Craft as creative making

Anina says I should stop using the word craft as it sounds so totally uncool. She works in the fashion business so she knows what she is talking about.

At the Reboot conference I tried to enrich the meaning of craft by showing that we can link craft to a variety of interesting phenomena including personalized technology, limited edition fashion, alternative production, culture history, construction, play, and programming. For most of these activities I would probably not use the Finnish equivalent for craft (käsityö), which literally means hand (käsi) work (työ). But somehow, through these examples, the English word 'craft' has begun to translate in my head as 'creative making'. At least that is what I mean by the term.

Comments

[Ulla-Maaria]

Jill, thank you for the excellent examples.

Liz, Anne, and Jill aptly pointed out that craft is not a category. Because of its association with hand-made (human-made), the idea of craft brings forth a rich assemblage of people, ideas, and relationships, which is something we cannot evaluate with a criteria set by the day's media. Still, we can evaluate if that certain type of assemblage makes sense to us, or if it can teach us something new. The coolness/uncoolness is thus a personal judgement of the network.

In this sense I think art and craft have a lot in common. We try to understand art to learn something new (about ourselves or about the society). I think craft – by combining the ideal, material, social, and political aspects of making– has the same promise.

[maria]

Hi everybody...

Just some notes on "crafts" as a grandma's thing and fashion:

Yes, "craft" implies a manual know-how.

Yes, almost every pocess in fashion (even industrial ones) depends on female crafters and, yes, they're completely undervalued.

Yes, there's an "uncoolness" coming and going on fashion's codes about crafting, and I guess It's not casual at all...

So: let's talk about crafts, specially referring to fashion. Let's talk about women's traditional knowledgement, and culture, and work.

And let's return to limited edition series so that crafter's work can get the care and value it deserves...

I'm an experienced industrial fashion designer, becoming independent (and ocasional writer), so maybe I should know, too...

[anina.net]

BLESS are definitly not craft--they are serious designers. they would never consider themselves in the craft section, sorry.

have to disagree with comment "In some ways it is people revolting against what "the fashion industry" says they should do, such as in Wardrobe Refashion and Swap-o-rama-rama or Bless..."

[anina.net]

I vote for HAND-CRAFT!

[jill danyelle]

I am not saying that BLESS is crafty, but I am putting them in the category of people creating things that challenge the constructs of fashion. Craft can be as serious as design, as "the artist" Andrea Zittel also makes clothing that is loaded with concepts, some hand crafted, some not. Her work also grew out of exasperation in dressing the part daily for her art gallery job. The idea I was bringing up was that the lines between craft, design and art are often quite blurry. You saying that BLESS are serious designers while others dub them artists is my case in point.

BLESS have also cut up and resewn clothes... I am assuming this serious design was laden with some comment on fashion no matter how latent or obvious. Underscoring my other point, that I feel people are returning to "craft" or "redesign" in some ways to go against traditional fashion constructs. Be it a design duo often featured in art galleries or someone in rural Australia committed to using what she already has to provide herself new clothes or a designer recycling sweaters to work in a couture "slow fashion" mindset as opposed to "fast fashion".

So, I am wondering, Anina, why you disagree or if you just did not see the points I was trying to make.

1. art, design & craft often are blurry and bleed into one another.

2. the process one chooses to utilize in producing work often becomes part of the statement of the work.

As much as I also follow fashion, for myself, I do my projects for a myriad of reasons. One reason is to bring up concepts which challenge the current fashion climate re: the environment, waste and consumption. I also get immense pleasure from wearing something I've made. The pieces have so much more meaning to me. Yet, I don't really consider myself a crafter or artist and am somewhat outside of the tradtional design world.

The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
-William Shakespeare

Fashion condemns us to many follies; the greatest is to make ourselves its slave.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

via artmetropole
BLESS situate themselves between art and fashion - for Heiss and Kaag there are no distinctions between these fields. Their production, which sits on the fine line between art object and design, high-function and high fashion, is always unique and marked by the recycling and adaptation of unexpected items put to use in a totally new way.

via interhost
The BLESS duo of artists present design sketches which question how assignations of roles and forms of behavior constitute themselves through furniture or clothing.

via concierge
A more recent collection took segments of cloth from other well-known high-street chains, like H&M and Levi's, and reconstructed them as scarves.

via shift
the BLESS approach can also just as easily be seen as pseudo-scientific, where clothing and accessories are created more as way of experiencing structure and form, which either assists or subverts the functionality of the object.

via symrise
In their work, they focus instead on giving everyday accessories and articles of clothing a new meaning by removing them from their original context.

via nowtoronto
Heiss and Kaag design clever one-off fashion and home pieces that defy expectations.

What makes Bless good designers is that their work is elegantly functional. What makes them good artists is that their work is unexpectedly multi-functional.

As they say, it's stuff to "fuck up every style."

via nmpft
They have designed their own landscape where the product itself extends far beyond the limitations of fashion, and anyone who dares call their things works of art will encounter a lofty scepticism. To be absolutely clear, the press release for Bless No 19 states: "This project has no artistic intentions."

via artforum
Bless, a celebrated fashion label run by Desirée Heiss and Ines Kaag out of studios in Berlin and Paris, are well known for Conceptual art–like gestures such as hijacking magazines to distribute their seasonal look books and refusing to pose for photographs.

[Ulla-Maaria]

From Jill's comment I wanted to pick up the useful notion of Slow Fashionthat she found on sustainable.ie.

What is Slow Fashion ?
Slow Fashion is to clothing and design what slow food is to cuisine – natural, organic, ethical, local (where possible) and one-off designs with an emphasis on quality, and of course – taste. Slow Fashion means you can look fantastic and feel 100% guilt free.

Apart from the last sentence ( :-D) that sums up my personal relationship with fashion quite nicely. Many times that includes hand craft.

[jill danyelle]

some more interesting comments along the same vein can be found here:

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/015252.html

[Julie]

Im new here and find this an interesting discussion. I also have a problem with the word 'craft' - seems not 'professional' enough. To me 'Hand craft' sounds better...

[Mosaic]

don't stop what you have started because...woodcraft does not sound totally uncool.......besides only few can make wood carving......its your skills and talent....you must keep it up...

[mosaic]

......craft for me is innovating a product that us old...crafing is making something unique...