A Woven World
On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Part memoir, part cultural history, A Woven World celebrates the fading crafts, industries, and artisans that have defined communities for generations.
The desire to create is the cornerstone of civilization. But as we move into a world where machine manufacturing has nearly usurped craft, Alison Hawthorne Deming resists the erasure of our shared history of handiwork with this appeal for embracing continuity and belonging in a time of destabilizing change.
Sensing a need to preserve the crafts and stories of our founding communities, and inspired by an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute featuring Yves St. Laurent’s “sardine” dress, Deming turned to the industries of her ancestors, both the dressmakers and designers in Manhattan in the nineteenth century and the fishermen on Grand Manan Island, a community of 2,500 residents, where the dignity of work and the bounty of the sea ruled for hundreds of years.
Reweaving the fabric of those lives, A Woven World gives presence on the page to the people, places, and practices, uncovering and preserving a record of the ingenuity and dignity that comes with such work. In this way the lament becomes a song of praise and a testament to the beauty and fragility of human making.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lyrical memoir, poet and essayist Deming (Zoologies) traces the role of handiwork in her life and the lives of her ancestors, highlighting the "painful fact" of a vanishing world of simplicity and beauty. She recounts summers spent in a Canadian fishing village once celebrated as "the sardine capital of the world," where a "handmade, place-made way of life is nearly over." A viewing of a fish-scale-inspired Yves Saint Laurent dress prompts memories of her grandmother and great-grandmother, both dressmakers, and sparks an investigation into their lives, taking her to New York and Paris, where she's "resigned to find in fragments a picture of the whole." In episodic spurts, Deming picks a topic, researches it, then investigates its relationship to her life; among the subjects considered are the origin of camel hair coats, the history of herring, and environmental degradation as a result of industrialization. Deming has a poet's eye for details—she describes the shingles of her family's 150-year-old house as "herring scales" and imagines the previous tenants "in beds together packed like sardines"—but the overall collage-like assemblage can feel a bit hodgepodge. Champions of a home-crafted way of life will find much to savor here—but they'd be best served reading in small doses.
