite pleased when I damage them.

Stills from film Fold, 2013. Ellen Sampson

Shonagh: I found the writing powerful, and they led me to recall my memories. We so rarely share our real authentic internal thoughts, although I think social media has given the illusion that we do. 

Ellen: I’m interested in the memory that garments provoke, but also the interplay between those material memories and one's own interior sense of self, and how one can trigger the other… A real breakthrough for me was when I trampled down the back of one of my shoes. I had forgotten that I used to do that as a child; it used to drive my parents mad. I would squash the back of my left shoe, every time I wore it.  It was exciting because it presented this meeting of bodily and material memory that used garments evoke and contain. That's the broader theme of the book—this idea of the garments as a vessel of both external and internal experience.

Shonagh: The book ultimately asks why within a culture the privileges and prizes "new" things we have such attachment to our worn clothing. Why do you think in cultures like America and the UK, we have such an obsession with the "new"?

Ellen: I think it is incredibly complicated, but on a basic level, I believe newness offers potential for reinvention. If you think about old clothes as bearers of memory, we don't always want that— to carry around our past. Often, we want a sense of forgetting; we want absolution, we want a clean slate. 

This idea of reinvention is highlighted in the ways that clothes are so often bound up with fantasy. It's not necessarily even real reinvention we're searching for, but the fantasy of another self. Then often when you get something new, it doesn't meet your desire. 

There's a psychoanalyst called Christopher Bollas, who wrote a book called The Shadow of the Object about the idea of the transformational object.  He writes about the transformational object in a psychic sense: a person, an action, or an actual thing that the patient projects onto, as the site of transformation. For Bollas this is a negative thing, that you view the transformation as an external experience rather than an internal one. 

This idea of reinvention and change is very, very seductive. I completely get it. I don't necessarily think that wanting new things is a bad thing.  I think it's made complicated,  because if you live in a culture that continually offers you this potential for reinvention, but it is fundamentally unsatisfactory and unreal, you always will feel short-changed or at a loss. If the only solution offered is to buy another thing, you remain stuck in an unhealthy cycle of consumption.

Shonagh: This describes the nature of fashion. It is built on reinvention, for a new season there are new trends so you must buy a new wardrobe. You sit in an intriguing space in a fashion landscape. Where do you see yourself within fashion? Did you become critical of it through doing this work?

Ellen: I tend to define myself as a material cultural researcher with a focus on clothing, rather than a fashion researcher. I find the term fashion problematic on so many levels. Partly because I'm interested in the materiality of clothes, rather than the fashion industry or fashion representation. 

More broadly, I have a tricky relationship with fashion. I used to work in fashion, and I didn't hugely enjoy working in the industry, but then I think I possibly wasn't very good at it. It's such a problematic industry; the fashion industry, or high fashion, is based on a system of hierarchies and a system of exclusions. I think it's tough to have a comfortable relationship with it. Then again, like I was saying earlier about its proximity to fantasy, I still love clothes. I love the capacity for reinvention. I love what people do with clothes. I love watching people create an identity through outfits. There are interesting people in fashion and good things happening, but the industry itself is problematic. 

Shonagh: I have a similarly complicated relationship with the allure of it and what it offers. My nostalgia is rooted in the potency I felt when I first explored its potential as a young person. You've mentioned clothes and the fashion industry; how do you differentiate them? 

Ellen: I would define clothes as objects and fashion as what is done with clothes. I think clothes can exist without being fashion. My sense is that fashion is a system of representation and self-presentation. ‘Fashioning’ is the production of selves, but also the production of images, garments, and industries. Clothes are one of the materializations of fashion or fashioning; but not the only one. Others could be exhibitions, photographs, and catwalk shows. Clothes are central to fashion, but fashion is more than just clothes. It always requires another series of agencies and interventions to make garments fashion. 

Shonagh: When you embarked on your practice-based research. Why did you choose to focus on shoes? Why didn't you choose a jumper?

Ellen: Initially it was a practical decision. I used to be a shoemaker. I did a BA in anthropology, and I wrote my dissertation about footwear in fairytales. Someone bought me a shoemaking course, and it was love at first sight. I'd been thinking about doing a Ph.D. in anthropology, and instead, I went and trained to be a shoemaker. Eventually, I went to do the masters in footwear at London College of Fashion. Once I finished, I knew that I didn't want to design shoes for a living, but I wanted to make art or installations that sat at the edges between fashion and artwork.

When I came to do my Ph.D, I thought shoes were a good place to start because I knew them. But more broadly, shoes are ‘overdetermined’ objects: shoes, almost more than anything else I can think of, are loaded with symbolism. In Valerie Steele and Colleen Hill's book Shoe Obsession, you've got this incredible layering and layering of imagery, whether its erotic imagery or fairytale imagery, this huge symbolic potency to footwear.  Shoes often are so symbolically potent, that it almost obscures them as material objects. People write really interesting things about what shoes mean, but at the time there was relatively little written about the experience of wearing shoes.

Another factor was that people wear shoes for longer than they wear other garments. When I was first thinking about this project, I was interested in things people might be willing to wear every day for, say, a year. If someone were to wear a jumper every day for a year, they would look askance. The duration was significant; you get a connection with things that you wear for a long time.

Cloth Triptych Part 1, 2015, Ellen Sampson

Shonagh: You talk about wornness in the book. How do you define wornness? 

Ellen: I say that wornness is an in-between state. Most garments are neither new, or fully destroyed, in landfill. The majority of our garments sit in this liminal place, which I call wornness. Wornness is the state that most of our clothes are in most of the time. It's a space in between two things. In this case, the binaries of pristine, which is how we often think about fashion through the objects displayed in fashion exhibitions, magazines, or shops, and the things that are destroyed, garments being stripped up by the rag trade, for example. 

Wornness is also a state of change. As we wear them, launder them, or moths nibble on them our clothes are in a state of flux: they are always changing

Shonagh: That is incredibly interesting. When you apply this thinking to fashion, from fast to luxury fashion, we believe it's "new" through the mythologizing process in the marketing and visual merchandising of the object. How do you think that the fashion industry has enabled this disconnect between the maker, the industrial production process, and the object for sale? 

Ellen: I think a lot of this is based on the fact that, increasingly in the West, our clothes are made thousands of miles away from us. The consumer can have no idea how a garment is made. You know no one who knows how to make a garment. By the time you encounter the generation I teach, they may have parents who too do not know anyone who ever made a garment. 

But I also think there's something else going on. There's an article by Nigel Thrift called 'The Material Practices of Glamour' which talks about the idea of smoothness in terms of capitalism. That is something I find very interesting, the need in capitalism for a disavowal of the uncomfortable or untidy things; the exclusion of anything that prevents these consumer objects offering an uncomplicated potential for reinvention.  Because fashion is often dependent on this idea, you can pick up something and reinvent yourself or create a new aspect of yourself to cheer yourself up; this requires the garment not to have a history. The garment needs to be completely amnesiac so that you can entirely project yourself onto it. That's much harder with an object someone else has touched, handled, and known—all the things, which have happened to it in the production process.

Shonagh: I am intrigued by this because, yes, that may lead to profitable sales; however, on the flip side, people are so invested in the memory that objects hold. Take, for example, the Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! exhibition I curated at Somerset House, in it we displayed the clothes that bore the wear and tear of Blow's life, and people were incredibly moved. It allowed them to imagine the garments within the narrative of her life. Why do you think people are so emotional when presented with garments imbued with memory?

Ellen: I think what is presented as desirable in clothing, quite often, is not the reality. When I first started working with the Northampton Shoe Museum, where I curated a couple of exhibitions, people would say, "I'm not interested in clothes at all." Then they would, for example, go on to tell you an extended anecdote about how difficult they found it to dispose of the shoes of a loved one. The fact that people immediately understand wornness and that it is compelling isn't terribly revolutionary. If you talk to anyone, they say, "Oh yes, I have my father's jumper. Oh, yes, that's the dress I wore the day I met my girlfriend." We know that worn things are incredibly powerful: that they are records of experience. We all know that we're often attached to items that aren't perfect. I suppose the question becomes, and it's not something I necessarily know the answer to, how do you leverage that power? How do you use that to change something? 

Shonagh: Can you think about it? What change could be leveraged? 

Ellen: It's interesting. I've just started a job in the School of Design at Northumbria University, so everyone always asks: what are the solutions? That's not something that happens as much in the fashion studies or art history departments.  I am currently interested in wornness or imperfection as lenses to think critically about overlooked objects— particularly those in museums. How might focusing on imperfection allow us to have different conversations about what we value.

At times I'm unsure about the narrative around fashion and sustainability, which suggests that we should all love our clothes more. I think it's very loaded, and it comes from a place of privilege. Not everyone gets to have the clothes they love. Many people’s clothing choices are practical, you have clothes that you work in, or maybe you don't have a choice at all.  

The idea that we should all develop intense emotional relationships with things doesn't seem to be a solution. However, I wonder if there is a space where this idea of wornness, more generally, might be useful— as a counter-narrative to the current preoccupation with newness. But in truth, I don't know—I don't have the solution.

Black copper flip—flop — wear 1— Polaroid 6, 2015. Ellen Sampson

Shonagh: Identity is a lens that we often use to explain this attachment. Do you think that clothing and identity are inherently linked and that the clothes we wear and their wornness are fragments of ourselves? 

Ellen: Clothes are our most immediate marker of identity outside our physiological characteristics. They're accessible; if you think about identity production, in general, they're one of the few things that most people have access to. They're an extremely accessible way of constructing, and having agency over, one's identity. While also engaging with and negotiating all of those external forces, which dictate and question what you wear.

I'm interested in psychoanalytic theory because I'm interested in the idea of surfaces and containment, clothes as spaces of holding. In a psychoanalytic sense, if you think about the work of people like Didier Anzieu, Esther Bick or Claudia Benthiem, these tactile surfaces create a sense of self: they are potentially sites of ego formation. I think we have these layered and complicated visual and emotional, but also very sensory relationships, with our clothing—all the time. I think that's something that you begin to understand when you talk to people about why they're choosing to wear things. It's not just about what something looks like, what it feels like, or what it makes them remember; it is an intersection of all three.

Shonagh: If clothing is so important, which I believe it is. Why has it been positioned so often as meaningless and frivolous?  

Ellen: I think there's a series of reasons. The first is that fashion tends to get associated with the feminine. That's not to say that men's fashion is not important, but we have a cultural preoccupation with fashion as something feminine. You can perhaps trace some of that to the 19th century when men start dressing in a much more sober way, whereas women's bodies become this site of frivolous excess: of conspicuous consumption. 

More broadly, I think there is a discomfort with the idea of artifice, which is often associated with fashion. That fear that fashion is on some level an act of concealment, and people are very anxious about things being hidden.  Often in the media, people who are very interested in fashion are presented as somehow faking something.

There is also a sense of gatekeeping. It's imperative to certain people that what constitutes fashion is neatly defined, and those boundaries are kept. The trouble is, when you start realizing that fashion is happening everywhere all the time, you can't maintain those boundaries. It all tends to break down, and it gets a bit more porous. There’s a contradiction, fashion is fundamental to capitalism, yet within late-capitalist cultures, we tend to present fashion as frivolous pursuit—something not worthy of serious attention. That we should speak of philosophy or something instead. 

Shonagh: But as you laid out, humans overload the clothes we wear with meaning. Take the wedding outfit; someone might wear it once yet keep it in their wardrobe for the rest of their life. Their ancestors may keep it long after they are gone. These textiles are laced with our DNA, our scent, and they become evocative prompts for remembering. In the book, you map a diagram called the Memory Nexus Diagram. What is this? 

Ellen: the book starts by exploring the sensory and embodied experiences of wearing – and the ways those experiences create attachment to our clothes. But mid-way through the book, I turn my focus to garments that are no longer being worn. Your ex's sweater, a glove you find abandoned on the street, or an object in the museum. 

I think we all accept that garments are memory objects, but at the time there wasn't much attempt to unpack how clothes work as memory objects. There's an anthropologist called Alfred Gell who wrote a book called Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory—it's one of my favorite academic books. 

Alfred Gell tried to map the relationships embodied in an art object. What's the relationship between the material the object is made from, the patron, the artist, and the viewer? How can those be mapped, and what might be the intersection? In doing that he developed Art Nexus, so I borrowed his idea—a diagrammatic mapping of the agencies embodied in old clothes, to explore the relationships between garments and memory. What is the difference between responding to a garment like an ex's sweater versus seeing a decayed garment belonging to someone that you don't know, something in a museum, for example?

What I was trying to unpack was that when we think about garments and memory, we often think about them in terms of the stories you apply to them, that is, your wedding dress, this is your hat. However, much of these garments' power comes directly from the marks of wear; it is a material power. The book's final chapter is about how these unintelligible marks, where you don't know the story of a garment, instead you see the ripped hem, the sweat stain, the red wine drips, how they work on you. The power of other people's worn clothes.

Black pointed shoe— wear 2—Polaroid 6 and 7, 2015. Ellen Sampson.

Shonagh: I always ask the last question, what would your fashion utopia be? If you could reorganize the fashion system tomorrow, what would you like it to be? 

Ellen: I would like there to be space to see the connectedness between things. To unpack the ideas that fashion objects and garments are imbued with lots of agencies and have passed through lots of hands. I would find it very pleasing if you could understand your clothes more as a process than just an object in a wardrobe or on the floor. This engagement with the idea of garments as a process wouldn't perhaps create a massive shift, but a subtle change in the relationship we have with them.  

If we got into the habit of celebrating duration in clothes, that would begin to make a small difference. What's the thing you've owned longest? How long can you wear something for? How does that change your relationship to it?  I think this would make small differences not perhaps in consumer behavior but in terms of broader thinking about clothes.

Unrelated to my research for this book, I think that although I care about personal responsibility, and I think it's important, a massive part of this change in fashion needs to be mandated by legislation. I don't think you can force companies to make those changes through consumer action alone; I think those changes will come through taxation. When you start penalizing people for unethical production practices is when you're going to begin to see proper change. It is a bit of a now or never moment.

Ellen will be in discussion with Hilary Davidson and Alison Matthews David about her book and imperfect garments on December 11th at 6pm GMT. Click here to book a ticket.