The History of Gauze is Haunting Me
Fabric is culture, culture is passport, and home should not be bloody.
I’ve been staring at versions of this grid for weeks as my tiny happy place from the chaos of being inundated with holiday sales and horrific news cycles. Going online has felt so wild lately - you can’t really avoid swinging back and forth from images of violence and reports on the genocide of Palestinians and the state-sanctioned celebration of it, the sterilized newsroom framing of it, to like, shopping promotions and viral memes. To have any kind of ‘business as usual’ mode feels kind of disgusting, no? I am unable to metabolize the level of grief and outrage I feel into much more than nausea and fog and hyperfocus on things that are materially kind of unimportant.
I have been preoccupied with the history of fabrics. Maybe because interesting textile work is the unifying factor of my current moodboard, but also because textile work is culture work, is cultural history, is a diary entry, a passport, a wrapping, someone’s dreams made manifest and another person’s daily wages. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote Eric Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire, “says cotton.” Textiles and industry, fabric and culture - they’re woven together, forgive the wordplay. Think of the fabrics of today, the degradation of quality you find in most stores at the moment - you can get clothing in fast fashion stores, yes, but it quickly decays, and the laborers behind the clothes are often no better off for the deal either.
Right now, I’m really drawn to knitwear, reclaimed textiles as new designs, to one-of-one pieces - because of the immediate connection to the person who made it, but also because the quality is better. The motivation behind the finished garments isn’t a trend or a purchase order to finish but a question to the universe that something thoughtfully made would find a person who might see it, love it, ask about it like it’s an old friend. How long did it take to get here, to my arms? Did you dye the wool yourself? The beads in the embroidery - how long did they sit in your studio, waiting for their moment? What draws you to collecting certain buttons, since each are different? I spent hours in a boutique recently chatting with one of the designers behind Colorant about how they decided on the colors of their sweaters, how long the dye process takes, the back-and-forth process of fabric collection for reworked jacket pieces. It felt like we were best friends in her living room, so quick was the camaraderie over clothing.
Fabric is an intimate thing to me, not only because it is literally clothing my body but because it’s a pathway to learning about other people. To learn about fabric means you inevitably learn how things are made, what was involved, and who was committed to the act of creating something. Knitwear, embroidery…they require dedication, human dedication, to happen. From the newest fabric to the oldest ones around.
A few weeks ago, I came across the knowledge that gauze - the word and the cloth itself - comes from Gaza. Gauze, that lightweight open-weave cotton fabric, breathable, forgiving, found in any well-stocked First Aid Kit and certainly any medical establishment - it’s from Gaza. It was originally made of silk and used in clothing, and now it is made of silk, cotton, and other kinds of fabrics. But the origins lie in Gaza, a place now being utterly decimated, where the hospitals are bombed, where surgeons are having to perform on children, often their own, with no anesthesia, no medications, no sterilized environment and often no…gauze. To have given the world something synonymous with care, with healing, and to be deprived of it so utterly - is that not the saddest, most haunting thing?
Knowing this has haunted me every day. I don’t know what to do with this information besides collect it, honor it by linking it to all the other things I know and cherish. Share it with you, so you might mourn with me.
I’m keeping busy, being haunted by this knowledge and the grief the context summons. The injustice of it does move me to do things. You know - read-ins for Palestine, passing information along, caring for friends and organizing in the ways that I can, where I am, with what I know. It’s been hard to be a person and I am not a productive person this year, but I think not being able to be productive is a normal, healthy human response to utter destruction and witnessing the dehumanization of people in real time. The fact I can still find beauty and pleasure in material things is a lifeline for my sanity, a little moat of hope for better things in a sea of absolute garbage. You can witness horror and be broken by it, but the breaking of you - of us, me - is a win for those who would break much more and do so gladly. I am choosing every day to refuse to be broken entirely. I consider beautiful things memorials to the people who made them, who perhaps saw enough goodness in the world to embroider them into physical memory or weave it into being. Who might not have seen it but wanted to, so badly, that they made it.
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