Sophie Tolhurst

Seams: wanting and wearing is a book that takes the structure of the seam as a site in which to test the relationships between different things.The seam has its origin in the construction of garments, and so this project finds itself rooted in the subject of fashion. Yet it does not see fashion as an isolated phenomenon, but as something always inextricably linked to people, to culture, to goods; like the seam, there are always different parts being joined together.

The project starts by outlining a poetics of the seam, laying out its various forms and qualities as if pattern pieces for a garment to be made. Joined together with a central narrative of personal experience in the fashion industry, the book aims, like the process of garment-making itself, to create something desirable of its various parts. As the writing moves through different examples of fashion, visual culture, theory and literature, looking for different analogies for the seam, matters do not always join smoothly. Unlike the assured narratives that contemporary 'on-demand' and 'gig' economies provide the fashion consumer and that shape the world today, this project aims to see the joins in the otherwise smooth surface. Whereas ideas of seamlessness have been criticised for not being as smooth as promised, but merely hiding the undesirable elsewhere, here the seams are flipped to reveal that deemed unseemly, or used as structures and ideas to be tried-out and tested, risking, in doing so, that we might feel the rub of these seams as if wearing a dress too-tight. 

Seams: wanting and wearing offers ideas like garments to try on, knowing that we will still be left wanting, always desiring to take-apart and start again.