Sewing Reconsidered

Whenever sewing occurs, human bodies are touched by stitched objects. Or, as Alden O’Brien, curator of ‘Sewn in American’, a recent exhibition at the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Museum in Washington, DC, reminds us, ‘Sewn objects surround us. They clothe us from birth, cover our bodies night and day, furnish our living spaces, line our coffins.’ With a focus on haptic experience, ‘Sewn in America’ is a smart and ambitious attempt to reckon with the many dimensions of American sewing as material practice. As such, it invites comparison to Novels, Needleworks, and Empire by Chloe Wigston Smith. Both the exhibition and the book express an enhanced appreciation for the ‘craft’ of sewing – what Smith calls ‘needleworks’. Both explore its far-reaching personal and political ramifications, and both suggest how a materialist lens expands our understanding of sewing as a powerful cultural force that reverberates widely throughout the political world. Both are also equally impressive for their erudite engagement with archival sources and for their ability to move forward a long-standing conversation about the nature of ‘women’s work’.

Clothing · Conversation · Exhibition · Focus (optics) · Materialism · Politics · Visual culture · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles