The Crafts of Fashion: Sources covers various issues relating to know-how in fashion design and raises the crucial question of sources. Fashion encompasses a vast array of professions and crafts, and as many singular histories; how can we think about this object of study when faced with the diversity of the practices that make it up? Plaiters, tailors, embroiderers, and other model makers, often anonymous, animate the worlds of fashion and their technical cultures, but how is this technical knowledge, which is also “knowledge of the body”, studied, preserved, and transmitted? This volume looks at the existing anthropological and historical traditions in this field, and examines current methodological innovations that enable us to understand this dynamic, little-explored area of research.
The contributions that make up this book were given in the form of lectures as part of the research seminar Chaire CHANEL et le19M des savoir-faire de la mode at the Institut français de la mode.
From the conservation of archives in a major embroidery house such as Atelier Montex, to the capture of the technical gesture in a hatmaker’s workshop, to the inventory of forgotten fashion crafts, a panoramic approach is outlined, from workshop to museum. Émilie Hammen brings together voices that help us to better understand what unites these multiple ways of making fashion and passing on their savoir-faire.