THE SHIRT ––––––––––– HALF BUT BIG
Or how to make a whole out of a halfOr how to make a whole out of a half
A long history speaks for experimenting with the shirt.
The shirt is a textile archetype and several thousand years old. ‒ The German word for shirt, «Hemd», comes from the word «hemidi», which originally meant skin or husk. And so one wore it directly on the body, thus still (nearly) naked and not fit for the street. A nightshirt is still like that. In countries of the Middle East, a light floorlength garment in the form of a shirt is appropriate streetwear for men. ‒ As an outer garment for men, the shirt went through a varied evolution. Women also participated: a simple man’s shirt looked particularly sexy on them ... the androgynous touch. Indeed, the shirtdress has become a wardrobe classic.
Games played with shirts: men unbutton their shirts to expose their chest hair, occasionally resplendent with a massive chain. Completely open and blowing in the wind, cloth swirling around the splendor of the male torso ... Women knew and still know how to use cleavage ... and they also tied their shirttails into knots under their breasts, reducing the amount of fabric coverage in favor of some «freedom of the belly».
(And playing around with collars, such as the implications of a stand-up collar, the cuffs, the colors and patterns ...) Whether to halve it vertically or horizontally is suggested by the form of a shirt itself: You have to open and close a shirt somehow ‒ and so that is also the line for cutting it in half. H A L F: A well-made half shirt is, in and of itself, an artifact like any product, but it is a forceful one. Its straightforward statement is its manifestation as a finished piece – as a sort of whole. This form of a shirt is even more intense, because the half shirt has all the features of a whole shirt: collar, front, back ... in this piece we can see a whole, even though it is not all there. It embodies the idea of a shirt, but has been opened up. From being an artifact to being a piece of clothing: this is not social sharing, halving in the sense of «you take one half, I’ll take the other». And by no means does this have to do with «doing things halfway», as in the sense of being incompetent or getting stuck. Theoretically and practically, the opening created by the half-shirt is about making whole things possible in a different way. What we divide or separate in this manner can be connected differently. After all, energy is always on the side of dissonance, the non-whole and the incomplete! H A L F B U T B I G: The half-shirt grows to oversized proportions, and this expanded material can be arranged around the body in all sorts of ways: draped, knotted, fastened. Interesting silhouettes, plasticity, and three-dimensionality can be created by the individual wearer. The elements of a conventional shirt begin to «wander»: a collar becomes a suspender, a giant cuff slips to the edge of the dress or skirt ... Formal asymmetry is deliberately created; there are artistic painted decorations, and different colors are used. A new group of combinations emerges, generating countless possibilities. Shirt hybrids. Bastards. The conservative unity or completeness of the garment «shirt» has been forced open. Once again something else has found its way in ‒ and turns out to be a variant of the same ... also something wearable ... and a clothing statement. Have we now reached the «shirt of the happy man», which in the Tolstoy fairy tale does not exist because the happy man had no shirt at all ... ?
Perhaps, as the author Handke once suggested, an «old-shirt day» should really be proclaimed, a day when everyone wears their oldest shirt; if possible a patched «bastard shirt».
Karin Ruprechter-Prenn
[translation from German: Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek]
Sequel
Half But Big But Oversized
What happens if I divide something in half and then create something new from each part? This question is connected to how one deals with materials, fabrics and models, or how they are placed in relationship to one another. It also has to do with the new hybrid forms that can arise through reuse or combining. Edwina Hörl's «Half But Big» models, which divide and re-assemble the individual components of the basic «shirt», open new ways of perceiving the relationship between a shirt's various parts. By doing away with categories, she explores the relationships between material and function, past and present, clothing and body. A shirt is turned into a wrapper made of fabric; by interacting with it and draping it over the body, it acquires a multifunctional form. It is no longer clearly what we define as a shirt, but offers many different ways of being used. The basis of all «HBB» models is the shirt, its components re-functionalized into new arrangements, such as the bodice becoming a collar. The «Half But Big» models do not mirror the body, nor do they trace its contours. Rather, they have their own design according to how the wearer shapes them.
Dividing a garment in half is a way to analyze its structure. By disassembling and reassembling, a garment's original assembly can be made visible and its various functions repositioned. This is connected to Hörl's exploration of culturally influenced and traditional designs by breaking up their schematic roles through oversized dimensions. A work-in-progress, the «Half But Big» models reflect on cultural, historical and social developments, revealing not only contradictions but also possible «wearable» forms.
This has been a continuous process, from the «HBB» hybrid models created by Edwina Hörl in 1998 to her «Half But Big Bastard» models of 2000‒2007, with the new models representing the most recent permutation. «Bastardizing»1 means that a model's categories and the connected mechanisms of exclusion have been put into question. Dividing and mixing shapes, designs and categories celebrates the equality of hybrid forms, supported by the participation of the wearer, who forms them on their body. The most recent «HBB Bastard» models not only pick up an existing design idea, they also reveal its developmental potential. When is an idea expandable and reusable in a new form? And in what context are past ideas reactivated as part of the process?
The after-effects of ideas
Fashion history is the best illustration of how trends and styles from earlier epochs are picked up and sampled to establish new trends. An important role in this is played by social developments and phenomena. Such developments often reflect questions already raised in the past, or are reactions to current events. Temporal distance changes attitudes toward certain things, whether visionary or disastrous. What is the actual process behind developing an idea? What after-effects do ideas have? Or does design have, if those ideas are implemented? And who or what determines this? Current problems play a role in every «zeitgeist»: Design ideas are an expression of particular social developments, whether utopian or dystopian in nature. They are part of and help shape social processes, they point to future developments.
Hindsight
Looking back gives us a chance to reflect on our personal development or the history of society's development, to see it in a new light. The consequences of realized ideas are often clear only decades later. The contradictions in modernity, for example, have only become fully apparent from a historical perspective: Ideas of technological progress and a better life for all strata of the population have encountered technically optimized authoritarian systems (such as fascism). There are also contradictions in ideas about design, as can be seen for instance in the realization of Bauhaus2 concepts. Bauhaus design involved an overall concept of how urban and private spaces and relationships could be designed socially. But the apartment buildings that were built, while pointing to the future, were an architectural display of the failure of modernist concepts. And the full extent of the destruction of our planet through industrialization and capitalization is evident in current discussions on sustainability. Ultimately, the Friday for Future movement can also be seen as a reaction to the effects of progress and exploitation, the modern age's promise for the future.
When looking back, ideas and events are newly assessed or appraised, they are explained from a removed standpoint or in the light of current social or individual developments. In times of speculative correlations, causal relationships seem to be gaining new importance, especially when one thinks of analysis deficits or technology impact assessments. If nothing has a cause, anything might be possible, but for the first time this says nothing about the quality or veracity of new considerations or viewpoints. Increasingly, being aware of the consequences of individual behavior and of global developments will play a central role. Prototypes for solutions, in turn, require exploratory procedures and trial courses of action.
The history of the «HBB» models represents the constant appraising of ideas and things based on their potential for development, durability, and length of use ‒ not by their spontaneous hype status. Edwina Hörl's oversized models are explorations of how we perceive size, they parody bogged down orders of magnitude, they reduce oversized stratagems for consumption to absurdity.
Sabine Winkler
[translation from German: Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek]
[1] Bastardization: a non-technical and obsolete term for hybridization.
[2] The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius as an art school. It existed from 1919 to 1933, the same years as the Weimar Republic, and is now regarded worldwide as the birthplace of the classical modernist avant-garde in art, design and architecture. «Architecture and art were not only seen as instruments of social policy, but as the seeds of a new beginning. The aim was a reformed society that overcame the social rifts of capitalism and the post-war poverty and discovered its sense of community – through newly designed cities, for example.»