Fashion: tissue, textile, toile

“Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world since the world is flesh?” Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible

Tissue is a word used for both the flesh of the human body and for cloth - the stuff in closest daily contact with us, touching, protecting and adorning our bodies. The conceptual, linguistic, and material intertwining of the human body with fashion and textiles in all their layers will be the subject of this panel.

Textiles are made by the action of human beings and then fabricated further into fashion – from “high” to “low;” – into a substrate for paintings onto which the image is applied; and into tapestries in which the image and the weave are totally integrated.

Toile (from the Latin “tela” web and also toil) is the final stage before a garment goes into production – serving, in effect, as the garment’s sculptural cartoon – and also refers to painting on canvas – huile sur toile. Human action – fashioning, making, and artifice – is a mark of the highest level of value and artistry in the highly skilled hand-sewing of haute couture, the hand-madeness of painting, the weaving of tapestries, and more.

We invite panel participants to address fashion: tissue, textile toile and the wide-ranging, multi-layered relationships among the materiality and action of the human body, the linguistic overlapping of words referring to both body and fabric, and the materiality and making of fashion and art.