News from the front – Birth of a Blog

On garments, traces, stories—and their way back to the light.

“News from the front”—we really should have called this section BLOG. It chronicles the battles we fight: dating the pieces, situating them ethnographically, restoring them, re-assembling full costumes, and uncovering the stories they’ve lived.

Beyond the research proper, each piece brings its own tale, great or small—a tale seldom caught in photographs, written instead in stains, tears, and mends.

Some pieces arrive as pure surprises. We know nothing about them; they come by post—sometimes sight unseen—bought on the strength of a legend about a very old shirt seeking a keeper. Other shirts carry the sad stories of abandoned places and deserted houses. Some things come from corners where traditions have been forgotten and the children have gone, with no one left who knows what they are or how they were worn. A few arrive with the story— and the photograph—of the person who wore them: objects that seem new only because they slept for ages in a chest, waiting to be taken to church on feast days.

Our stories, however, are devoted to the pieces gnawed by mice, dampened by water seeping through attics—the pieces that seem to weep when they reach us, and we with them.

In the end, what reaches us are the marks of those who stitched them, the beliefs of those who trusted them, the energy of thresholds crossed by the wearers of these shirts; traces of the time that made them forgotten or renowned; signs of the generations who wore them and sheltered their souls in cloth.

…time scored into fabric—that’s the story we tell.

It would, in truth, have been more accurate to backdate this… to September 2015.