Testament to a life once lived, a purpose served before obsolescence, however fleeting that might have been; Hendrickje Schimmel both decays and preserves post-consumer textiles in scrutiny of fashion’s verisimilitude with waste.
Vast knitted castings of reformed fabrics and ghoulish relics of bags and boots are attentively sabotaged with intuitive execution. Stretched, laddered, dissected and dissolved then stitched together once again in curious combinations that are nuanced by themes of origin and history, desire, time and product metabolism.
“It’s delivered but from a place where I acknowledge that it’s extremely complicated, multifaceted, enduring,” says the Dutch designer-cum-sculptor on the deliberation of her oeuvre.
Schimmel’s craft is neither comment nor critique. Rather it’s an exerted exploration of context in an effort to better understand production and consumption behaviours.
Working under the moniker Tenant of Culture, an idiom she first came across in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, she maintains such an allegory. She comments on the notion of a tenant leasing their position within a larger pre-existing structure such as a renter might lease an apartment, pointing out that a renter doesn’t own the structure in which they reside but they can make changes to it – or at least apply to counsel to do so.
“Certeau uses the example of a reader reading a text by an author and coming to it with their own experiences, their own default settings. A text then transforms into a sort of collaboration between the reader and the writer.”
Having studied womenswear design, Schimmel worked in the fashion industry for several years before returning to school for an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art. When working as a designer in industry, she observed a curious severance between the sketching of a garment and its return as a finished prototype from the manufacturer three weeks later. “This stage between sketch and finished piece is almost invisible and it’s really hard to access information about production, about mass manufacturing.”
Because fashion lends itself to us as both an art form and an industry, cognitive dissonance ensues. “As an art, it tends to be discussed as an image or for its social value, rarely as a material or a production process, or for the extraction and exploitation inherent to its practice,” she tells me. I agree. “It made me want to work in a very material way, creating a tangible, physical object that somehow referred to these production processes and the industrial history.”
Despite having attracted much attention from the art world (she recently exhibited in London’s Soft Opening and Camden Art Centre), Schimmel refers to her practice as one of fashion not fine art. “It wasn’t the most deliberate idea to go from clothes to sculpture,” she says, continuing: “and I still think very much in terms of the production of a collection.”
Though not always wearable, she works in reference to the human body using production techniques typical of fashion. “The framing of the human body is still very much present but minus the actual human body. For a while I still worked with mannequins, but then I started to remove the physical body more and more from the work just to really focus on the materiality of the garments and the construction techniques. The message is in the materiality.”
Schimmel’s most recent body of work, Ladder, exhibited at Soft Opening last year, investigated the aestheticization of damage. Rising to popularity on social media in 2022 by means of asymmetry, layering and laddering, wear-and-tear, a trend which fashion analyst Mandy Lee coined ‘Avant Apocalypse’, is in.
The organic distressing of garments takes time. But we’re as ravenous as the very moths who maul our knitwear in the first place and a plastic bag won’t stop us either, hell if anything it’ll encourage us. What do we want? Distressed. When do we want it? Now. Let’s eat.
While the arduous wearing of a garment might have started through necessity, it quickly filtered down fashion’s food chain and into the collections of mainstream fashion brands high and low. It wasn’t long before worn out garments were available en masse; only the spirit of endurance is faux, replicated by purpose-built machinery that can rack up years of wear in a mere moment. A new garment cosplaying as an old one.
“The mass manufacturing of damage feels very contemporary, and I was really curious about the origin of this trend and the processes behind it,” Schimmel shares. Her curiosity led to a collaborative investigation with design historian Eilidh Duffy and a comprehensive text that draws parallels between the social and material elements of contemporary production methods and their historical predecessors. The text is titled: ‘Modes of Destruction, History Unravels Before Us, Loose Screws and Broken Machines, Stitching and Slashing, Expressing The Time’.
Schimmel’s diptych sabotage in acrylic references the infamous sweater designed by Rei Kawakubo for Comme Des Garcons in 1982 (A/W), a thick woollen V-neck jumper freckled with intentional holes. “This really was the piece that introduced ‘damage’ as an aesthetic to runways in Paris for the first time.” To achieve these perfectly finished imperfections, Kawakubo loosened the screws on her loom, self-sabotaging her own machinery. “The Luddites, a movement of British textile workers in the early 19th century, did similar,” Schimmel tells me, “sabotaging their own machinery to protest the mechanisation of looms that sped up and replaced human labour.”
As Schimmel and Duffy delved into the rich tapestry of textile history, they came across some lesser known examples of deliberate destruction processes. Before Ned Ludd and the Luddites came the Spitalfield Silk Cutters who in the 1700s, Schimmel tells me, were among the first textile workers to riot against their employers for wages and job insecurity. “They were violent, slashing silk weaves from the loom, attacking workshops and anyone who stood in their way,” she shares. “And the punishment was death. They’d be publicly hung outside the Salmon and Ball in Bethnal Green,” – a pub which is right next door to Soft Opening, the gallery Schimmel exhibited at.
In a series titled Haul, Schimmel uniformly and meticulously slashes and stitches fast fashion garments, still in the plastic packaging. She uses a labour intensive decorative process synonymous with clothing worn by European aristocracy in the 15th and 16th centuries. In this early Renaissance period, European aristocrats would flex slashed sleeves through which layers of lavish silk would burst.
“It’s thought that the slashes were inspired by the damaged garb of the Landschnecht soldiers after battle,” a mercenary group who were exempt from sumptuary laws of the time due to their perilous pursuits, granting them permit to utilise the opulent silks and velvets typically only available to the ruling classes. “Their armour was so destroyed and out of these slashed wounds fell layers of luxury fabrics in marvellous colours. This influenced the Austrian Commander Wilhelm Von Roggendorf in the billowing slashed sleeves signature of his armour and likely the aristocratic dress across Europe which became symbolic of wealth and power.”
“I’m trying to reflect on these historical and contemporary fragments, placing these events and contradictions in the context of wider cultural developments into a longer lineage so as to better understand how we got here,” she says.
Schimmel pauses. “What sparked our craving for all these garments? Is it the logical consequence of a sequence of events?”
It’s interesting to think about the aestheticisation of devastation and the juxtaposition of material sabotage as an act of protest in order to achieve better working conditions versus the statement of power and hierarchy or the synthesised aesthetics apparent today.
Equally, ‘Avant Apocalypse’ could be a protest whereby destruction and decay are symbolic of the uncertainty that comes hand in hand with contemporary environmental threat and geopolitical unrest. Trends often do constitute a reaction to the zeitgeist. But, as Duffy notes in her text, the commodification of such expression into manufactured distress is ironic and may well exacerbate the very anxiety that caused it in the first place. Have we reached the point at which industrial rebellion can, too, be mass produced?
Schimmel, Tenant of Culture, subverts the idea that the consumer is a passive agent to whom the production and lifespan of a garment are pacified and pardoned, encouraging a transition in how we recognise ‘used’ or ‘worn’. “It’s not my intention to make people feel guilty about how they consume. There would be no point in trying to create awareness about our clothes either because there’s no lack of awareness.” True say.
“I want people to look at the structural, social, technical and industrial histories of this way of consumption, and to think about a garment’s lifecycle outside of the short purpose it might serve in an immediate sense to create a more weighted and abject understanding of fashion and its consequences. What happens after something is discarded? How is it metabolised? What do its fibres become? A used garment really can be a raw material.”