When my maternal great-grandmother was around my age, she dreamed of being a seamstress in Paris. Born into a small town in northern Italy at the turn of the 20th-century, she taught herself how to stitch and style any piece of fabric she could find. Yet by the end of World War II, she was a widow caring for ten hungry children. She never moved to France, but she never stopped sewing.
One hundred years later, my paternal grandmother taught me how to use a sewing machine on the outskirts of Newcastle. I remember the day we visited a fabric store together most vividly, when she had picked out a tapestry of textures ranging from corduroy to cotton. We resolved to make a tote bag out of a dark-wash denim, something I could carry my library books to and from school in. She spent the afternoon fixing the snags of ribbon I had used to line its borders as I embroidered a peach handkerchief with white lace.
I have not seen one of these women in two years, and I never had the chance to meet the other. But across time and place, we are bound by fashion as a craft, an aesthetic and a feeling.
This is what makes the Fashion Edition more than a closet full of trends or a runway of salacious gossip. Within these pages, you will read radical histories of revolutionaries and their outfits. You will see fresh perspectives on fast-fashion and sustainability. All the way throughout, you will find pieces challenging the boundaries of masculinity, femininity, modesty and queerness in the way we dress.
The importance of fashion as a physical site of resistance against both racialised and gendered forms of oppression is most explicitly celebrated in this week’s cover. The student on the front of this paper is wearing a keffiyeh, a square scarf representing the endurance of Palestinian culture, identity and liberation. Set against a broader history of SRC fashion explored in this week’s feature article, this photograph expresses solidarity and persistence in the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.
I hope that you learn something from all the brilliant writers who have contributed to this edition, or that you at least do a double take in the mirror next time you put on a new outfit. And I hope you see the value of learning to cut from your own unique cloth.
